Social Contract Theory

Social Contract Theory, nearly as old as philosophy itself, is the
view that persons' moral and/or political obligations are dependent
upon a contract or agreement between them to form society. Socrates
uses something quite like a social contract argument to explain to
Crito why he must remain in prison and accept the death penalty.
However, Social Contract Theory is rightly associated with modern
moral and political theory and is given its first full exposition and
defense by Thomas Hobbes. After Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau are the best known proponents of this enormously influential
theory, which has been one of the most dominant theories within moral
and political theory throughout the history of the modern West. In the
twentieth century, moral and political theory regained philosophical
momentum as a result of John Rawls' Kantian version of social contract
theory, and was followed by other revisitings of the subject by David
Gauthier and others. More recently, philosophers from different
perspectives have criticized Social Contract Theory. In particular,
feminists and race-conscious philosophers have argued that social
contract theory is at least an incomplete picture of our moral and
political lives, and may in fact camouflage some of the ways in which
the contract is itself parasitical upon the subjugations of classes of
persons.

1. Socrates' Argument

In the early Platonic dialogue, Crito, Socrates makes a compelling
argument as to why he must stay in prison and accept the death
penalty, rather than escape and go into exile in another Greek city.
He personifies the Laws of Athens, and, speaking in their voice,
explains that he has acquired an overwhelming obligation to obey the
Laws because they have made his entire way of life, and even the fact
of his very existence, possible. They made it possible for his mother
and father to marry, and therefore to have legitimate children,
including himself. Having been born, the city of Athens, through its
laws, then required that his father care for and educate him.
Socrates' life and the way in which that life has flourished in Athens
are each dependent upon the Laws. Importantly, however, this
relationship between citizens and the Laws of the city are not
coerced. Citizens, once they have grown up, and have seen how the city
conducts itself, can choose whether to leave, taking their property
with them, or stay. Staying implies an agreement to abide by the Laws
and accept the punishments that they mete out. And, having made an
agreement that is itself just, Socrates asserts that he must keep to
this agreement that he has made and obey the Laws, in this case, by
staying and accepting the death penalty. Importantly, the contract
described by Socrates is an implicit one: it is implied by his choice
to stay in Athens, even though he is free to leave.

In Plato's most well-known dialogue, Republic, social contract theory
is represented again, although this time less favorably. In Book II,
Glaucon offers a candidate for an answer to the question "what is
justice?" by representing a social contract explanation for the nature
of justice. What men would most want is to be able to commit
injustices against others without the fear of reprisal, and what they
most want to avoid is being treated unjustly by others without being
able to do injustice in return. Justice then, he says, is the
conventional result of the laws and covenants that men make in order
to avoid these extremes. Being unable to commit injustice with
impunity (as those who wear the ring of Gyges would), and fearing
becoming victims themselves, men decide that it is in their interests
to submit themselves to the convention of justice. Socrates rejects
this view, and most of the rest of the dialogue centers on showing
that justice is worth having for its own sake, and that the just man
is the happy man. So, from Socrates' point of view, justice has a
value that greatly exceeds the prudential value that Glaucon assigns
to it.

These views, in the Crito and the Republic, might seem at first glance
inconsistent: in the former dialogue Socrates uses a social contract
type of argument to show why it is just for him to remain in prison,
whereas in the latter he rejects social contract as the source of
justice. These two views are, however, reconcilable. From Socrates'
point of view, a just man is one who will, among other things,
recognize his obligation to the state by obeying its laws. The state
is the morally and politically most fundamental entity, and as such
deserves our highest allegiance and deepest respect. Just men know
this and act accordingly. Justice, however, is more than simply
obeying laws in exchange for others obeying them as well. Justice is
the state of a well-regulated soul, and so the just man will also
necessarily be the happy man. So, justice is more than the simple
reciprocal obedience to law, as Glaucon suggests, but it does
nonetheless include obedience to the state and the laws that sustain
it. So in the end, although Plato is perhaps the first philosopher to
offer a representation of the argument at the heart of social contract
theory, Socrates ultimately rejects the idea that social contract is
the original source of justice.
2. Modern Social Contract Theory
a. Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679, lived during the most crucial period of
early modern England's history: the English Civil War, waged from
1642-1648. To describe this conflict in the most general of terms, it
was a clash between the King and his supporters, the Monarchists, who
preferred the traditional authority of a monarch, and the
Parliamentarians, most notably led by Oliver Cromwell, who demanded
more power for the quasi-democratic institution of Parliament. Hobbes
represents a compromise between these two factions. On the one hand he
rejects the theory of the Divine Right of Kings, which is most
eloquently expressed by Robert Filmer in his Patriarcha or the Natural
Power of Kings, (although it would be left to John Locke to refute
Filmer directly). Filmer's view held that a king's authority was
invested in him (or, presumably, her) by God, that such authority was
absolute, and therefore that the basis of political obligation lay in
our obligation to obey God absolutely. According to this view, then,
political obligation is subsumed under religious obligation. On the
other hand, Hobbes also rejects the early democratic view, taken up by
the Parliamentarians, that power ought to be shared between Parliament
and the King. In rejecting both these views, Hobbes occupies the
ground of one is who both radical and conservative. He argues,
radically for his times, that political authority and obligation are
based on the individual self-interests of members of society who are
understood to be equal to one another, with no single individual
invested with any essential authority to rule over the rest, while at
the same time maintaining the conservative position that the monarch,
which he called the Sovereign, must be ceded absolute authority if
society is to survive.

