Is there a “social contract”?

We often hear the argument that a “social contract” obliges us to behave in a particular way, because we are bound in a mutually dependent relationship with society and the government, where we enjoy privileges in exchange for our cooperation in upholding certain rules of association. But of course, no-one actually signed any such contract; it is an implicit rather than a concrete agreement, and that begs the question to what extend it should be considered legitimate? In the following, we take a quick tour of the origins of the idea of the social contract and consider its philosophical justification and political implications. It is a story that starts more than four centuries ago.

The defining political paradigm of the Middle Ages was what is known as “the divine right of kings,” which held that the monarch’s power derived directly from God and as such was unquestionable. But in the 17^th century this belief was beginning to be challenged by idea that there exists a pact between the ruler and the governed, from which flows the legitimacy of the state. This idea has become known as the social contract, after the 1762 book of the same name by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and while many political philosophers were proponents of this type of thinking, it is Rousseau, alongside Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who is most commonly associated with it.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) seminal work, Leviathan, published in 1651, contains the first comprehensive theory of the social contract. Hobbes was deeply influenced by the English civil war from 1642-1651, during which some 200,000 people died, and his work can be seen as an attempt to accommodate the modernising idea of a contract between the people and the monarch while making a philosophical argument against an uprising such as that which had seen King Charles I beheaded in 1649.

Hobbes’ starting point is the state of nature, society before the social contract, in which he believes people led lived that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” reflecting a misanthropic view of man as inherently bad and unable to live in any sort of harmonic coexistence with others in the absence of a central authority to regulate their behaviour. People enter the social contract simply out of dread of the state of nature and there is no possible question of them ever wishing to go back: the state is all the stands between us and the chaos of anarchy and war. This bargain of security for compliance obliges the people to unconditionally obey the ruler, regardless of how dictatorial he may be. Hobbes named his ideal ruler Leviathan, after the invincible sea-monster in the Old Testament’s Book of Job, reflecting how a monarch must be so strong and authoritarian as to be beyond challenge.

While Hobbes was therefore an absolutist who believed in unrestrained monarchical rule, the next political philosopher to propose a major theory of the social contract, John Locke (1632-1704), was very much a constitutionalist. Locke wrote Two Treatises of Government in 1689, in the aftermath of The Glorious Revolution, in which the Catholic King James II of England was deposed in a bloodless coup and succeeded by his Protestant daughter Mary II. This convinced Locke that constitutional conflict could and should be settled by the toppling of a ruler who broke the social contract and that the foundations for such a change in rule was an in fact an integral part of the contract. In his book, Locke set out how he believed that God had imbued man with natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and he presented a philosophical case for constitutional government as the guarantor of these rights. Locke’s ideas are foundational for classical liberalism and would come to be highly inspirational for Thomas Jefferson when he wrote America’s Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Locke disagreed with Hobbes’ dismal view of the nature of man. His contention, referred to as tabula rasa, or blank slate, is that human beings are born without an inherent nature and that our thoughts and ideas are subsequently formed by sensory experiences. Accordingly, Locke didn’t see the state of nature as being without morality, and he envisioned it as free and basically peaceful. However, he feared for the protection of our natural rights in a society without civil authority, and it is to protect one’s property and punish transgressors that men consent to being subjected to a government – but unlike Hobbes, Locke did not believe that we give up our sovereignty when we enter into the social contract. His is a decidedly individualistic philosophy: “Any man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of [the government],” he wrote, and he did not preclude that men would find the conditions for their surrender to government rule to be broken if the government “endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people or reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power.” With the social contract void as a result, this would give the people a right to revolution (like what had just happened when King James II was dethroned).

Locke’s individualistic constitutionalism was challenged by Rousseau (1712-1778), who put forward a philosophical argument for collectivist democracy. His primitive man was the total opposite of the brutes envisaged by Thomas Hobbes’ in Leviathan: compassionate and morally virtuous. For him, it is the very concept of private property that necessitates the state, because private property, which doesn’t exist in the state of nature, lies at the heart of the conflicts which mar civilisation. Rousseau did not see any other solution to regulate what he believed was a zero-sum competition for scarce resources, but he saw the state as much more than a guarantor of a legal framework for conflict resolution: while Rousseau insisted that man never surrenders his sovereignty to the government, his theory is nevertheless one of total subjugation of the individual to the state.

It was Rousseau’s belief in a generally benign human nature that led him to advocate for government according to the “general will” of the people, because, despite the moral deficiencies of individual people, as a collectivist force it would bring about a moral, benevolent, and compassionate society. The government’s legitimacy flows from it representing the general will, and thus, against such a government there is no right for the individual to resist. Men come together and enter the social contract in preparedness to submit to the general will, in which lies freedom: people must be “forced to be free,” wrote Rousseau. Rousseau’s concept of freedom isn’t the ability to act freely but rather, he somewhat cryptically defines it as the triumph of reason over instinct. The general will, the benevolent collective mind, is this reason, to which man must surrender his individualistic instinct. Rousseau’s social contract theory is therefore a philosophical framework for democracy (or, if you will, a tyranny of the majority) and he was a key influence on the French Revolution, in particular on Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine Saint-Just, the leaders of the horrific Reign of Terror from 1793-94. As pointed out by Friedrich Hayek, Rosseau’s “will of the people” explains why the French revolutionaries did not write a constitution and hence why the French state has been able to grow so much bigger than the American: they did not think it necessary to limit the powers of government, as Locke did, because if the government always represents the will of the people, then why restrict it?

Rousseau’s theory is foundational to modern democracies, which may pay lip-service to the private property rights which Rousseau found so problematic, but ultimately see all property as potential subject for taxation and appropriation and therefore only “private” at the pleasure of the government. This is why anarcho-libertarian philosophy rejects the notion of any sort of social contract, because even Locke’s soft version precludes the idea that society could function without at least some constitution power granted to a government. Minarcists may well subscribe to Locke’s basic ideas, but he did fail to sufficiently explain how people who rose up in legitimate rebellion against a government in breach of the social contract would be able to claim their rights against a leader such as Hobbe’s Leviathan or, indeed, a contemporary western democratically elected government.

No, we live in Rousseau’s world. When the social contract is brought up, it is an attempt to persuade us that freedom is contained in our belonging to a collective; all of us bound by an implicit contract with each other. But it is not a contract. It is a command.