Social Contract - Modern Formulations, Political Authority Versus Moral Principles, Hobbes And Rawls, Feminist Views, Bibliography
contracts century agreement
The "social contract" in the early twenty-first century is associated with the modern school of natural jurisprudence as crystallized in the seventeenth century (although earlier scholastics and humanists had also spoken of contracts, but differently, for example contracts between people and ruler rather than contracts that actually generate sovereignty). Yet there were preceding statements of central elements of social contract theory. The ancient Sophist Lycophron is sometimes credited with originating the idea of the social contract, and there are echoes of it in the teachings of Protagoras (c. 490–c. 421 B.C.E.) as well. The Roman author Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) stated in his widely read treatise on rhetoric, De inventione, that social, legal, and political associations were the result of a primeval agreement to live together on the part of human beings who were previously in a wild and asocial condition. Likewise, St. Augustine (354–430) insisted that any true republic required agreement on the part of its citizens about the object of their love.
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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…
Hume's sometime-friend Rousseau can be seen as the initiator of a second fundamental question about the contract: that of its scope. Hobbes and Locke had both treated the contract in relation to the justification of political authority, although for Hobbes the contract also turned the precepts of a minimal morality (the "laws of nature") into binding civic law. Rousseau, howev…
This entry returns to the rational-justification approach to the contract's role. Sometimes this is called the "hypothetical" approach, as it is often framed in terms of a contract to which one could or would agree. But since the question then arises of how a hypothetical contract can be regarded as morally binding, one is forced back upon its rationality. Rationality, however…
Some feminists have criticized the social contract approach as excessively individualistic, arguing that to treat contract as the fundamental moral and/or political relationship is to overlook the dependency on the care of others that characterizes infants, the elderly, the severely disabled, and everyone to the extent that they are vulnerable. Carole Pateman has noted the problematic relationship…
Hampton, Jean. "Feminist Contractarianism." In A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, edited by Louise M. Anthony and Charlotte Witt. Boulder, Colo., and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Rev. student ed. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Reprints the original frontispiece an…
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