Hobbes' political theory is best understood if taken in two parts: his
theory of human motivation, Psychological Egoism, and his theory of
the social contract, founded on the hypothetical State of Nature.
Hobbes has, first and foremost, a particular theory of human nature,
which gives rise to a particular view of morality and politics, as
developed in his philosophical masterpiece, Leviathan, published in
1651. The Scientific Revolution, with its important new discoveries
that the universe could be both described and predicted in accordance
with universal laws of nature, greatly influenced Hobbes. He sought to
provide a theory of human nature that would parallel the discoveries
being made in the sciences of the inanimate universe. His
psychological theory is therefore informed by mechanism, the general
view that everything in the universe is produced by nothing other than
matter in motion. According to Hobbes, this extends to human behavior.
Human macro-behavior can be aptly described as the effect of certain
kinds of micro-behavior, even though some of this latter behavior is
invisible to us. So, such behaviors as walking, talking, and the like
are themselves produced by other actions inside of us. And these other
actions are themselves caused by the interaction of our bodies with
other bodies, human or otherwise, which create in us certain chains of
causes and effects, and which eventually give rise to the human
behavior that we can plainly observe. We, including all of our actions
and choices, are then, according to this view, as explainable in terms
of universal laws of nature as are the motions of heavenly bodies. The
gradual disintegration of memory, for example, can be explained by
inertia. As we are presented with ever more sensory information, the
residue of earlier impressions 'slows down' over time. From Hobbes'
point of view, we are essentially very complicated organic machines,
responding to the stimuli of the world mechanistically and in
accordance with universal laws of human nature.

In Hobbes' view, this mechanistic quality of human psychology implies
the subjective nature of normative claims. 'Love' and 'hate', for
instance, are just words we use to describe the things we are drawn to
and repelled by, respectively. So, too, the terms 'good' and 'bad'
have no meaning other than to describe our appetites and aversions.
Moral terms do not, therefore, describe some objective state of
affairs, but are rather reflections of individual tastes and
preferences.

In addition to Subjectivism, Hobbes also infers from his mechanistic
theory of human nature that humans are necessarily and exclusively
self-interested. All men pursue only what they perceive to be in their
own individually considered best interests – they respond
mechanistically by being drawn to that which they desire and repelled
by that to which they are averse. This is a universal claim: it is
meant to cover all human actions under all circumstances – in society
or out of it, with regard to strangers and friends alike, with regard
to small ends and the most generalized of human desires, such as the
desire for power and status. Everything we do is motivated solely by
the desire to better our own situations, and satisfy as many of our
own, individually considered desires as possible. We are infinitely
appetitive and only genuinely concerned with our own selves. According
to Hobbes, even the reason that adults care for small children can be
explicated in terms of the adults' own self-interest (he claims that
in saving an infant by caring for it, we become the recipient of a
strong sense of obligation in one who has been helped to survive
rather than allowed to die).

In addition to being exclusively self-interested, Hobbes also argues
that human beings are reasonable. They have in them the rational
capacity to pursue their desires as efficiently and maximally as
possible. Their reason does not, given the subjective nature of value,
evaluate their given ends, rather it merely acts as "Scouts, and
Spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things Desired" (139).
Rationality is purely instrumental. It can add and subtract, and
compare sums one to another, and thereby endows us with the capacity
to formulate the best means to whatever ends we might happen to have.

