Social Contract
Political Theory: The Social Contract
Introduction to Social Contract
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes also stressed governmental power. His major work, Leviathan (1651), argued that the sovereign’s power should be unlimited, because the state originated in a so-called social contract, whereby individuals accept a common superior power to protect themselves from their own brutish instincts and to make possible the satisfaction of certain human desires. Another 17th-century English philosopher, John Locke, accepted much of Hobbes’s social-contract theory but argued that sovereignty resided in the people for whom governments were trustees and that such governments could be legitimately overthrown if they failed to discharge their functions to the people.
The ideals and rhetoric of Locke later contributed to the establishment of the United States through their expression in the Declaration of Independence and The Federalist, two major documents of the American Revolution. Important contributions to republican and democratic ideals were also made by the French philosophers Jean Jacques Rousseau, who expressed ideas similar to those of Locke, and the Baron de Montesquieu, who proposed a separation of governmental powers in prerevolutionary 18th-century France similar to that later embodied in the U.S. Constitution. The political theories of Locke and the early Americans, constituting the attitude generally known as liberalism, were further refined by the 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill.” (1)
In the Society
Sir Henry Maine, a nineteenth-century historian, wrote in his book Ancient Law (from 1869, pages 180-82):
“(F)rom a condition of society in which all the relations of Persons are summed up in the relations of Family, we seem to have steadily moved towards a phase of social order in which all these relations arise from the free agreement of Individuals. . . . Thus the status of the Slave has disappeared—it has been superseded by the contractual relation of the servant to his master. . . . The status of the Female under Tutelage . . . has also ceased to exist. . . . So too the status of the Son under Power has no true place in the law of modern European societies. If any civil obligation binds together the Parent and the child of full age, it is one to which only contract gives its legal validity…. If then we employ Status, agreeably with the usage of the best writers, to signify these personal conditions [arising from ancient legal privileges of the Family] only, we may say that the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.”
Resources
See Also
- Labor Relations
- Industrial Relations
- Employment Relationship
- Trade Unionism
- Trade Union
- Labor Union
- Labor Movement
Resources
Notes and References
- Information about Social Contract in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia
Guide to Social Contract
Introduction to Social Contract
Social Contract, voluntary agreement among people defining the relationship of individuals with one another and with government and by this process forming a distinct organized society. Concern over the origin and conditions of political obligation was manifest even in the writings of philosophers and statesmen in ancient Greece and Rome. Such ideas were not systematically formulated, however, until the latter part of the 16th century, when Protestant philosophers sought a democratic principle with which to oppose the authoritarian theory of the divine right of kings. In the 17th and 18th centuries the theory of a social compact among individuals of a society was linked with the doctrine of natural law. For the development and historical importance of the major social contract theories as expounded by the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, see Political Theory.” (1)
Resources
Notes and References
- Information about Social Contract in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia
Guide to Social Contract
Social Contract in Constitutional Law
From the Comparative Constitutions Project: This refers to an actual or hypothetical contract providing the legitimate basis of sovereignty and civil society and of the rights and duties constituting the role of citizen. The contract can be agreed between people and a proposed sovereign or among the people themselves.
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