SOCIAL CONTRACT.

The "social contract" in the early twenty-first century is associated with the modern school of natural jurisprudence as crystallized in the seventeenth century (although earlier scholastics and humanists had also spoken of contracts, but differently, for example contracts between people and ruler rather than contracts that actually generate sovereignty). Yet there were preceding statements of central elements of social contract theory. The ancient Sophist Lycophron is sometimes credited with originating the idea of the social contract, and there are echoes of it in the teachings of Protagoras (c. 490–c. 421 b.c.e.) as well. The Roman author Cicero (106–43 b.c.e.) stated in his widely read treatise on rhetoric, De inventione, that social, legal, and political associations were the result of a primeval agreement to live together on the part of human beings who were previously in a wild and asocial condition. Likewise, St. Augustine (354–430) insisted that any true republic required agreement on the part of its citizens about the object of their love.

Modern Formulations

Modern theorists of the social contract school argued that political authority was artificial and conventional rather than divinely or naturally ordained. To sustain their argument, some—including Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)—appealed to a social contract as a way of explaining the rational basis for and limits on political authority. But for most of these thinkers, the social contract was not the deepest basis of their arguments, which depended rather on new views about natural rights, sociability, passion, and reason. It was David Hume (1711–1776) in his "Of the Original Contract" of 1748, who, although agreeing that political authority was artificial and conventional, attacked the use of the "social contract" by Locke and his followers and so retrospectively turned this image into the badge of a tradition.

By contrasting the social contract unfavorably with his own view of a duty to obey government grounded in utility, Hume established the debate between the social contract and utilitarianism that continued to structure Anglophone philosophy into the twenty-first century. (John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, 1971, is widely credited with reviving contractarianism, though others contributed to this revival before and since.) But Hume's classic criticisms of the contract approach—Were any governments actually founded by contract? When and how could people consent to such a contract, especially one founded before they were born? Why should the duty to keep contracts or promises be more fundamental than the duty to obey political authority?—apply principally to its Lockean interpretation.

Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government of 1689 (the year it was published anonymously), interpreted the social contract to require actual consent, whether explicit or "tacit." Most critics concur that he was unable to show convincingly when or how such consent is given, though he did powerfully develop the claim that however given, consent to a government that proves grossly incompetent or malicious can be rescinded. At the opposite extreme, Rousseau, in Du contrat social (1762; On the social contract), accepted only assemblies actually giving consent to laws as indicative of authentic social contracts. Yet the most interesting treatments of the idea of the social contract are those that treat it as a device for testing the rationality of obedience to political authority. Here, the justificatory force rests on not on visible consent or contract but rather on the rationality (broadly conceived) that such a contract exhibits. In different ways, Hobbes and Rawls both take this approach, as will be discussed below.

Political Authority versus Moral Principles

Hume's sometime-friend Rousseau can be seen as the initiator of a second fundamental question about the contract: that of its scope. Hobbes and Locke had both treated the contract in relation to the justification of political authority, although for Hobbes the contract also turned the precepts of a minimal morality (the "laws of nature") into binding civic law. Rousseau, however, saw the contract as creating simultaneously political legitimacy and genuine moral principles: in transforming asocial or antisocial "men" into civically minded "citizens," his social contract created justice and freedom along with the artifice of political authority. This role of the contract in constructing morality inspired Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who, in addition to featuring the contract in his political theory, transformed its role in creating moral principles into his idea of the categorical imperative instructing every rational being to act only according to maxims that he or she could will to be a universal law.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, Rawls developed the role of the contract in justifying political authority, while its role in constructing and testing moral principles was developed primarily by David Gauthier, J. C. Harsanyi, and Thomas Scanlon. Scanlon extended a Rawlsian approach from justice to morality, arguing that "contractualism" identifies principles that no one could reasonably reject. By contrast, Gauthier and Harsanyi both bridged the Humean distinction between contract and utility, using contractarian approaches to argue for utilitarian principles as simultaneously morally right and rational to pursue.

Hobbes and Rawls

This entry returns to the rational-justification approach to the contract's role. Sometimes this is called the "hypothetical" approach, as it is often framed in terms of a contract to which one could or would agree. But since the question then arises of how a hypothetical contract can be regarded as morally binding, one is forced back upon its rationality. Rationality, however, can be divided (using Rawls's terms) into a narrow conception of rationality on the one hand, and "reasonableness" on the other. The narrow conception of rationality, which the term bears in the remainder of this entry, is identical with prudence: assessing the best way to pursue one's own goals and interests. "Reasonableness," by contrast, involves assessing the fairness of the conditions under which all can pursue their goals and interests.

Using this distinction, it can be said that Hobbes, in his Leviathan of 1651, uses the contract to argue that it is rational to act reasonably—that is, it is rational and prudent to obey an effective sovereign and so to act fairly towards all the others who are also obeying rather than to try to evade obedience for personal advantage. Rawls, in contrast, uses the contract to argue that one must first establish reasonable conditions for reflection on what is rational and only then decide what one can rationally pursue. For Rawls, obedience is justified because what is obeyed is just, whereas for Hobbes, what is obeyed is just because this is what it is most prudent to obey.

So for Rawls, what is reasonable both structures the contracting position and shapes the analysis of what would be chosen within it. The role of the contract is to model the reasonable constraints of publicity and reciprocity: any principles of justice chosen must be mutually acknowledged by citizens, even though in the "original position" all are ignorant of their actual identities and so would reason the same way. Rawls insists on this ignorance because, like Kant in his moral theory, he wants to exclude special pleading and unfair existing advantages from the contracting or "original" position. Whereas for Hobbes, people have the same overriding interest in preserving their lives and can be shown that in a "state of nature" without government they will best do so by acting reasonably, for Rawls people should recognize the fairness of starting with the reasonable prior to any particular rational interest they might have.

Feminist Views

Some feminists have criticized the social contract approach as excessively individualistic, arguing that to treat contract as the fundamental moral and/or political relationship is to overlook the dependency on the care of others that characterizes infants, the elderly, the severely disabled, and everyone to the extent that they are vulnerable. Carole Pateman has noted the problematic relationship of women to contract in the seventeenth-century heyday of natural jurisprudence, when married women could not own property or make contracts in English common law. But others have argued that the social contract approach can be turned to feminist ends. Susan Moller Okin argues that a consistent Rawlsian theory would include the family within the scope of the theory of justice, while Jean Hampton contends that contractarianism can be used to test and prevent the exploitation that may pervade intimate relationships between family and friends.

See also Human Rights ; Liberalism ; Natural Law ; Society ; State of Nature .

bibliography

Hampton, Jean. "Feminist Contractarianism." In A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, edited by Louise M. Anthony and Charlotte Witt. Boulder, Colo., and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Rev. student ed. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Reprints the original frontispiece and has a valuable introduction.

Hume, David. "Of the Original Contract." In Political Essays. Edited by Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Laslett. Student ed. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Introduction summarizes Laslett's influential view on when the Treatises were written.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings. Edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Melissa Lane