From these premises of human nature, Hobbes goes on to construct a
provocative and compelling argument for why we ought to be willing to
submit ourselves to political authority. He does this by imagining
persons in a situation prior to the establishment of society, the
State of Nature.

According to Hobbes, the justification for political obligation is
this: given that men are naturally self-interested, yet they are
rational, they will choose to submit to the authority of a Sovereign
in order to be able to live in a civil society, which is conducive to
their own interests. Hobbes argues for this by imagining men in their
natural state, or in other words, the State of Nature. In the State of
Nature, which is purely hypothetical according to Hobbes, men are
naturally and exclusively self-interested, they are more or less equal
to one another, (even the strongest man can be killed in his sleep),
there are limited resources, and yet there is no power able to force
men to cooperate. Given these conditions in the State of Nature,
Hobbes concludes that the State of Nature would be unbearably brutal.
In the State of Nature, every person is always in fear of losing his
life to another. They have no capacity to ensure the long-term
satisfaction of their needs or desires. No long-term or complex
cooperation is possible because the State of Nature can be aptly
described as a state of utter distrust. Given Hobbes' reasonable
assumption that most people want first and foremost to avoid their own
deaths, he concludes that the State of Nature is the worst possible
situation in which men can find themselves. It is the state of
perpetual and unavoidable war.

The situation is not, however, hopeless. Because men are reasonable,
they can see their way out of such a state by recognizing the laws of
nature, which show them the means by which to escape the State of
Nature and create a civil society. The first and most important law of
nature commands that each man be willing to pursue peace when others
are willing to do the same, all the while retaining the right to
continue to pursue war when others do not pursue peace. Being
reasonable, and recognizing the rationality of this basic precept of
reason, men can be expected to construct a Social Contract that will
afford them a life other than that available to them in the State of
Nature. This contract is constituted by two distinguishable contracts.
First, they must agree to establish society by collectively and
reciprocally renouncing the rights they had against one another in the
State of Nature. Second, they must imbue some one person or assembly
of persons with the authority and power to enforce the initial
contract. In other words, to ensure their escape from the State of
Nature, they must both agree to live together under common laws, and
create an enforcement mechanism for the social contract and the laws
that constitute it. Since the sovereign is invested with the authority
and power to mete out punishments for breaches of the contract which
are worse than not being able to act as one pleases, men have good,
albeit self-interested, reason to adjust themselves to the artifice of
morality in general, and justice in particular. Society becomes
possible because, whereas in the State of Nature there was no power
able to "overawe them all", now there is an artificially and
conventionally superior and more powerful person who can force men to
cooperate. While living under the authority of a Sovereign can be
harsh (Hobbes argues that because men's passions can be expected to
overwhelm their reason, the Sovereign must have absolute authority in
order for the contract to be successful) it is at least better than
living in the State of Nature. And, no matter how much we may object
to how poorly a Sovereign manages the affairs of the state and
regulates our own lives, we are never justified in resisting his power
because it is the only thing which stands between us and what we most
want to avoid, the State of Nature.

According to this argument, morality, politics, society, and
everything that comes along with it, all of which Hobbes calls
'commodious living' are purely conventional. Prior to the
establishment of the basic social contract, according to which men
agree to live together and the contract to embody a Sovereign with
absolute authority, nothing is immoral or unjust – anything goes.
After these contracts are established, however, then society becomes
possible, and people can be expected to keep their promises, cooperate
with one another, and so on. The Social Contract is the most
fundamental source of all that is good and that which we depend upon
to live well. Our choice is either to abide by the terms of the
contract, or return to the State of Nature, which Hobbes argues no
reasonable person could possibly prefer.

Given his rather severe view of human nature, Hobbes nonetheless
manages to create an argument that makes civil society, along with all
its advantages, possible. Within the context of the political events
of his England, he also managed to argue for a continuation of the
traditional form of authority that his society had long since enjoyed,
while nonetheless placing it on what he saw as a far more acceptable
foundation.
b. John Locke

For Hobbes, the necessity of an absolute authority, in the form of a
Sovereign, followed from the utter brutality of the State of Nature.
The State of Nature was completely intolerable, and so rational men
would be willing to submit themselves even to absolute authority in
order to escape it. For John Locke, 1632-1704, the State of Nature is
a very different type of place, and so his argument concerning the
social contract and the nature of men's relationship to authority are
consequently quite different. While Locke uses Hobbes' methodological
device of the State of Nature, as do virtually all social contract
theorists, he uses it to a quite different end. Locke's arguments for
the social contract, and for the right of citizens to revolt against
their king were enormously influential on the democratic revolutions
that followed, especially on Thomas Jefferson, and the founders of the
United States.

