The Social Contract

The social contract is the political-theory idea that legitimate political authority arises from an agreement, actual or hypothetical, among the individuals it governs, who consent to give up some measure of their natural freedom in exchange for the protection and order political society provides. Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), argued that without such an agreement human life in a state of nature would be a war of all against all, so individuals rationally consent to transfer their rights to an absolute sovereign in exchange for peace and security. John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government (1689), held instead that the contract is conditional: government exists to protect citizens' natural rights to life, liberty and property, and a government that violates this trust can be legitimately overthrown, an argument that directly shaped the United States Declaration of Independence. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Du Contrat Social (1762), reframed the contract around the general will, arguing legitimate authority arises only when citizens collectively author the laws that bind them, so that obeying the law is a form of self-rule rather than submission to another's power. The three accounts disagree sharply about what the contract permits a government to do, but share the founding claim that political obligation must be traced to the governed's own agreement rather than assumed as natural or divinely given.