Social contract

thumb|200px|The original cover of [[Thomas Hobbes's work Leviathan (1651), in which he discusses the concept of the social contract theory]]

In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is an idea, theory, or model that usually, although not always, concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. Conceptualized in the Age of Enlightenment, it is a core concept of constitutionalism, while not necessarily convened and written down in a constituent assembly and constitution.

Social contract arguments typically are that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order. The relation between natural and legal rights is often a topic of social contract theory. The term takes its name from The Social Contract (French: Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique), a 1762 book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that discussed this concept. Although the antecedents of social contract theory are found in antiquity, in Greek and Stoic philosophy and Roman and Canon Law, the heyday of the social contract was the mid-17th to early 19th centuries, when it emerged as the leading doctrine of political legitimacy.

The starting point for most social contract theories is an examination of the human condition absent any political order (termed the "state of nature" by Thomas Hobbes). In this condition, individuals' actions are bound only by their personal power and conscience, assuming that 'nature' precludes mutually beneficial social relationships. From this shared premise, social contract theorists aim to demonstrate why rational individuals would voluntarily relinquish their natural freedom in exchange for the benefits of political order.

Prominent 17th- and 18th-century theorists of the social contract and natural rights included Hugo de Groot (1625), Thomas Hobbes (1651), Samuel von Pufendorf (1673), John Locke (1689), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) and Immanuel Kant (1797), each approaching the concept of political authority differently. Grotius posited that individual humans had natural rights. Hobbes famously said that in a "state of nature", human life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". In the absence of political order and law, everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the "right to all things" and thus the freedom to plunder, rape and murder; there would be an endless "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes). To avoid this, free men contract with each other to establish political community (civil society) through a social contract in which they all gain security in return for subjecting themselves to an absolute sovereign, one man or an assembly of men. Though the sovereign's edicts may well be arbitrary and tyrannical, Hobbes saw absolute government as the only alternative to the terrifying anarchy of a state of nature. Hobbes asserted that humans consent to abdicate their rights in favor of the absolute authority of government (whether monarchical or parliamentary).

Alternatively, Locke and Rousseau argued that individuals acquire civil rights by accepting the obligation to respect and protect the rights of others, thereby relinquishing certain personal freedoms in the process.

The central assertion that social contract theory approaches is that law and political order are not natural, but human creations. The social contract and the political order it creates are simply the means towards an end—the benefit of the individuals involved—and legitimate only to the extent that they fulfill their part of the agreement. Hobbes argued that government is not a party to the original contract; hence citizens are not obligated to submit to the government when it is too weak to act effectively to suppress factionalism and civil unrest.

A general model for different social contract theories exists. Given that hypothetically:</blockquote>

Being a model, the above is an abstraction of different theories which assists in identifying the relevant factors in the various theories. The Indian Buddhist text of the second century BC Mahāvastu recounts the legend of Mahasammata. The story goes as follows:

In his Rock Edicts, the Indian Buddhist king Asoka was said to have argued for a broad and far-reaching social contract. The Buddhist Vinaya also reflects social contracts expected of the monks; one such instance is when the people of a certain town complained about monks felling saka trees, the Buddha tells his monks that they must stop and give way to social norms.

In Western philosophy, the concept of the social contract was originally posed by Glaucon, as described by Plato in The Republic, BookII.

The social contract theory also appears in Crito, another dialogue from Plato.

Epicurus in the fourth century BC seemed to have had a strong sense of social contract, with justice and law being rooted in mutual agreement and advantage, as evidenced by these lines, among others, from his Principal Doctrines (see also Epicurean ethics):

Renaissance developments

Quentin Skinner has argued that several critical modern innovations in contract theory are found in the writings from French Calvinists and Huguenots, whose work in turn was invoked by writers in the Low Countries who objected to their subjection to Spain and, later still, by Catholics in England. Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), from the School of Salamanca, might be considered an early theorist of the social contract, theorizing natural law in an attempt to limit the divine right of absolute monarchy. All of these groups were led to articulate notions of popular sovereignty by means of a social covenant or contract, and all of these arguments began with proto-"state of nature" arguments, to the effect that the basis of politics is that everyone is by nature free of subjection to any government.

These arguments, however, relied on a corporatist theory found in Roman law, according to which "a populus" can exist as a distinct legal entity. Thus, these arguments held that a group of people can join a government because it has the capacity to exercise a single will and make decisions with a single voice in the absence of sovereign authority—a notion rejected by Hobbes and later contract theorists.

