The Social Contract: Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau and the Foundation of Modern Politics

Why should we obey the State? What makes a law legitimate rather than a mere order imposed by force? In the history of Western philosophy, these questions found their first systematically modern formulation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with three thinkers who changed forever the vocabulary of politics: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The three give radically different answers, but share a method: contractualism — the idea that political legitimacy must be thought from a hypothetical pact among free individuals.

The contractualist method: from the state of nature to civil society

Before Hobbes, the justification of political power had mostly theological or cosmological foundations. Kings ruled by divine right; the social hierarchy mirrored an order given by nature or by God. Classical Greek philosophy — Plato and Aristotle — thought of man as zoon politikon: a being that only fulfills itself in the polis, and the polis as prior, in logical terms, to the individual.

Modern contractualism inverts this scheme. The individual is the starting point; political society, the result of a rational decision. To think this decision, contractualists construct a methodological fiction: the state of nature — the hypothetical condition of human beings before any political authority. The philosophical question is: given the state of nature, why and how do people decide to form a civil society? Which clauses of this pact justify sovereign power?

Each philosopher’s answer depends, above all, on how he describes the state of nature.

Hobbes: the Leviathan and the war of all against all

Context and work

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) wrote the Leviathan (1651) in the shadow of the English Civil War, which culminated in the execution of Charles I in 1649. The experience of political collapse deeply marked his philosophy: for Hobbes, the worst of evils is anarchy.

The state of nature: bellum omnium contra omnes

In chapter XIII of the Leviathan, Hobbes offers one of the most famous descriptions in political philosophy. In the state of nature:

• Men are approximately equal in strength and skill — the weakest can kill the strongest by cunning or alliance.
• This equality produces mutual mistrust: each fears that the other will seize what he has.
• Relative scarcity and the desire for glory produce three causes of discord: competition, diffidence (mistrust), and vainglory.
• The result is bellum omnium contra omnes — the war of all against all.

In that condition, in Hobbes’s most-quoted phrase, human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. There is no industry, agriculture, science, art, society — for none of these activities is possible without security.

The pact and the absolute sovereign

Driven by fear of violent death and the desire for peace, rational individuals enter a pact: each transfers his unlimited natural right (the right to everything, in the state of nature) to a common authority — the Sovereign — on condition that all others do the same.

This sovereign, the Leviathan (the biblical monster of the Book of Job), is not part of the contract: it is its product. Hence its power is absolute, indivisible, and irrevocable. To submit it to laws or divide it among instances would be to reintroduce the very conflict the pact sought to eliminate.

Implications

Hobbes’s philosophy is radical in two senses:

1. It grounds the legitimacy of the State in the rational consent of subjects, not in divine right — a rupture with medieval tradition.
2. It justifies absolutism for proto-liberal reasons: individual security. The citizen has a duty to obey, but retains the natural right to self-preservation — if the sovereign threatens his life, the pact dissolves.

Hobbes thus founds the paradox of authoritarian liberalism: the absolute state justified by the protection of the individual.

Locke: property, consent, and the right of resistance

Context and work

John Locke (1632–1704) published the Two Treatises of Government in 1689, in the context of the Glorious Revolution, which deposed James II and established the English parliamentary monarchy. His political philosophy is the theoretical defense of that new arrangement: limited government, separation of powers, supremacy of law.

The state of nature: free, but not savage

Locke describes the state of nature in a radically different way from Hobbes. In the Second Treatise (II, §4–6), human beings in it:

• Are free and equal, endowed with reason.
• Are governed by the law of nature, which teaches that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions”.
• Have natural rights prior to any convention: life, liberty, and property (life, liberty, and estate).

Property, for Locke, arises from labor: when an individual mixes his activity with the goods of nature, they become his (II, §27). This is one of the most influential arguments in modern political philosophy — the intellectual foundation of economic liberalism.

The state of nature is not war, but it has a practical problem: without a common judge, each is judge in his own cause, which produces insecurity and partiality. That is the reason for the pact, not fear of violent death.

The pact and limited government

For Locke, the social contract has two stages:

1. Pact of association: individuals form a political community.
2. Pact of fiduciary submission: the community entrusts power to a government, under conditions.

