Contract and Consent Theories of Authority

Theories that ground political authority in agreement. An entry belongs here when its cited source describes the claim that rulers hold rightful authority because those who are governed have agreed to it. The social contract is the idea, associated with writers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that political authority arises from an agreement among people to form a government, and consent of the governed is the principle that the legitimacy of a government depends on the approval of the people it rules. The group lets a reader compare the founding agreement with the continuing approval it implies.