Philosophers

Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651)

The first modern philosopher to articulate a detailed contract theory was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", a state in which self-interest and the absence of reliably protected rights and contracts prevented the "social", or society. Life was "anarchic" (without rulers or the concept of sovereignty). Individuals in the state of nature were apolitical and asocial. This state of nature is followed by the social contract.

The social contract was seen as an "occurrence" during which individuals came together and ceded some of their individual rights so that others would cede theirs. This resulted in the establishment of the state—a sovereign entity like the individuals (now under its rule) used to be, which would create laws to regulate social interactions. Human life was thus no longer "a war of all against all". Notably, this theory features the ability of individuals to irrevocably relinquish their rights, even to a state which has absolute authority over life and death. How one could be said to do so "freely" while in the state of nature, i.e. under actual or potential duress, is not fully worked out by Hobbes or other social contract theorists (cf. "inalienable rights" in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, with marked Lockean influence, wherein rights are characterized as God-given and merely guaranteed or protected by the state. For a right to be "inalienable" arguably precludes its being given up under some or all circumstances by a rational autonomous agent bearing or possessing those rights as social contract theories require).

The state system, which grew out of the social contract, was, however, also anarchic (without rulers). Just as the individuals in the state of nature had been sovereign and thus guided by self-interest and the absence of rights, so states now acted in their self-interest in competition with each other. Just like the state of nature, states were thus bound to be in conflict because there was no sovereign over and above the state (more powerful) capable of imposing some system such as social-contract laws on everyone by force. Indeed, Hobbes' work helped to serve as a basis for the realism theories of international relations which consider the basic unit of analysis to be states with no overarching higher authority (akin to the "anarchy" of Hobbes' state of nature), advanced by E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau. Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that humans ("we") need the "terrour of some Power" otherwise humans will not heed the law of reciprocity, "(in summe) doing to others, as wee would be done to".

John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689)

John Locke's conception of the social contract differed from Hobbes' in several fundamental ways, retaining only the central notion that individuals in a state of nature would willingly come together to form a state. Locke believed that individuals in a state of nature would be bound morally, by the Law of Nature, in which man has the "power... to preserve his property; that is, his life, liberty and estate against the injuries and attempts of other men". Without government to defend them against those seeking to injure or enslave them, Locke further believed people would have no security in their rights and would live in fear. Individuals, to Locke, would only agree to form a state that would provide, in part, a "neutral judge", acting to protect the lives, liberty, and property of those who lived within it.

While Hobbes argued for near-absolute authority, Locke argued for inviolate freedom under law in his Second Treatise of Government. Locke argued that a government's legitimacy comes from the citizens' delegation to the government of their absolute right of violence (reserving the inalienable right of self-defense or "self-preservation"), along with elements of other rights (e.g. property will be liable to taxation) as necessary to achieve the goal of security through granting the state a monopoly of violence, whereby the government, as an impartial judge, may use the collective force of the populace to administer and enforce the law, rather than each man acting as his own judge, jury, and executioner—the condition in the state of nature.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), in his influential 1762 treatise The Social Contract, outlined a different version of social-contract theory, as the foundations of society based on the sovereignty of the "general will".

Rousseau's political theory differs in important ways from that of Locke and Hobbes. Rousseau's collectivist conception is most evident in his development of the "luminous conception" (which he credited to Denis Diderot) of the "general will". Summarised, the "general will" is the power of all the citizens' collective interest—not to be confused with their individual interests.

Although Rousseau wrote that the British were perhaps at the time the freest people on earth, he did not approve of their representative government, nor any form of representative government. Rousseau believed that society was only legitimate when the sovereign (i.e. the "general will") were the sole legislators. He also stated that the individual must accept "the total alienation to the whole community of each associate with all his rights". In short, Rousseau meant that in order for the social contract to work, individuals must forfeit their rights to the whole so that such conditions were "equal for all".

Rousseau's other writings assert that his striking phrase that man must "be forced to be free" should be understood this way: since the indivisible and inalienable popular sovereignty decides what is good for the whole, if an individual rejects this "civil liberty" in place of "natural liberty" thus suggesting the origins of the state as a form of mutual insurance.

