Social Contract

Modern theorists of the social contract school argued that political authority was artificial and conventional rather than divinely or naturally ordained. To sustain their argument, some—including Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)—appealed to a social contract as a way of explaining the rational basis for and limits on political authority. But for most of these thinkers, the social contract was not the deepest basis of their arguments, which depended rather on new views about natural rights, sociability, passion, and reason. It was David Hume (1711–1776) in his "Of the Original Contract" of 1748, who, although agreeing that political authority was artificial and conventional, attacked the use of the "social contract" by Locke and his followers and so retrospectively turned this image into the badge of a tradition.

By contrasting the social contract unfavorably with his own view of a duty to obey government grounded in utility, Hume established the debate between the social contract and utilitarianism that continued to structure Anglophone philosophy into the twenty-first century. (John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, 1971, is widely credited with reviving contractarianism, though others contributed to this revival before and since.) But Hume's classic criticisms of the contract approach—Were any governments actually founded by contract? When and how could people consent to such a contract, especially one founded before they were born? Why should the duty to keep contracts or promises be more fundamental than the duty to obey political authority?—apply principally to its Lockean interpretation.

Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government of 1689 (the year it was published anonymously), interpreted the social contract to require actual consent, whether explicit or "tacit." Most critics concur that he was unable to show convincingly when or how such consent is given, though he did powerfully develop the claim that however given, consent to a government that proves grossly incompetent or malicious can be rescinded. At the opposite extreme, Rousseau, in Du contrat social (1762; On the social contract), accepted only assemblies actually giving consent to laws as indicative of authentic social contracts. Yet the most interesting treatments of the idea of the social contract are those that treat it as a device for testing the rationality of obedience to political authority. Here, the justificatory force rests on not on visible consent or contract but rather on the rationality (broadly conceived) that such a contract exhibits. In different ways, Hobbes and Rawls both take this approach, as will be discussed below.