Locke's most important and influential political writings are
contained in his Two Treatises on Government. The first treatise is
concerned almost exclusively with refuting the argument of Robert
Filmer's Patriarcha, that political authority was derived from
religious authority, also known by the description of the Divine Right
of Kings, which was a very dominant theory in seventeenth-century
England. The second treatise contains Locke's own constructive view of
the aims and justification for civil government, and is titled "An
Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil
Government".

According to Locke, the State of Nature, the natural condition of
mankind, is a state of perfect and complete liberty to conduct one's
life as one best sees fit, free from the interference of others. This
does not mean, however, that it is a state of license: one is not free
to do anything at all one pleases, or even anything that one judges to
be in one's interest. The State of Nature, although a state wherein
there is no civil authority or government to punish people for
transgressions against laws, is not a state without morality. The
State of Nature is pre-political, but it is not pre-moral. Persons are
assumed to be equal to one another in such a state, and therefore
equally capable of discovering and being bound by the Law of Nature.
The Law of Nature, which is on Locke's view the basis of all morality,
and given to us by God, commands that we not harm others with regards
to their "life, health, liberty, or possessions" (par. 6). Because we
all belong equally to God, and because we cannot take away that which
is rightfully His, we are prohibited from harming one another. So, the
State of Nature is a state of liberty where persons are free to pursue
their own interests and plans, free from interference, and, because of
the Law of Nature and the restrictions that it imposes upon persons,
it is relatively peaceful.

The State of Nature therefore, is not the same as the state of war, as
it is according to Hobbes. It can, however devolve into a state of
war, in particular, a state of war over property disputes. Whereas the
State of Nature is the state of liberty where persons recognize the
Law of Nature and therefore do not harm one another, the state of war
begins between two or more men once one man declares war on another,
by stealing from him, or by trying to make him his slave. Since in the
State of Nature there is no civil power to whom men can appeal, and
since the Law of Nature allows them to defend their own lives, they
may then kill those who would bring force against them. Since the
State of Nature lacks civil authority, once war begins it is likely to
continue. And this is one of the strongest reasons that men have to
abandon the State of Nature by contracting together to form civil
government.

Property plays an essential role in Locke's argument for civil
government and the contract that establishes it. According to Locke,
private property is created when a person mixes his labor with the raw
materials of nature. So, for example, when one tills a piece of land
in nature, and makes it into a piece of farmland, which produces food,
then one has a claim to own that piece of land and the food produced
upon it. (This led Locke to conclude that America didn't really belong
to the natives who lived there, because they were, on his view,
failing to utilize the basic material of nature. In other words, they
didn't farm it, so they had no legitimate claim to it, and others
could therefore justifiably appropriate it.) Given the implications of
the Law of Nature, there are limits as to how much property one can
own: one is not allowed to take so more from nature than oneself can
use, thereby leaving others without enough for themselves. Because
nature is given to all of mankind by God for its common subsistence,
one cannot take more than his own fair share. Property is the linchpin
of Locke's argument for the social contract and civil government
because it is the protection of their property, including their
property in their own bodies, that men seek when they decide to
abandon the State of Nature.

According to Locke, the State of Nature is not a condition of
individuals, as it is for Hobbes. Rather, it is populated by mothers
and fathers with their children, or families – what he calls "conjugal
society" (par. 78). These societies are based on the voluntary
agreements to care for children together, and they are moral but not
political. Political society comes into being when individual men,
representing their families, come together in the State of Nature and
agree to each give up the executive power to punish those who
transgress the Law of Nature, and hand over that power to the public
power of a government. Having done this, they then become subject to
the will of the majority. In other words, by making a compact to leave
the State of Nature and form society, they make "one body politic
under one government" (par. 97) and submit themselves to the will of
that body. One joins such a body, either from its beginnings, or after
it has already been established by others, only by explicit consent.
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. Each man therefore gives over the
power to protect himself and punish transgressors of the Law of Nature
to the government that he has created through the compact.

