Having created a political society and government through their consent, men then gain three things which they lacked in the State of Nature:
laws, judges to adjudicate laws, and the executive power necessary to enforce these laws
.
Social contract theory says that people live together in society in accordance with an agreement that
establishes moral and political rules of behavior
. … Social contracts can be explicit, such as laws, or implicit, such as raising one’s hand in class to speak.
The State of Nature, Equality, and Liberty
.
Thus, three stages described by Rousseau, are investigated: (a) the state of nature, where man is free and independent, (b) society, in which man is oppressed and dependent on others, and
(c) the state under the Social Contract, in which, ironically, man becomes free through obligation; he is only independent through
…
The parties are described as (1) motivated by self-interest, in as much as they will only agree to the contract if they perceive that they will benefit from social interaction; (2) concerned for the welfare of others, if only because they recognize that the advantages they expect to derive from the social contract will …
In simple terms, Locke’s social contract theory says:
government was created through the consent of the people to be ruled by the majority
, “(unless they explicitly agree on some number greater than the majority),” and that every man once they are of age has the right to either continue under the government they were …
Rousseau’s central argument in The Social Contract is
that government attains its right to exist and to govern by “the consent of the governed
.” Today this may not seem too extreme an idea, but it was a radical position when The Social Contract was published.
A social contract
establishes civil society
. With a social contract the people trade personal freedom for social and political order. The people do surrender some freedoms to authority, but they do so voluntarily in exchange for protection of their remaining freedoms as well as the promise of services from government.
To explicate the idea of the social contract we analyze contractual approaches into five elements:
(1) the role of the social contract (2) the parties (3) agreement (4) the object of agreement (5) what the agreement is supposed to show.
The stated aim of The Social Contract is
to determine whether there can be a legitimate political authority since people’s interactions he
saw at his time seemed to put them in a state far worse than the good one they were at in the state of nature, even though living in isolation.
The average reader will spend
3 hours and 38 minutes
reading this book at 250 WPM (words per minute). These are the famous opening words of a treatise that has not ceased to stir vigorous debate since its first publication in 1762.
The social contract is
unwritten
, and is inherited at birth. It dictates that we will not break laws or certain moral codes and, in exchange, we reap the benefits of our society, namely security, survival, education and other necessities needed to live.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, born in Geneva in 1712, was one of the 18th century’s most important political thinkers. His work focussed on the relationship between human society and the individual, and contributed to the ideas that would lead eventually to the French Revolution.
The theory of
social contract has played – and still plays
– an important role in the central stage of political philosophy. The social contract answers the question of the origin of the society. The history of the theory originates in the ancient Greece political philosophy and extends to the recent years.
or social compact
the voluntary agreement among individuals by
which, according to any of various theories, as of Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau, organized society is brought into being and invested with the right to secure mutual protection and welfare or to regulate the relations among its members.
Specifically for law enforcement, social contract theory is
important to justify the power that law enforcement can exert over the population as a whole
(Evans and MacMillan, 2014). The power imbalance, held by law enforcement, is part of the contract that society has agreed upon in exchange for security.