Government is a fiduciary agent (trustee): its power is limited by the purpose for which it was instituted — to protect natural rights. Unlike Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s sovereign is not absolute. It stands under:

• the law of nature (which it cannot violate);
• the separation of powers (Legislative and Executive);
• the continuing consent of the governed.

Right of resistance

If government systematically violates natural rights — becoming tyrannical — the people have a right of resistance and may dissolve the government (II, §222). This principle directly influenced the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), drafted by Jefferson with Locke as explicit reference, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789).

Locke is, then, the philosophical founder of political liberalism: limited government, individual rights prior to the State, property as an extension of the person, religious toleration.

Rousseau: the general will and republican liberty

Context and work

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) published On the Social Contract in 1762, a generation before the French Revolution. His political philosophy is the most radical attempt to think a political community in which obedience to the law coincides with freedom.

The state of nature: man good, corrupted by society

Rousseau’s description of the state of nature, set out in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), differs from Hobbes and Locke. In the pure state of nature, man is:

• Good by nature — not in a moral sense, but pre-moral: he knows neither good nor evil, for he does not yet live in society.
• Solitary and independent, moved only by amour de soi (self-preservation) and natural pity.
• Free, equal, self-sufficient.

Inequality, vanity, war, oppression — all of this is the fruit of social history, especially of the invention of private property: “The first who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ’this is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society” (Discourse, second part).

The central problem

In On the Social Contract (Book I, ch. 6), Rousseau formulates the fundamental problem:

“To find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.”

The solution is the social pact: each totally alienates his rights to the community, but, as all do the same, no one loses — on the contrary, each gains the equivalent in civil guarantees.

The general will

The key piece of the system is the general will (volonté générale). It is not simply the will of the majority (will of all, the sum of particular interests), but the will of the collective body as such — oriented to the common good. Law is the expression of the general will.

Political freedom, for Rousseau, is to obey the law one has prescribed to oneself. As citizen, I am simultaneously legislator and subject. Hence the famous paradox: whoever refuses to obey the general will “shall be forced to be free” (I, ch. 7) — a phrase that has yielded both radically democratic and totalitarian readings.

Implications

Rousseau founds modern republicanism: indivisible popular sovereignty, refusal of representative government (in which the people’s will is “alienated” to representatives), civic education as a condition of citizenship, civil religion. His influence on Robespierre and the Jacobins, on Kant, and on the entire modern republican imagination is incalculable.

Systematic comparison

Criticisms and developments

Internal criticisms

• Hobbes was charged with reducing man to a passional machine and with failing to distinguish sufficiently between absolutism and tyranny.
• Locke was criticized, especially from the left, for naturalizing private property and for implicit exclusions (women, slaves, non-proprietors) from effective citizenship.
• Rousseau was accused of opening the way to totalitarianism, through the indivisible general will and the idea of “forcing one to be free”. The reading has been debated from Benjamin Constant (The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns, 1819) to Isaiah Berlin (Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958).

Contemporary developments

The contractualist tradition has never died. It was taken up and radically reformulated by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971), through the device of the “original position” and the “veil of ignorance” — a reinvention of the social contract as a procedure for justifying principles of justice. Before him, Kant had integrated contractualism into his practical philosophy, thinking the contract as a regulative idea of reason.

The communitarian critique (MacIntyre, Sandel, Taylor) and the feminist critique (Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 1988) renewed at the close of the twentieth century the debate on the limits of the contractualist paradigm — pointing both to what it presupposes (abstract, rational, autonomous individuals) and to what it conceals (relations of care, gender, community, tradition).

Why study this today

We live under institutions — State, laws, rights, democracy, separation of powers — whose conceptual grammar was forged by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. When a modern constitution speaks of “consent of the governed”, of “inviolable rights”, or of “popular sovereignty”, it is mobilizing — even without naming them — these three authors.

Each of them offers a model of State: the Leviathan that guarantees peace through concentrated force; the limited government that serves individual rights; the democratic republic in which the people is simultaneously legislator and subject. Contemporary political debates — about security vs. liberty, about the role of the market, about representation vs. direct democracy — continue to unfold, in large part, within the horizon opened by these three thinkers.

To understand contractualism is no antiquarian exercise. It is to reconstruct the founding intellectual decisions on which we still depend.

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