Contractarianism in Modern Politics: From Theory to Practice

The contractarian tradition of political thought, developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has had a profound influence on the development of modern politics. The basic claim of the tradition — that political authority is legitimate only to the extent that it rests on the consent of the governed — has become a basic principle of modern democratic politics. This article examines the influence of contractarianism on modern political practice, from the American Constitution to the contemporary international human rights regime.

The American Founding

The most famous practical application of the contractarian tradition is the American founding. The American revolutionaries drew directly on the contractarian tradition in justifying their break with Britain and in establishing the new American republic.

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 Declaration was not only a statement of the rights of the American colonists; it was also a manifesto of the contractarian tradition, and it has become a basic reference for the contemporary debate about the proper foundations of political life.

The American Constitution, with its system of separation of powers, its Bill of Rights, and its federal structure, was an attempt to embody the principles of the contractarian tradition in a concrete political form. The Federalist Papers, written by Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay, provided the most systematic theoretical defense of the Constitution, and they drew directly on the contractarian tradition in their arguments for the proper organization of the new republic.

The French Revolution

The French Revolution of 1789 was also deeply influenced by the contractarian tradition, although the influence of Rousseau was more important than the influence of Locke. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 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 contractarian principles a concrete institutional form. The revolutionary leaders, especially in the more radical phases of the Revolution, saw themselves as implementing the contractarian principles that the philosophers of the Enlightenment had developed, and they attempted to design political institutions that would give effect to these principles.

The French Revolution also illustrated the dangers of the contractarian tradition. The Terror of 1793–1794, in which thousands of French citizens were executed in the name of the Republic, was a perversion of the contractarian principles, and it has cast a long shadow over the subsequent history of the tradition. The totalitarianism of the twentieth century, in its various forms, can be seen in some respects as a monstrous extension of the contractarian project of rebuilding society from first principles.

The Contemporary Human Rights Regime

The contemporary international human rights regime is, a continuation of the contractarian tradition. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), drafted in the aftermath of the Second World War by a committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, drew directly on the language and the structure of the eighteenth-century contractarian documents.

The Universal Declaration, like the earlier declarations, proclaims a comprehensive catalogue of human rights that are supposed to apply to all human beings, regardless of their nationality, race, religion, or sex. The Declaration is grounded in the contractarian principle that these rights are not granted by governments but are possessed by human beings as such, and that the proper function of government is to protect these rights.

The various international covenants and conventions that have been developed since 1948 — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and many others — are all descendants of the Universal Declaration, and they have established a comprehensive international human rights regime that did not exist before the twentieth century.

The Contemporary Engagement

The contractarian tradition remains one of the central traditions of modern political thought, and the contemporary engagement with the tradition is part of the broader debate about the proper foundations of modern democracy.

The contemporary defenders of the contractarian tradition emphasize the importance of the principles of consent, equality, and the protection of individual rights. They argue that the contractarian tradition provides the best framework for thinking about the proper relationship between the individual and the state, and that the principles of the tradition are basic to the modern understanding of legitimate political authority.

The contemporary critics of the contractarian tradition argue that the tradition is based on a false universalism, that it ignores the historical and cultural specificity of the actual political communities, and that it tends to produce a kind of individualism that is incompatible with the proper recognition of the common good. The critics argue that the contractarian tradition is inadequate to the challenges of contemporary politics, and that a more communitarian or civic-republican framework is needed.

The American Founding

The French Revolution

The Contemporary Human Rights Regime

The Contemporary Engagement

Further Reading