Given that the end of "men's uniting into common-wealths"( par. 124)
is the preservation of their wealth, and preserving their lives,
liberty, and well-being in general, Locke can easily imagine the
conditions under which the compact with government is destroyed, and
men are justified in resisting the authority of a civil government,
such as a King. When the executive power of a government devolves into
tyranny, such as by dissolving the legislature and therefore denying
the people the ability to make laws for their own preservation, then
the resulting tyrant puts himself into a State of Nature, and
specifically into a state of war with the people, and they then have
the same right to self-defense as they had before making a compact to
establish society in the first place. In other words, the
justification of the authority of the executive component of
government is the protection of the people's property and well-being,
so when such protection is no longer present, or when the king becomes
a tyrant and acts against the interests of the people, they have a
right, if not an outright obligation, to resist his authority. The
social compact can be dissolved and the process to create political
society begun anew.

Because Locke did not envision the State of Nature as grimly as did
Hobbes, he can imagine conditions under which one would be better off
rejecting a particular civil government and returning to the State of
Nature, with the aim of constructing a better civil government in its
place. It is therefore both the view of human nature, and the nature
of morality itself, which account for the differences between Hobbes'
and Locke's views of the social contract.
c. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1778, lived and wrote during what was
arguably the headiest period in the intellectual history of modern
France–the Enlightenment. He was one of the bright lights of that
intellectual movement, contributing articles to the Encyclopdie of
Diderot, and participating in the salons in Paris, where the great
intellectual questions of his day were pursued.

Rousseau has two distinct social contract theories. The first is found
in his essay, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality
Among Men, commonly referred to as the Second Discourse, and is an
account of the moral and political evolution of human beings over
time, from a State of Nature to modern society. As such it contains
his naturalized account of the social contract, which he sees as very
problematic. The second is his normative, or idealized theory of the
social contract, and is meant to provide the means by which to
alleviate the problems that modern society has created for us, as laid
out in the Second Discourse.

Rousseau wrote his Second Discourse in response to an essay contest
sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. (Rousseau had previously won the
same essay contest with an earlier essay, commonly referred to as the
First Discourse.) In it he describes the historical process by which
man began in a State of Nature and over time 'progressed' into civil
society. According to Rousseau, the State of Nature was a peaceful and
quixotic time. People lived solitary, uncomplicated lives. Their few
needs were easily satisfied by nature. Because of the abundance of
nature and the small size of the population, competition was
non-existent, and persons rarely even saw one another, much less had
reason for conflict or fear. Moreover, these simple, morally pure
persons were naturally endowed with the capacity for pity, and
therefore were not inclined to bring harm to one another.

As time passed, however, humanity faced certain changes. As the
overall population increased, the means by which people could satisfy
their needs had to change. People slowly began to live together in
small families, and then in small communities. Divisions of labor were
introduced, both within and between families, and discoveries and
inventions made life easier, giving rise to leisure time. Such leisure
time inevitably led people to make comparisons between themselves and
others, resulting in public values, leading to shame and envy, pride
and contempt. Most importantly however, according to Rousseau, was the
invention of private property, which constituted the pivotal moment in
humanity's evolution out of a simple, pure state into one
characterized by greed, competition, vanity, inequality, and vice. For
Rousseau the invention of property constitutes humanity's 'fall from
grace' out of the State of Nature.

Having introduced private property, initial conditions of inequality
became more pronounced. Some have property and others are forced to
work for them, and the development of social classes begins.
Eventually, those who have property notice that it would be in their
interests to create a government that would protect private property
from those who do not have it but can see that they might be able to
acquire it by force. So, government gets established, through a
contract, which purports to guarantee equality and protection for all,
even though its true purpose is to fossilize the very inequalities
that private property has produced. In other words, the contract,
which claims to be in the interests of everyone equally, is really in
the interests of the few who have become stronger and richer as a
result of the developments of private property. This is the
naturalized social contract, which Rousseau views as responsible for
the conflict and competition from which modern society suffers.

The normative social contract, argued for by Rousseau in The Social
Contract (1762), is meant to respond to this sorry state of affairs
and to remedy the social and moral ills that have been produced by the
development of society. The distinction between history and
justification, between the factual situation of mankind and how it
ought to live together, is of the utmost importance to Rousseau. While
we ought not to ignore history, nor ignore the causes of the problems
we face, we must resolve those problems through our capacity to choose
how we ought to live. Might never makes right, despite how often it
pretends that it can.

