Social Contract Theory

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Ask what makes a government's authority legitimate, and three of the tradition's founding figures give three different answers, each starting from the same basic move, imagining people before government exists, in a state of nature, and asking what would drive them to accept one. Hobbes' state of nature is a war of every man against every man, life famously nasty, brutish and short, because with no common power to keep everyone in awe, each person's own reasonable fear of everyone else makes peace impossible without one. His remedy is severe: people surrender their natural right to govern themselves almost entirely to a single sovereign, and once surrendered it is not easily taken back, because a sovereign that could be overthrown whenever subjects grew dissatisfied would not deliver the security the whole arrangement exists to buy. Locke's state of nature is milder, governed already by a law of reason that forbids harming others in their life, health, liberty or possessions, so government is not rescue from chaos but a convenience, appointed to judge disputes impartially and to protect property more reliably than each person judging their own case. Because government exists by the people's consent for their benefit, it can forfeit that consent by breaking the trust, which is exactly the room Hobbes' sovereign was built to deny. Rousseau denies that either picture captures what legitimacy actually requires. Consent to a ruler is not enough if the ruler's will is not authentically the people's own; genuine legitimacy requires submission to the general will, the collective, common interest a properly constituted people share, which can differ from what any momentary majority happens to want. Three thinkers, one shared question, and three answers that still organize practically every argument since about what a government owes the people who accept it.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Hobbes wrote Leviathan against the backdrop of the English Civil War, and it shows: the book's argument is best understood as a sustained case that civil war, faction and the collapse of common authority are the worst thing that can happen to a people, worse by far than submitting to a ruler with more power than anyone finds comfortable. His state of nature is not primarily a historical claim about primitive humanity so much as a diagnosis of what happens whenever a common power capable of enforcing agreements disappears, which a civil war does in practice regardless of how civilized the people caught in it were the week before. Without a common power, Hobbes argues, no agreement can be trusted to hold, because each party has reason to fear the other will break it first and strike while ahead, which makes even naturally peaceable people rationally driven to preemptive hostility. The only remedy is a sovereign whose power to punish breach is credible enough that keeping agreements becomes the safer bet than breaking them, and that credibility, Hobbes insists, requires the sovereign's power to be nearly absolute and effectively irrevocable; a sovereign subjects could unseat at will would face exactly the same problem the state of nature poses, nobody able to trust that today's peace holds tomorrow. This is why Leviathan reads less like an argument for tyranny for its own sake and more like an argument that the alternative, a return to a war of all against all, is so much worse that almost any stable authority is preferable to none. Locke and Rousseau, writing in calmer decades, could afford to worry about a sovereign's abuses in a way Hobbes, writing amid actual civil collapse, did not feel he could.