The Social Contract Theory: Consent, Government, and the Foundation of Legitimate Authority

The Leviathan opens with one of the most famous sentences in the English language: “Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and governs the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal.” The book that follows, published in 1651, is a sustained argument that political authority is conventional, that it rests on the agreement of the governed, and that the only proper basis for it is the consent of the people. The argument is the foundation of modern contractarian political philosophy, and it is the foundation of the modern theory of legitimate political authority. The book was written by a man in his sixties, living in exile in Paris, who had been tutor to the future Charles II, who had fled to the continent during the Civil War, and who had been, in his own words, “the first of all that fled.” The fact that the founding text of the modern theory of political legitimacy was written by a Royalist exile is, like much in the history of political philosophy, ironic in ways that are worth pausing on.

The social contract was the central concept of Enlightenment political philosophy. The basic idea was that political authority was legitimate only to the extent that it rested on the agreement, express or tacit, of the governed. The theory was developed in different ways by different thinkers — Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant — and the differences among them have been one of the great sources of political argument ever since.

The prehistory

The social contract theory had a long history before the Enlightenment. The ancient Sophists had made some use of contractarian arguments; the Roman jurists had appealed to the idea of a pactum in certain contexts; the medieval canon lawyers had appealed to a kind of original consent in the case of the relationship between ruler and people. But it was the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that saw the systematic development of the theory, and that made it the central concept of modern political thought.

The English development of the contractarian tradition was closely connected to the critique of the older doctrine of patriarchal monarchy, which held that kings ruled by divine right as the heirs of the original patriarchal authority of Adam. Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (published posthumously in 1680) was the most famous statement of the patriarchal theory, and the refutation of Filmer was a central project of the contractarian thinkers of the late seventeenth century. Locke’s First Treatise of Government (1689) is a sustained attack on the patriarchal theory. Locke argues that there is no natural basis for Adam’s authority over his children, that the Bible does not support the doctrine of divine right, and that the patriarchal theory is inconsistent with the obvious facts of human history. The argument was an important step in the development of the modern theory of legitimate political authority.

The four major versions

The four major versions of the social contract theory in the Enlightenment were those of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. Each of these versions developed a distinctive account of the nature of the contract, the scope of the rights it established, and the proper form of the government that it was supposed to justify.

Hobbes: the authoritarian contract

The first major theorist of the social contract was Hobbes, in his Leviathan (1651). Hobbes argued that, in the absence of political authority, human life would be a “war of all against all” in which life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To escape this condition, human beings would consent, in a great act of collective decision, to transfer their natural rights to a sovereign authority whose commands they would obey.

Hobbes’s contract was authoritarian. The sovereign, once established, was not subject to the contract, and there was no right of resistance. But the contract was also revolutionary in another sense: it established the principle that political authority was grounded in the consent of the governed, and not in any divine right or natural superiority of the ruler. This principle, even in Hobbes’s authoritarian version of it, was to be of decisive importance for the development of modern political thought.

The historical reception of Hobbes is one of the curiosities of intellectual history. He was the most rigorous and most original political philosopher of the seventeenth century, and he was also the most reviled. The Leviathan was burned at Oxford and Cambridge. The Royalist Hobbes, who had defended absolute sovereignty, ended up being treated as a secret republican and atheist. The Whig tradition of the eighteenth century used the Leviathan as a foil — the bad version of contractarian argument, the version that had to be transcended in order for the liberal contractarian argument to be developed. The irony is that the bad version is, philosophically, the more rigorous one. The Leviathan is one of the great unread works of the Western tradition — widely cited, widely reviled, and rarely worked through with the care it deserves.

Locke: the liberal contract

Locke’s version of the social contract was the most influential in the English-speaking world. In the Second Treatise of Government (1689), Locke argued that, in the state of nature, human beings were free and equal, and possessed natural rights to life, liberty, and property. They established political society, by contract, in order to protect these rights. Government was thus a kind of trust, and rulers who violated the trust could legitimately be resisted or overthrown.

Locke’s contract was liberal in two important senses. First, it was designed to protect the natural rights of the individuals, and the government was conceived as the instrument of this protection. Second, it established the principle that political authority was conditional on the consent of the governed, and that rulers who violated the conditions of the trust could be replaced by the people.

This argument had a decisive influence on the American revolutionaries. The American Declaration of Independence drew directly on Locke’s natural-rights argument, and the American system of constitutional government, with its separation of powers and its Bill of Rights, was an attempt to embody Locke’s principles in a concrete political form. The argument was also, of course, the foundation of the modern doctrine of human rights.

Rousseau: the democratic contract

Rousseau’s version of the social contract, developed in the Social Contract (1762), was more radical and more democratic. Rousseau argued that legitimate political authority was not based on the protection of pre-political rights, but on the general will (volonté générale) — the will of the citizenry as a whole directed at the common good.

Rousseau’s argument was based on a different conception of the human being than Locke’s. Where Locke had emphasized the natural rights of the individual, Rousseau emphasized the moral capacity of human beings to direct their own lives in accordance with the dictates of reason. The social contract, for Rousseau, was not merely an agreement to protect the natural rights of the individuals; it was a transformation of the individual into a citizen, a member of a political community who finds his true freedom in the general will.

This was a more demanding conception of political life than Locke’s. The Rousseauian citizen was not merely a rights-bearer, protected against the arbitrary power of the state; he was a participant in the collective self-government of the community, and the proper role of the political life was to make possible the development of the moral and rational capacities of all citizens.

