In five minutes: what social contract theory says
Social contract theory is the idea that political authority is legitimate only because the people under it agree to it, openly or by implication. Nobody claims that a real contract was ever signed. The "contract" is a thought experiment: imagine life with no government, ask what people would gain by creating one, and you learn what a government may and may not do. This page belongs to our hub on the Enlightenment.
The idea matters because it reverses an older picture. For centuries many Europeans were taught that kings ruled by divine right or by inherited custom. Social contract thinkers asked a harder question: what gives one person the right to give orders to another? Their answer was consent.
Three names dominate the story. Thomas Hobbes used the contract to defend strong rule that keeps the peace. John Locke used it to limit government and protect rights. Jean-Jacques Rousseau used it to put ordinary citizens at the centre of the state. Same starting point, three very different conclusions.
The core idea in four steps
- State of nature. Picture people before any government, laws or police.
- A problem. Without a shared authority, life is insecure, disputes are unsettled and rights are weak.
- An agreement. People give up some freedom, or some power to judge and punish for themselves, and set up a common authority.
- Limits. The authority is legitimate only while it does the job it was created for. Each thinker disagrees about how tight those limits are.
Why the idea appeared in the 1600s
Older versions exist. In Plato's dialogue Crito, Socrates argues that by living all his life under Athens's laws he has agreed to obey them. But the theory took its famous form in the seventeenth century, after a shock to the old order. The English Civil War (1642 to 1651) pitted Parliament against the king, and Charles I was executed in 1649. If a king could be tried and removed, the old claim that rulers were simply placed there by God needed a replacement.
Two other trends helped. Europe had lived through long religious wars, so thinkers wanted a basis for government that did not depend on which church was right. And the new science encouraged people to reason from simple starting points, as Galileo and Newton did in physics. Social contract writers tried to do the same for politics: start with individuals, then build up the state.
Three thinkers, three contracts
Thomas Hobbes: security first
Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, with the civil war fresh in mind. He argued that in a state of nature people are roughly equal in strength and fear each other, so everyone is tempted to strike first. The result is a "war of all against all", where life is, in his famous words, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Leviathan, chapter 13).
To escape, people agree with each other to hand nearly all their power to one sovereign, a person or an assembly, who can enforce the peace. The only right people keep is self-preservation. Hobbes preferred a monarch, but his reasoning is about security, not royal blood: a sovereign who cannot keep order has no claim on obedience.
John Locke: consent and limits
Locke published Two Treatises of Government anonymously in 1689, just after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 removed James II. His state of nature is not a war. People already have natural rights to life, liberty and property, and a law of nature tells them not to harm one another. The trouble is that no impartial judge exists, so everyone judges their own case, and disputes turn violent.
Locke's contract creates government to fix that one problem. Government is a trust: it holds power on behalf of the people and must protect their rights. If it breaks the trust, for example by seizing property or ruling arbitrarily, the people may resist and replace it. This idea of a right of revolution is why Locke is so closely tied to the American Declaration of Independence (1776), which says governments get their just powers from "the consent of the governed". You can read more about him in Who Was John Locke?.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the general will
Rousseau's The Social Contract came out in 1762. It opens with a famous line: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" (Book 1, chapter 1). His question is how people can join together in a society and still obey only themselves.
His answer is the "general will": the common interest of the whole community, which is different from what each person wants privately or what a majority happens to want in a bad mood. Citizens make the laws together, and because they are both makers and subjects of the law, obeying it is a form of freedom. Rousseau believed sovereignty belongs to the people and cannot be handed to representatives, which made him wary of parliaments. The book was banned in Paris and Geneva soon after it appeared. A full walk-through is in Rousseau's The Social Contract Explained.
Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau compared
| Question | Hobbes | Locke | Rousseau |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main work | Leviathan (1651) | Two Treatises of Government (1689) | The Social Contract (1762) |
| State of nature | Fearful, close to constant war | Peaceful but insecure | Free and simple, later spoiled by inequality |
| Why a contract? | To escape violent death | To protect life, liberty and property | To be free and equal under laws citizens make |
| Power of the state | Strong, close to absolute | Limited by rights and the law | Rests on the general will of the people |
| Can people resist? | Hardly ever | Yes, if the government breaks its trust | The people stay sovereign and can change the government |
For a longer side-by-side, see Hobbes vs Locke vs Rousseau on the Social Contract.
Objections and later life
Critics noticed the obvious gap early. David Hume argued in "Of the Original Contract" (1748) that no real contract ever founded a state: governments began in conquest or habit, and people obey out of custom and usefulness, not a promise. Defenders reply that the theory is about justification, not history. The question is not whether people signed, but whether a government could be defended to the people it rules.
Later scholars asked who was left out of the story. Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract (1988) argued that classic contract theory treated women's subordination as natural, and Charles Mills's The Racial Contract (1997) argued that the "free and equal" parties were often understood to be white men only. In the twentieth century John Rawls revived the method in A Theory of Justice (1971), asking what rules people would choose if they did not know their own place in society.
The theory and the book are not the same
"Social contract theory" names a whole tradition. The Social Contract is one book inside it, Rousseau's. If a question asks about the theory, expect Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. If it asks about the book, it means Rousseau's 1762 work and its idea of the general will.
What exams ask
- Define it. A safe one-line answer: government gets its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, who agree to give up some freedom in return for order and protection.
- Compare thinkers. Hobbes: fear and a strong sovereign. Locke: natural rights, limited government, right to resist. Rousseau: general will and popular sovereignty.
- Link to events. Locke connects to the Glorious Revolution and the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Rousseau's popular sovereignty echoes in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789.
- Significance (AP style). The theory shifted the basis of legitimacy from divine right to consent, which supported arguments for constitutional government, rights and revolution.
Read next
- Hobbes vs Locke vs Rousseau on the Social Contract: the three versions side by side, with the exam comparisons in more detail.
- Rousseau's The Social Contract Explained: the book's argument chapter by chapter.
- Who Was John Locke? Life, Ideas and Influence: the man behind the right of revolution.
- The Enlightenment Explained: Ideas, Thinkers and Legacy: the wider movement this theory belongs to.
