Social contract
In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is an idea, theory, or model that usually, although not always, concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. Conceptualized in the Age of Enlightenment, it is a core concept of constitutionalism, while not necessarily convened and written down in a constituent assembly and constitution.
Social contract arguments typically are that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order. The relation between natural and legal rights is often a topic of social contract theory. The term takes its name from The Social Contract, a 1762 book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that discussed this concept. Although the antecedents of social contract theory are found in antiquity, in Greek and Stoic philosophy and Roman and Canon Law, the heyday of the social contract was the mid-17th to early 19th centuries, when it emerged as the leading doctrine of political legitimacy.
The starting point for most social contract theories is an examination of the human condition absent any political order. In this condition, individuals' actions are bound only by their personal power and conscience, assuming that 'nature' precludes mutually beneficial social relationships. From this shared premise, social contract theorists aim to demonstrate why rational individuals would voluntarily relinquish their natural freedom in exchange for the benefits of political order.
Prominent 17th- and 18th-century theorists of the social contract and natural rights included Hugo de Groot, Thomas Hobbes, Samuel von Pufendorf, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, each approaching the concept of political authority differently. Grotius posited that individual humans had natural rights. Hobbes famously said that in a "state of nature", human life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". In the absence of political order and law, everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the "right to all things" and thus the freedom to plunder, rape and murder; there would be an endless "war of all against all". To avoid this, free men contract with each other to establish political community through a social contract in which they all gain security in return for subjecting themselves to an absolute sovereign, one man or an assembly of men. Though the sovereign's edicts may well be arbitrary and tyrannical, Hobbes saw absolute government as the only alternative to the terrifying anarchy of a state of nature. Hobbes asserted that humans consent to abdicate their rights in favor of the absolute authority of government.
Alternatively, Locke and Rousseau argued that individuals acquire civil rights by accepting the obligation to respect and protect the rights of others, thereby relinquishing certain personal freedoms in the process.
The central assertion that social contract theory approaches is that law and political order are not natural, but human creations. The social contract and the political order it creates are simply the means towards an end—the benefit of the individuals involved—and legitimate only to the extent that they fulfill their part of the agreement. Hobbes argued that government is not a party to the original contract; hence citizens are not obligated to submit to the government when it is too weak to act effectively to suppress factionalism and civil unrest.
Overview
The model of the social contract
There is a general form of social contract theories, which is:I chooses R in M and this gives I* reason to endorse and comply with R in the real world insofar as the reasons I has for choosing R in M are shared by I*.With M being the deliberative setting; R rules, principles or institutions; I the people in original position or state of nature making the social contract; and I* being the individuals in the real world following the social contract.
History
Classical thought
Social contract formulations are preserved in many of the world's oldest records. The Indian Buddhist text of the second century BC Mahāvastu recounts the legend of Mahasammata. The story goes as follows:In his rock edicts, the Indian Buddhist king Asoka was said to have argued for a broad and far-reaching social contract. The Buddhist vinaya also reflects social contracts expected of the monks; one such instance is when the people of a certain town complained about monks felling saka trees, the Buddha tells his monks that they must stop and give way to social norms.
Epicurus in the fourth century BC seemed to have had a strong sense of social contract, with justice and law being rooted in mutual agreement and advantage, as evidenced by these lines, among others, from his Principal Doctrines :
The concept of the social contract was originally posed by Glaucon, as described by Plato in The Republic, BookII.
The social contract theory also appears in Crito, another dialogue from Plato. Over time, the social contract theory became more widespread after Epicurus, the first philosopher who saw justice as a social contract, and not as existing in Nature due to divine intervention, decided to bring the theory to the forefront of his society. As time went on, philosophers of traditional political and social thought, such as Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau put forward their opinions on social contract, which then caused the topic to become much more mainstream.
Renaissance developments
has argued that several critical modern innovations in contract theory are found in the writings from French Calvinists and Huguenots, whose work in turn was invoked by writers in the Low Countries who objected to their subjection to Spain and, later still, by Catholics in England. Francisco Suárez, from the School of Salamanca, might be considered an early theorist of the social contract, theorizing natural law in an attempt to limit the divine right of absolute monarchy. All of these groups were led to articulate notions of popular sovereignty by means of a social covenant or contract, and all of these arguments began with proto-"state of nature" arguments, to the effect that the basis of politics is that everyone is by nature free of subjection to any government.These arguments, however, relied on a corporatist theory found in Roman law, according to which "a populus" can exist as a distinct legal entity. Thus, these arguments held that a group of people can join a government because it has the capacity to exercise a single will and make decisions with a single voice in the absence of sovereign authority—a notion rejected by Hobbes and later contract theorists.
Philosophers
Thomas Hobbes' ''Leviathan'' (1651)
The first modern philosopher to articulate a detailed contract theory was Thomas Hobbes. According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", a state in which self-interest and the absence of rights and contracts prevented the "social", or society. Life was "anarchic". Individuals in the state of nature were apolitical and asocial. This state of nature is followed by the social contract.The social contract was seen as an "occurrence" during which individuals came together and ceded some of their individual rights so that others would cede theirs. This resulted in the establishment of the state—a sovereign entity like the individuals used to be, which would create laws to regulate social interactions. Human life was thus no longer "a war of all against all".
The state system, which grew out of the social contract, was, however, also anarchic. Just as the individuals in the state of nature had been sovereigns and thus guided by self-interest and the absence of rights, so states now acted in their self-interest in competition with each other. Just like the state of nature, states were thus bound to be in conflict because there was no sovereign over and above the state capable of imposing some system such as social-contract laws on everyone by force. Indeed, Hobbes' work helped to serve as a basis for the realism theories of international relations, advanced by E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau. Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that humans need the "terrour of some Power" otherwise humans will not heed the law of reciprocity, " doing to others, as wee would be done to".
John Locke's ''Second Treatise of Government'' (1689)
's conception of the social contract differed from Hobbes' in several fundamental ways, retaining only the central notion that individuals in a state of nature would willingly come together to form a state. Locke believed that individuals in a state of nature would be bound morally, by the Law of Nature, in which man has the "power... to preserve his property; that is, his life, liberty and estate against the injuries and attempts of other men". Without government to defend them against those seeking to injure or enslave them, Locke further believed people would have no security in their rights and would live in fear. Individuals, to Locke, would only agree to form a state that would provide, in part, a "neutral judge", acting to protect the lives, liberty, and property of those who lived within it.While Hobbes argued for near-absolute authority, Locke argued for inviolate freedom under law in his Second Treatise of Government. Locke argued that a government's legitimacy comes from the citizens' delegation to the government of their absolute right of violence, along with elements of other rights as necessary to achieve the goal of security through granting the state a monopoly of violence, whereby the government, as an impartial judge, may use the collective force of the populace to administer and enforce the law, rather than each man acting as his own judge, jury, and executioner—the condition in the state of nature.