![]() ![]() People took for themselves all that they could, and human life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The state of nature was therefore a state of war, which could be ended only if individuals agreed (in a social contract) to give their liberty into the hands of a sovereign, on the sole condition that their lives were safeguarded by sovereign power.įor Hobbes the authority of the sovereign is absolute, in the sense that no authority is above the sovereign, whose will is law. The social contract in HobbesĪccording to Hobbes ( Leviathan, 1651), the state of nature was one in which there were no enforceable criteria of right and wrong. Theories of the social contract differed according to their purpose: some were designed to justify the power of the sovereign, while others were intended to safeguard the individual from oppression by a sovereign who was all too powerful. These conclusions were then reduced to the form of a social contract, from which it was supposed that all the essential rights and duties of citizens could be logically deduced. By comparing the advantages of organized government with the disadvantages of the state of nature, they showed why and under what conditions government is useful and ought therefore to be accepted by all reasonable people as a voluntary obligation. What distinguished these theories of political obligation from other doctrines of the period was their attempt to justify and delimit political authority on the grounds of individual self-interest and rational consent. They then, by exercising natural reason, formed a society (and a government) by means of a social contract.Īlthough similar ideas can be traced to the Greek Sophists, social-contract theories had their greatest currency in the 17th and 18th centuries and are associated with the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. ![]() In primeval times, according to the theory, individuals were born into an anarchic state of nature, which was happy or unhappy according to the particular version of the theory. ![]() Social contract, in political philosophy, an actual or hypothetical compact, or agreement, between the ruled or between the ruled and their rulers, defining the rights and duties of each.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |