What Is the Social Contract? Social Contract Theory Explained

The social contract in plain terms

Why should anyone obey the government? Laws limit what you can do, taxes take part of what you earn, and police and courts can use force against you. Social contract theory answers that this authority is legitimate because it rests on agreement. Free and equal people, thinking about what life would be like without any government, would choose to set one up and accept its rules.

The theory usually has three parts:

1. A starting point, often called the state of nature: life without any political authority.
2. An agreement in which people give up some freedom or rights in exchange for something they value more, such as safety or protected rights.
3. A result: a government whose powers and limits follow from the terms of that agreement.

Different thinkers describe each part differently, and that is why the same idea has been used to defend everything from absolute monarchy to democratic socialism.

Two related words come up often. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy distinguishes contractarianism, the Hobbesian line that grounds rules in mutual self-interest, from contractualism, the Kantian line that grounds them in what can be justified to each person as a free and equal agent.

Hobbes: escaping the war of all against all

Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan (1651) after living through the English Civil War. He asked readers to imagine life with no common authority to settle disputes. Each person would judge for themselves what they needed to survive, and everyone would have reason to fear everyone else. The result, in his famous phrase, would be a war of all against all, in which life is "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

To escape, people agree to hand their power to a sovereign, a single person or assembly, who keeps the peace. Hobbes argued that sovereign power should be undivided and very broad, because divided power invites conflict. But the deal has a limit: the sovereign's claim to obedience rests on protecting its subjects, and individuals keep the right to defend their own lives.

Hobbes is often read as a defender of strong authority, and his work remains a reference point for anyone who values order and security first.

Locke: natural rights and limited government

John Locke, writing in the Two Treatises of Government around the time of England's Glorious Revolution, painted a gentler picture. In his state of nature, people already have natural rights to life, liberty and property, and are bound by a moral law. The problem is that there is no impartial judge to enforce those rights.

People therefore consent to form a political society and a government whose job is to protect their rights. Because that is the government's purpose, its power is limited. If rulers violate the rights they were set up to protect, they break the trust placed in them and the people may resist and replace them.

Locke also faced the obvious question: when did you consent? His answer was tacit consent. By living in a country, using its roads or inheriting property under its laws, he argued, people accept its government. Critics have found this answer weak ever since.

Locke's version became a foundation of classical liberalism. The Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, echoes it directly: governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," and when a government becomes destructive of people's rights, "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." See our guide to what is classical liberalism for how those ideas developed.

Rousseau: the general will

Jean-Jacques Rousseau opened The Social Contract (1762) with the line "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." He did not want to return to nature. He wanted to show how political authority could be legitimate, so that people living under law remain free.

His answer was that each person gives themselves wholly to the community, and the community is governed by the general will: the shared will of all citizens directed at the common good. When you obey a law that expresses the general will, you are obeying a rule you gave yourself.

Rousseau's ideas inspired democratic and republican movements, and his insistence that sovereignty belongs to the people as a whole fed into later arguments for direct democracy. His critics, including many liberals, worried about one notorious passage, which says that anyone who refuses to obey the general will may be "forced to be free." They saw in it a risk that majorities or states could override individuals in the name of the people.

Kant: the contract as a test

Immanuel Kant made a move that shaped most later theories. He treated the original contract not as a historical event but as an idea of reason: a standard for judging laws. A law is just, on this view, if a whole people could have agreed to it. The question is not whether anyone did agree, but whether free and equal people could.

Rawls and Nozick: the modern revival

Rawls and the veil of ignorance

In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls brought the social contract back to the center of political philosophy. He asked readers to imagine choosing the basic rules of society from an original position, behind a veil of ignorance: you do not know your class, race, sex, talents or beliefs about the good life.

Rawls argued that people choosing under those conditions would pick two principles:

• Equal basic liberties for everyone, which take priority.
• Social and economic inequalities are allowed only if positions are open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and if the inequalities work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, the difference principle.

Rawls's theory became a cornerstone of modern liberalism and social liberalism, supporting a strong welfare state alongside firm civil liberties.

Nozick's reply

Robert Nozick, Rawls's Harvard colleague, answered in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Starting from Lockean rights, he argued that only a minimal state limited to protection against force, theft and fraud could arise without violating anyone's rights, and that redistribution beyond that treats people as means to others' ends. His work is a key text of libertarianism, discussed in our guide to what is a libertarian.

Other contemporary versions

The debate continued. David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement (1986) updated the Hobbesian line, deriving moral rules from rational bargaining between self-interested people. T. M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other (1998) developed contractualism, holding that an act is wrong if it is disallowed by principles that no one could reasonably reject.

Critics of the social contract

Social contract theory has drawn criticism from several directions.

• No one signed it. In his essay "Of the Original Contract," David Hume argued that almost every government began through conquest or usurpation, not agreement. He compared tacit consent to a poor peasant who is said to consent to a ruler because he could leave the country, when in reality he knows no foreign language and has no means to go.
• Hypothetical consent is not consent. Critics of Kant and Rawls argue that showing people would agree to something under ideal conditions does not mean they are bound by it.
• Who was left out. In The Sexual Contract (1988), Carole Pateman argued that classic contract theory assumed a prior agreement that subordinated women. In The Racial Contract (1997), Charles W. Mills argued that in practice the contract's protections were extended to white Europeans while excluding colonized and enslaved peoples.
• Anarchist objections. Many anarchists accept the critique of consent and conclude that no state can be legitimate. Our guide to what is anarchism covers that view.
• Communitarian objections. Some conservatives and communitarians argue that people are born into families, traditions and communities, not into a negotiation, so obligations come from shared history rather than choice.

Defenders reply that the contract was never meant as history. It is a way to ask what rules free and equal people could accept, and that question, they argue, is still the right one.

The social contract in everyday politics

The idea appears constantly outside philosophy seminars. Politicians speak of a "new social contract" when proposing changes to welfare, work or taxation. Debates over vaccines, policing and public health are often framed as questions about what citizens owe one another in return for protection. And arguments about whether a government has lost legitimacy, from protests to revolutions, usually rest on the claim that it has broken its side of the deal.

Where you land often depends on which version you find most convincing: Hobbes's stress on order, Locke's on rights and limited government, Rousseau's on popular sovereignty, Rawls's on fairness to the least advantaged, or Nozick's on individual rights against redistribution.

Find where you fit

If you think government exists mainly to keep order, you may lean toward Hobbes. If you think it exists to protect individual rights and should stay small, Locke and Nozick may suit you. If fairness to the worst off matters most, Rawls may be your starting point.

The Political Compass Test separates your economic views from your views on authority, and the 12 Axes Political Test matches you with 60 ideologies and over 100 historical figures. For a quick check, try the Which Philosopher Are You? quiz or the Libertarian Quiz, or browse the thinkers and philosophers behind these ideas. You can also compare classical liberalism vs liberalism or liberalism vs social liberalism.