What Is Social Contract Theory as Developed by Enlightenment Thinkers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes

However, the state system that emerged from the social contract was also anarchic (without leadership). Just as individuals had been sovereign in the state of nature and therefore allowed themselves to be guided by self-interest and the absence of rights, so States were now acting in their own interests in competition with each other. Just like the state of nature, states were therefore forced to come into conflict because there was no sovereign beyond the (more powerful) state who was able to impose a system such as social contract laws on everyone by force. In fact, Hobbes` work served as the basis for the theories of realism of international relations put forward by E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau. Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that people (“we”) need to “terrify it with power,” otherwise people will not observe the law of reciprocity, “(in short) to do to others what would be done for the little ones.” [13] In 1972, the publication of John Rawls` highly influential book, A Theory of Justice, brought moral and political philosophy back from a long pause in philosophical reflection. Rawls` theory is based on a Kantian understanding of people and their abilities. For Rawls, as for Kant, individuals have the ability to argue from a universal point of view, which in turn means that they have the special moral capacity to judge principles from an impartial point of view. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls argues that the moral and political point of view is discovered by impartiality. (It is important to note that this view, described in A Theory of Justice, was considerably revised by Rawls and called his later view “political liberalism.”) He invokes this point of view (the general point of view that Thomas Nagel describes as “the point of view of nothing”) by imagining people in a hypothetical situation, the original position characterized by the epistemological limitation of the veil of ignorance. Rawls` original position is his very abstract version of the state of nature. This is the position from which we can discover the essence of justice and what it requires of us as individuals and the social institutions through which we will live together in cooperation.

In the original position, behind the veil of ignorance, one is deprived of any knowledge of one`s situation, such as gender, race, certain talents or disabilities, age, social status, the particular idea of what constitutes a good life, or the particular state of the society in which one lives. It is also believed that individuals are rational and disinterested in the well-being of the other. These are the conditions under which, according to Rawls, one can choose principles for a just society, which are themselves chosen from starting conditions that are inherently fair. Since no one has the special knowledge that he or she could use to develop principles that favor their own particular circumstances, in other words, knowledge that causes and perpetuates prejudice, the principles chosen from such a perspective are necessarily right. For example, if one does not know whether one is a woman or a man in the society for which one must choose the fundamental principles of justice, from the point of view of self-interested rationality, it makes no sense to support a principle that favors one gender at the expense of another, because once the veil of ignorance is lifted, we could end up on the losing side of such a principle. Therefore, Rawls describes his theory as “justice as equity.” Because the conditions under which the principles of justice are discovered are fundamentally just, justice proceeds out of equity. However, the situation is not hopeless. Because people are reasonable, they can see their way out of such a state by recognizing the laws of nature that show them the means by which they can escape the state of nature and create a civil society. The first and most important law of nature requires that every human being be ready to seek peace when others are willing to do the same, while retaining the right to continue waging war when others are not seeking peace. Since they are reasonable and recognize the rationality of this fundamental commandment of reason, people can be expected to build a social contract that allows them to live a different life than they have in the state of nature. This contract consists of two separate contracts.

First, they must agree to found society by collectively and mutually renouncing the rights they had against each other in the state of nature. Second, they must equip a person or gathering of persons with the power and authority to enforce the original contract. In other words, to ensure that they escape the state of nature, they must both agree to live together according to common laws and create a mechanism for the application of the social contract and the laws that compose it. Since the sovereign is endowed with the authority and power to impose sanctions for breaches of contract that are worse than not being able to act as he pleases, people have good, if selfish, reasons to adapt to the artificiality of morality in general and justice in particular. Society becomes possible because, while in the state of nature there was no power capable of “overwhelming” them all, there is now an artificially and conventionally superior and more powerful person who can force men to cooperate. While living under the authority of a ruler can be difficult (Hobbes argues that because people`s passions can overwhelm their mental health, the ruler must have absolute authority for the contract to succeed), at least it`s better than living in the state of nature. And no matter how much we can resist it, how badly a sovereign manages the affairs of the state and regulates our own lives, we never have the right to oppose his power because it is the only thing that stands between us and what we most want to avoid, the state of nature. Rousseau`s striking sentence that man “must be forced to be free”[16] must be understood [according to whom?] as follows: Since indivisible and inalienable popular sovereignty decides what is good for the whole, then when an individual falls back into his ordinary egoism and despises the law, he will be forced to listen to what has been decided, when the people acted as a collective (as citizens).

Thus, the law, to the extent that it is created by persons who act as a body, is not a restriction of individual freedom, but rather its expression. Hobbes was the first modern philosopher to articulate a detailed theory of the social contract, which appeared in his work Leviathan in 1651. Hobbes set out his doctrine of establishing legitimate states and governments and created an objective science of morality. Since the Leviathan was written during the English Civil War, much of the book has been preoccupied with demonstrating the need for a strong central authority to avoid the evil of discord and civil war. Starting from a mechanistic understanding of man and passions, Hobbes postulates what life without government would be, a condition he calls the state of nature. In this state, every person would have a right or license over everything in the world. This, according to Hobbes, would lead to a “war of all against all.” In such a state, people fear death and lack both the things necessary for a trivialized life and the hope of being able to fight to support them. To avoid this, people adhere to a social contract and form a civil society.

According to Hobbes, society is a population under sovereign authority to which all individuals in that society cede certain rights for the sake of protection. Any power exercised by this authority cannot be fought, because the sovereign power of the protector results from the surrender of his sovereign power for the protection of individuals. Individuals are the authors of all decisions made by the sovereign. There is no doctrine of separation of powers in Hobbes` discussion. According to Hobbes, the ruler must control civil, military, judicial, and ecclesiastical powers. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), in his influential 1762 treatise The Social Contract, sketched a different version of the theory of the social contract as the basis for political rights based on unlimited popular sovereignty. Although Rousseau wrote that the British were perhaps the freest people in the world at the time, he did not approve of their representative government. Rousseau believed that freedom was possible only where the people as a whole ruled directly through legislation, where popular sovereignty was indivisible and inalienable. However, he also claimed that people often did not know their “true will” and that a real society would only emerge when a great leader (“the legislator”) seemed to change the values and customs of the people, probably through the strategic use of religion.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a French-speaking Geneva philosopher and writer whose conceptualization of the social contract, the theory of the natural man and works on education strongly influenced the Western political, philosophical and social tradition. Condorcet`s political views, including women`s suffrage, rejection of slavery, racial equality, or free public education, were unique, even in the context of many of the radical ideas proposed during the Enlightenment period. Epicurus seemed to have had a strong sense of the social contract in the fourth century BC. J.-C., with justice and law rooted in mutual agreement and benefit, as evidenced, among other things, by his main teachings (see also Epicurean Ethics): The Enlightenment philosophers John Locke, Charles Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed all the theories of government in which some or even all peoples would govern. These thinkers had a profound influence on the American and French revolutions and on the democratic governments that produced them. .