Rousseau’s social contract had a profound influence on the French Revolution, especially in its more radical phases. Robespierre and the Jacobins claimed Rousseau as an inspiration, and the tension between democratic and authoritarian readings of the general will has been a recurring theme of modern political thought. The tension is genuine, and it is not entirely Rousseau’s fault, although he bears substantial responsibility for it.

Kant: the cosmopolitan contract

Kant’s version of the social contract, developed in a series of essays and in the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), was the most abstract and the most universal. Kant argued that the social contract was not a historical event but an idea of reason, a regulative principle that should guide the reform of existing political institutions.

Kant extended the contract tradition to the international order. In Perpetual Peace (1795), he argued that just as individuals had a duty to leave the state of nature and enter civil society, so nations had a duty to leave the international state of nature and enter a federation of free republican states. This cosmopolitan vision has had a profound influence on the development of international law and international institutions. The United Nations is, with substantial qualifications, an attempt to realize the Kantian idea. The project is not finished, and the qualifications are substantial, but the basic idea — that the proper end of international politics is a federation of free states living under the rule of law — is one of the most powerful political ideas of the modern period.

The influence

The social contract theory was one of the most influential political theories in modern history. It provided the theoretical foundation for the American and French revolutions, and it was a basic part of the intellectual equipment of the politicians and jurists who built the modern constitutional states of Europe and the Americas.

The American Revolution was the first great political event inspired by the social contract theory. The Declaration of Independence, with its appeal to the consent of the governed and its enumeration of unalienable rights, was a direct application of Lockean contractarian principles to the specific circumstances of the American colonies. The American Constitution, with its system of checks and balances and its Bill of Rights, was an attempt to embody the principles of the social contract in a concrete political form.

The French Revolution was also deeply influenced by the social contract theory, although the influence of Rousseau was more important than the influence of Locke. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, with its proclamation of the principles of liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty, was a direct descendant of the contractarian tradition. The revolutionary constitutions of 1791, 1793, and 1795 were attempts to give the social contract a concrete institutional form.

The Latin American independence movements of the early nineteenth century also drew on the social contract theory. The Venezuelan Declaration of Independence (1811) and the Chilean Declaration of Independence (1818) were modeled on the American Declaration, and the various constitutional projects of the new Latin American republics were attempts to apply the principles of the social contract to the specific circumstances of the former Spanish colonies. The social contract theory was, in this sense, the theoretical foundation of the first wave of modern republican revolutions.

The contemporary significance

The social contract theory remains one of the central traditions of modern political thought. The contemporary debates about the proper relationship between individual rights and the common good, about the conditions of legitimate political authority, and about the proper scope of government are all continuations of the debates begun by the contractarian thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The most important contemporary versions of the social contract theory are those of John Rawls and the tradition of contemporary liberal political philosophy. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993) developed a new version of contractarian argument, in which the principles of justice are those that would be chosen by rational individuals in an “original position” of equality. The Rawlsian theory of justice has had an enormous influence on contemporary political philosophy, and it represents one of the most important continuations of the contractarian tradition.

The scholars are still arguing about whether the social contract theory is the right way to think about political authority. David Gauthier, in Morals by Agreement (1986), has defended a contractarian theory of morality based on rational bargaining. Jean Hampton, in The Authority of Reason (1998), has developed a more Kantian version. The critics — communitarians, feminists, Marxists, postcolonialists — have argued that the contractarian framework is based on a false universalism that excludes the historical, communal, and gendered dimensions of political life. The debate is not closed, and it is not going to be closed, because the social contract theory is not just a theory about the basis of political authority. It is a theory about the kind of beings we are, and the kind of beings we are is itself a contested question.

The critics

The conservative critique, developed by Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, and the other counter-revolutionary writers, attacked the abstract rationalism of the contractarian tradition and defended a politics rooted in tradition, custom, prescription, and the accumulated wisdom of past generations. The conservatives argued that the revolutionary attempt to rebuild society from first principles was a dangerous fantasy, and that the proper political life was one that respected the inherited institutions and practices of a particular community.

The historical critique, developed in the nineteenth century by writers such as Sir Henry Maine, attacked the assumption that political authority was based on contract. Maine argued that political authority was based on status rather than on contract, and that the development of modern political institutions was the result of a long historical process rather than of a single act of agreement. The historical critique has been an important feature of modern political thought, especially in the British tradition.

The sociological critique, developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by writers such as Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber, attacked the assumption that political authority was based on the rational consent of the individuals. The sociologists argued that political authority was based on social forces — class, religion, bureaucracy, the division of labor — that the contractarian tradition had failed to understand.

The feminist critique, developed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, has argued that the contractarian tradition was based on a false universalism that excluded women from the political community. Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988) is the founding text of the contemporary feminist critique, and it argues that the “original contract” of modern political theory was, in effect, a contract among brothers that excluded women from the rights of citizenship. The feminist critique has been an important contribution to the contemporary debate about the social contract.

The continuing significance

Despite the many critiques that have been developed over the past two centuries, the social contract theory remains one of the central traditions of modern political thought. The basic commitment of the tradition — to the principle that political authority is legitimate only when it rests on the consent of the governed — has become a basic principle of modern democratic politics. The tradition has been modified by the various critiques, and it has been developed in new directions by contemporary political philosophers. But the basic commitment has not been abandoned, and the basic framework — the state of nature, the contract, the establishment of political society, the conditions of legitimate authority — is still the framework within which most contemporary debates about political legitimacy take place.