Early modern Europe · 1642 – late 18th c.
Social contract theory
Political authority is legitimate only because free and equal individuals would agree, or have agreed, to create it.
Why should anyone obey the state?
Seventeenth-century Europe was torn by wars of religion and England by civil war, and the old answer — that kings rule by divine right — was itself in dispute. Hobbes, writing amid that civil war, sought a foundation for government that did not depend on contested theology.
Imagine people with no government at all, in a “state of nature”. Hobbes argued such a life would be insecure and violent, so rational people would agree to hand power to a sovereign who keeps the peace. Locke and Rousseau kept the method but changed the terms: if authority comes from the people’s consent, it is limited by what they could reasonably agree to.
- No one is born with a natural right to rule others.
- Legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed.
- For Locke, rulers who betray their trust may be resisted.
Its language of consent, natural rights and popular sovereignty shaped the American and French revolutions, and John Rawls revived its method in 1971.
Thinkers
1588–1679Thomas HobbesEnglish materialist who grounded the state in fear and consent1632–1704John LockeEnglish physician and philosopher of experience, consent and toleration1712–1778Jean-Jacques RousseauGeneva-born writer who blamed society, not nature, for human corruptionKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofEpicureanismEpicurus had called justice a pact neither to harm nor be harmed; the contract theorists likewise explained law as an agreement serving each person’s interest.Grew out of
Renaissance humanismMachiavelli’s secular, unsentimental study of power prepared the ground for Hobbes’s attempt to found the state on human nature rather than divine right.Grew out of
ScholasticismLocke’s natural law, knowable by reason and binding even on rulers, descends from Aquinas through the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker, whom Locke repeatedly cites.
What it led to
Carried on byThe EnlightenmentLocke’s theory of consent and rights, and later Rousseau’s popular sovereignty, gave critics of absolute monarchy their political language.Carried on by
Liberal theories of justice (Rawls and after)Rawls said he aimed to carry the social contract of Locke, Rousseau and Kant to a higher level of abstraction; Nozick built on Locke’s natural rights.