While Rousseau's social contract is based on popular sovereignty and not on individual sovereignty, there are other theories espoused by individualists, libertarians, and anarchists that do not involve agreeing to anything more than negative rights and creates only a limited state, if any.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) advocated a conception of social contract that did not involve an individual surrendering sovereignty to others. According to him, the social contract was not between individuals and the state, but rather among individuals who refrain from coercing or governing each other, each one maintaining complete sovereignty upon him- or herself:

John Rawls' Theory of Justice (1971)

Building on the work of Immanuel Kant with its presumption of limits on the state, John Rawls (1921–2002), in A Theory of Justice (1971), proposed a contractarian approach whereby rational people in a hypothetical "original position" would set aside their individual preferences and capacities under a "veil of ignorance" and agree to certain general principles of justice and legal organization. This idea is also used as a game-theoretical formalization of the notion of fairness.

David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (1986)

David Gauthier's "neo-Hobbesian" theory argues that cooperation between two independent and self-interested parties is indeed possible, especially when it comes to understanding morality and politics. Gauthier notably points out the advantages of cooperation between two parties when it comes to the challenge of the prisoner's dilemma. He proposes that, if two parties were to stick to the original agreed-upon arrangement and morals outlined by the contract, they would both experience an optimal result. In his model for the social contract, factors including trust, rationality, and self-interest keep each party honest and dissuade them from breaking the rules.

According to other social contract theorists, when the government fails to secure their natural rights (Locke) or satisfy the best interests of society, citizens can withdraw their obligation to obey or change the leadership through elections or other means including, when necessary, violence. Locke believed that natural rights were inalienable, and therefore the rule of God superseded government authority, while Rousseau believed that democracy (majority-rule) was the best way to ensure welfare while maintaining individual freedom under the rule of law. The Lockean concept of the social contract was invoked in the United States Declaration of Independence.

Arab world

The social contract can be used as a theoretical object to analyse the capacity for a population to accept change, upon which the change exerts 'pressure'. In an analysis of the consequences of the Gulf Cooperation Council states changing energy prices, the social contract defines the capacity for change. Higher energy prices for resident households can have an adverse impact, meaning that the consent of the participants in the contract needs to be maintained, because before energy price increases, prices for residents were kept low by charging higher prices for exported oil.

Influence on the US Declaration of Independence

Ideas related to the social contract theory, particularly those of John Locke, intellectually inspired the United States Declaration of Independence. His ideas on every individual’s’ right to ‘life, liberty, and property’ as well as the people’s ‘right to revolt’ were particularly influential.

Life, Liberty, and Property

Locke’s idea that everyone has the right to 'life, liberty, and property' inspired the founding document. The Declaration posits, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. The terms ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ reflect the ideas of John Locke, who argued for human beings’ natural rights to ‘life, liberty, and property.’ In The Second Treatise of Government, Locke has asserted that “the state of Nature (...) teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions. Since the “state of nature,” which largely means the condition in which humans used to live before civilization, teaches humans to learn that all were born “equal and independent,” Locke emphasizes the inherent equality that exists among human beings, which is reflected in the Declaration's idea that "all men are created equal." Furthermore, Locke argued that men “have rights to life, (...) liberty, or possessions” and that “no one ought to harm another” in these rights. Since the rights to ‘life’ and ‘liberty,’ which constitute two of the three essential rights protected under the social contract, are repeated in the Declaration, Locke’s idea on the natural rights of human beings proves to be influential. As the John Locke Foundation, an independent and nonprofit think tank, establishes, "Locke’s influence can be seen throughout the Declaration of Independence" through the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The Right to Revolt

Locke’s idea of ‘the right to revolt’ was also influential. The Declaration posits that, when the natural rights of human beings are violated under the social contract, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government”. The usage of the word “right” not only shows how people should be allowed to revolt, but have a moral obligation to overthrow a tyrannical government. In a similar vein, Locke posited that people have ‘the right to revolt’ when their natural rights are violated. According to the philosopher, “Whenever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience” and gain the “right to resume their original liberty”. An explicit mention of Locke’s name, adding to the letter’s admission that his influence proved to be significant in serving as an inspiration for the text, further strengthens the claim that Locke's ideas, particularly those pertaining to the social contract, inspired the Declaration.

Criticism

An early critic of social contract theory was Rousseau's friend the philosopher David Hume, who in 1742 published an essay "Of Civil Liberty". The second part of this essay, entitled "Of the Original Contract", stresses that the concept of a "social contract" is a convenient fiction:

Model of the social contract