Social Contract — A central concept in modern political philosophy that grounds the legitimacy of the state and political obligation in an agreement (actual or hypothetical) among individuals who, by consenting, leave the state of nature and establish political authority. The image derives from the legal idea of the pactum — a voluntary contract that creates mutual obligations — transposed from relations between private parties to the bond between the governed and power. The tradition that treats this pact as the criterion of legitimate authority is called contractarianism. Three classical formulations define it. In Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651), the state of nature is a “war of all against all,” and individuals irrevocably transfer their rights to an absolute sovereign in exchange for security. In Locke (Second Treatise of Government, 1689), the state of nature already contains natural rights — life, liberty, and property — and the contract establishes a limited government charged with protecting them, which may be dissolved if it betrays them. In Rousseau (The Social Contract, 1762), the pact produces the general will (volonté générale): by obeying the law he has prescribed to himself, the citizen remains free. Kant reinterprets the contract as a regulative idea of practical reason — not a historical fact but a criterion: every law must be such that it could have been consented to by all. In the twentieth century, Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971) renews this tradition with the “original position” and the “veil of ignorance,” thought experiments that, by suppressing knowledge of one’s own social position, lead to the choice of impartial principles of justice.
← Glossary