The Social Contract begins with the most oft-quoted line from
Rousseau: "Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains" (49).
This claim is the conceptual bridge between the descriptive work of
the Second Discourse, and the prescriptive work that is to come.
Humans are essentially free, and were free in the State of Nature, but
the 'progress' of civilization has substituted subservience to others
for that freedom, through dependence, economic and social
inequalities, and the extent to which we judge ourselves through
comparisons with others. Since a return to the State of Nature is
neither feasible nor desirable, the purpose of politics is to restore
freedom to us, thereby reconciling who we truly and essentially are
with how we live together. So, this is the fundamental philosophical
problem that The Social Contract seeks to address: how can we be free
and live together? Or, put another way, how can we live together
without succumbing to the force and coercion of others? We can do so,
Rousseau maintains, by submitting our individual, particular wills to
the collective or general will, created through agreement with other
free and equal persons. Like Hobbes and Locke before him, and in
contrast to the ancient philosophers, all men are made by nature to be
equals, therefore no one has a natural right to govern others, and
therefore the only justified authority is the authority that is
generated out of agreements or covenants.

The most basic covenant, the social pact, is the agreement to come
together and form a people, a collectivity, which by definition is
more than and different from a mere aggregation of individual
interests and wills. This act, where individual persons become a
people is "the real foundation of society" (59). Through the
collective renunciation of the individual rights and freedom that one
has in the State of Nature, and the transfer of these rights to the
collective body, a new 'person', as it were, is formed. The sovereign
is thus formed when free and equal persons come together and agree to
create themselves anew as a single body, directed to the good of all
considered together. So, just as individual wills are directed towards
individual interests, the general will, once formed, is directed
towards the common good, understood and agreed to collectively.
Included in this version of the social contract is the idea of
reciprocated duties: the sovereign is committed to the good of the
individuals who constitute it, and each individual is likewise
committed to the good of the whole. Given this, individuals cannot be
given liberty to decide whether it is in their own interests to
fulfill their duties to the Sovereign, while at the same time being
allowed to reap the benefits of citizenship. They must be made to
conform themselves to the general will, they must be "forced to be
free" (64).

For Rousseau, this implies an extremely strong and direct form of
democracy. One cannot transfer one's will to another, to do with as he
or she sees fit, as one does in representative democracies. Rather,
the general will depends on the coming together periodically of the
entire democratic body, each and every citizen, to decide
collectively, and with at least near unanimity, how to live together,
i.e., what laws to enact. As it is constituted only by individual
wills, these private, individual wills must assemble themselves
regularly if the general will is to continue. One implication of this
is that the strong form of democracy which is consistent with the
general will is also only possible in relatively small states. The
people must be able to identify with one another, and at least know
who each other are. They cannot live in a large area, too spread out
to come together regularly, and they cannot live in such different
geographic circumstances as to be unable to be united under common
laws. (Could the present-day U.S. satisfy Rousseau's conception of
democracy? It could not. ) Although the conditions for true democracy
are stringent, they are also the only means by which we can, according
to Rousseau, save ourselves, and regain the freedom to which we are
naturally entitled.

Rousseau's social contract theories together form a single, consistent
view of our moral and political situation. We are endowed with freedom
and equality by nature, but our nature has been corrupted by our
contingent social history. We can overcome this corruption, however,
by invoking our free will to reconstitute ourselves politically, along
strongly democratic principles, which is good for us, both
individually and collectively.
3. More Recent Social Contract Theories
a. John Rawls' A Theory of Justice

