Political Philosophy Part 5: The Social Contract

Hobbes — Sovereign Order

Covered in some detail in Part 4. Recap the structure: a brutal state of nature ("war of every man against every man"), a covenant by which each individual lays down her right of self-government in exchange for the protection of an absolute sovereign, and a resulting commonwealth in which the sovereign's word is law.

Two distinctive features. (1) The contract is among the subjects, not between subjects and sovereign. The sovereign is not bound by the contract; she is its product. (2) The contract is irrevocable. Hobbes is haunted by the experience of the English Civil War; he sees clearly what happens when sovereign authority dissolves and is unwilling to license future dissolutions on principle. The price of order is high; the price of disorder is higher.

Hobbes is often misread as authoritarian. He is more accurately read as the philosopher who took the threat of civil war seriously enough to subordinate every other political value to its prevention. Whether he was right that the alternative to absolutism is anarchy is the question every subsequent contractarian has had to answer.

Locke — Natural Rights & Limited Government

John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689), written to justify the Glorious Revolution, is the foundational text of liberal constitutionalism. Locke's state of nature is much less dire than Hobbes's. Even before government, individuals have rights — to life, liberty, and property — that derive from natural law, accessible to reason. The state of nature has its inconveniences (no impartial judge, no settled rules), which is why people contract into government — but the contract is conditional.

The conditional point is decisive. Citizens delegate certain powers to government for the sake of better protecting their pre-existing rights. If government violates those rights, the contract is breached and the people retain a right of revolution. The American Declaration of Independence is essentially a Lockean argument applied to George III.

Locke's theory of property has been the most consequential and contested element. He argued that one acquires legitimate property by mixing one's labor with previously unowned natural resources, subject to the "Lockean proviso" that "enough and as good" be left for others. This grounds the right to private property in pre-political nature — a claim later libertarians (Nozick) extend, and later socialists challenge.

Rousseau — The General Will

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract (1762) opens with one of the most famous lines in political philosophy: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Rousseau's question is how those chains can be made legitimate.

His state of nature is benign — the natural human is a self-sufficient, peaceable creature, neither warlike (Hobbes) nor proto-rights-bearer (Locke). The trouble begins with society itself, particularly with the institution of private property and the comparisons among persons that property enables. Inequality, vanity, dependence, and corruption follow.

The contract Rousseau proposes is therefore more demanding than his predecessors'. Each person surrenders herself completely to the community as a whole — but in doing so receives back the same rights from everyone else. The result is collective sovereignty: the people, acting together, become the source of all legitimate law. The directive principle is the general will (volonté générale) — what the people, considered as a body and aiming at the common good, will. This is distinguished from the "will of all," the mere sum of private wills.

The general will idea is enormously influential and enormously controversial. It is the theoretical foundation of modern democratic legitimacy: laws are legitimate insofar as they express the will of the people. It also has authoritarian potential: a person whose private will conflicts with the general will may be, in Rousseau's chilling phrase, "forced to be free" — compelled to act in accordance with what she, properly understood, really wants. Critics from Berlin onward have seen this as the seedbed of totalitarian democracy.

Rawls — The Modern Revival

Covered in detail in Part 2. The crucial point for the contract tradition: Rawls revived contractarian reasoning after a century in which it had seemed quaint. His move was to make the contract hypothetical in a sophisticated way: not "what did people actually agree to?" (no one ever signed anything) but "what would rational, self-interested persons agree to from a fair starting position (the original position with the veil of ignorance)?"

This reframing rescued contractarianism from the obvious objection that no actual contract ever occurred. The question became one of rational reconstruction: which institutions could be justified to all who must live under them?

Post-Rawlsian contractarianism is now a major industry: T.M. Scanlon's contractualism (which institutions could no one reasonably reject?), David Gauthier's contractarianism by mutual advantage, the deliberative-democracy traditions of Jürgen Habermas. The contract metaphor proved more durable than its early-modern critics anticipated.

Critiques of the Contract Tradition

The objections are real and have shaped contemporary alternatives.

Hume's critique: The contract is fictional and known to be fictional. People obey government because they are habituated to it, not because they (or their ancestors) ever agreed. Real political legitimacy must rest on something other than imaginary contracts.

Communitarian critique (MacIntyre, Sandel, Taylor): The contract assumes the parties are pre-social individuals choosing to enter society. But humans are not pre-social; we are constituted by the traditions and communities we are born into. The contract image gets human nature backward.

Feminist critique (Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract): The classic contracts assumed a male contractor with a household, including women, behind him. Women's consent was not solicited; their subordination was assumed. The contract tradition is a contract among male heads of households, not a contract among full equals.

Postcolonial critique: The contract tradition assumed a domain of "civilized" peoples among whom contracting was meaningful and a domain of "uncivilized" peoples whose lands and lives were available for appropriation. Locke's defense of European appropriation of Native American land is a particularly painful case.

Each critique has produced contemporary research programs. None has displaced the contract tradition from its central place in liberal democratic theory; all have complicated and chastened it.