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Encyclopedia Britannica



SOCIAL CONTRACT

This article appears in Volume V25, Page 301 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: SIV-SOU
SOCIAL CONTRACT , in political philosophy, a
term
  applied to the theory of the origin of society associated chiefly with the names of
Hobbes
 ,
Locke
  and Rousseau, though it can be traced back to the Greek Sophists. According to
Hobbes
  (
Leviathan
 ), men lived originally in a state of nature in which there were no recognized criteria of right and wrong, no distinction of meum and tuum. Each person took for himself all that he could; man's life was " solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." The state of nature was therefore a state of war, which was ended by men agreeing to give their liberty into the hands of a sovereign, who thenceforward was absolute.
Locke
  (Treatise on Government) differed from Hobbes in so far as he described the pre-social state as one of freedom, and held that private property must have been recognized, though there was no security. Rousseau (Contrat social) held that in the pre-social state man was unwarlike and even timid.
Laws
  resulted from the combination of men who agreed for mutual
protection
  to surrender individual freedom of action. Government must therefore rest on the consent of the governed, the volonte generale. Though it is quite obvious that the theory of a social
contract
  (or compact,
as it is also called) contains a considerable
element
  of truththat loose associations for mutual
protection
  preceded any elaborate
idea
  or structure of law, and that government cannot be based exclusively on forceyet it is .open to the equally obvious objection that the very
idea
  of
contract
  belongs to a more advanced stage in human development than the hypothesis itself demands. Thus the
doctrine
 , yielding as a definite theory of the origin of society to the evidence of history and anthropology, becomes interesting primarily as revolt against medieval and theocratic theories of the state.


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