Social Contract Theory by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau

Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588 and died in 1679. Hobbes wrote at the time of the English Civil War which lasted from 1642 to 1651. He wrote Leviathan to support the monarchy. Thomas Hobbes based his analysis of the state of nature on human psychology, which works on the principle of pleasure and pain. For Hobbes, in the state of nature, there is a war of everyone against ever other. There is no peace there. The life of man was poor, nasty, brutish, and short. There was no distinction between right and wrong in the state of nature.

John Locke did not paint a dismal picture of the state of nature as did Hobbes. Rather, Locke argued that the state of nature is a state of peace, goodwill, mutual assistance, and of preservation. In the state of nature, man is not selfish or aggressive as described by Thomas Hobbes, rather man is social and sympathetic towards other human beings. His attitude toward fellow men is ruled by reason and justice. According to Locke, the state of nature is governed by the law of nature. And that the law of nature is of justice and reason. Besides this, man also possessed natural rights in the state of nature.

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was born in Switzerland. He spent most of his life in France. He was among the social contract theorists. Rousseau’s description of the state of nature is different from that of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Rousseau says that the state of nature was an ideal condition for humans to live. Man lived a free, happy, and peaceful life there. But two things ended this condition of ideal life. One was the growth of population and the other was the origin of private property. It was the origin of private property which, according to Hobbes, contributed to the pollution of human beings. He wrote this in his well-known work “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality of Men”. He wrote his social contract theory in another famous work “The Social Contract”.

Rousseau argues that man is born free and yet everywhere he is in chains. He attributes these chains to the laws and regulations of the civilized society. For Rousseau, there was a need for another contract in which people would enjoy the same conditions of ideal life in civil society as they enjoyed it in the state of nature. For this, he proposed that individuals will do a contract in which they will surrender all their rights to one assembly of men represented by all of them. This will become a sovereign body. Rousseau named it as General Will. The general will is sovereign because it is created by the free act of those who have created it. And it is the custodian of the interests of all. The individuals have surrendered all their rights not to one man but to the whole community.

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