In 1972, the publication of John Rawls' extremely influential A Theory
of Justice brought moral and political philosophy back from what had
been a long hiatus of philosophical consideration. Rawls' theory
relies on a Kantian understanding of persons and their capacities. For
Rawls, as for Kant, persons have the capacity to reason from a
universal point of view, which in turn means that they have the
particular moral capacity of judging principles from an impartial
standpoint. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls argues that the moral and
political point of view is discovered via impartiality. (It is
important to note that this view, delineated in A Theory of Justice,
has undergone substantial revisions by Rawls, and that he described
his later view as "political liberalism".) He invokes this point of
view (the general view that Thomas Nagel describes as "the view from
nowhere") by imagining persons in a hypothetical situation, the
Original Position, which is characterized by the epistemological
limitation of the Veil of Ignorance. Rawls' original position is his
highly abstracted version of the State of Nature. It is the position
from which we can discover the nature of justice and what it requires
of us as individual persons and of the social institutions through
which we will live together cooperatively. In the original position,
behind the veil of ignorance, one is denied any particular knowledge
of one's circumstances, such as one's gender, race, particular talents
or disabilities, one's age, social status, one's particular conception
of what makes for a good life, or the particular state of the society
in which one lives. Persons are also assumed to be rational and
disinterested in one another's well-being. These are the conditions
under which, Rawls argues, one can choose principles for a just
society which are themselves chosen from initial conditions that are
inherently fair. Because no one has any of the particular knowledge he
or she could use to develop principles that favor his or her own
particular circumstances, in other words the knowledge that makes for
and sustains prejudices, the principles chosen from such a perspective
are necessarily fair. For example, if one does not know whether one is
female or male in the society for which one must choose basic
principles of justice, it makes no sense, from the point of view of
self-interested rationality, to endorse a principle that favors one
sex at the expense of another, since, once the veil of ignorance is
lifted, one might find oneself on the losing end of such a principle.
Hence Rawls describes his theory as "justice as fairness." Because the
conditions under which the principles of justice are discovered are
basically fair, justice proceeds out of fairness.

In such a position, behind such a veil, everyone is in the same
situation, and everyone is presumed to be equally rational. Since
everyone adopts the same method for choosing the basic principles for
society, everyone will occupy the same standpoint: that of the
disembodied, rational, universal human. Therefore all who consider
justice from the point of view of the original position would agree
upon the same principles of justice generated out of such a thought
experiment. Any one person would reach the same conclusion as any
other person concerning the most basic principles that must regulate a
just society.

The principles that persons in the Original Position, behind the Veil
of Ignorance, would choose to regulate a society at the most basic
level (that is, prior even to a Constitution) are called by Rawls,
aptly enough, the Two Principles of Justice. These two principles
determine the distribution of both civil liberties and social and
economic goods. The first principle states that each person in a
society is to have as much basic liberty as possible, as long as
everyone is granted the same liberties. That is, there is to be as
much civil liberty as possible as long as these goods are distributed
equally. (This would, for example, preclude a scenario under which
there was a greater aggregate of civil liberties than under an
alternative scenario, but under which such liberties were not
distributed equally amongst citizens.) The second principle states
that while social and economic inequalities can be just, they must be
available to everyone equally (that is, no one is to be on principle
denied access to greater economic advantage) and such inequalities
must be to the advantage of everyone. This means that economic
inequalities are only justified when the least advantaged member of
society is nonetheless better off than she would be under alternative
arrangements. So, only if a rising tide truly does carry all boats
upward, can economic inequalities be allowed for in a just society.
The method of the original position supports this second principle,
referred to as the Difference Principle, because when we are behind
the veil of ignorance, and therefore do not know what our situation in
society will be once the veil of ignorance is lifted, we will only
accept principles that will be to our advantage even if we end up in
the least advantaged position in society.

These two principles are related to each other by a specific order.
The first principle, distributing civil liberties as widely as
possible consistent with equality, is prior to the second principle,
which distributes social and economic goods. In other words, we cannot
decide to forgo some of our civil liberties in favor of greater
economic advantage. Rather, we must satisfy the demands of the first
principle, before we move on to the second. From Rawls' point of view,
this serial ordering of the principles expresses a basic rational
preference for certain kinds of goods, i.e., those embodied in civil
liberties, over other kinds of goods, i.e., economic advantage.

Having argued that any rational person inhabiting the original
position and placing him or herself behind the veil of ignorance can
discover the two principles of justice, Rawls has constructed what is
perhaps the most abstract version of a social contract theory. It is
highly abstract because rather than demonstrating that we would or
even have signed to a contract to establish society, it instead shows
us what we must be willing to accept as rational persons in order to
be constrained by justice and therefore capable of living in a well
ordered society. The principles of justice are more fundamental than
the social contract as it has traditionally been conceived. Rather,
the principles of justice constrain that contract, and set out the
limits of how we can construct society in the first place. If we
consider, for example, a constitution as the concrete expression of
the social contract, Rawls' two principles of justice delineate what
such a constitution can and cannot require of us. Rawls' theory of
justice constitutes, then, the Kantian limits upon the forms of
political and social organization that are permissible within a just
society.
b. David Gauthier

In his 1986 book, Morals by Agreement, David Gauthier set out to renew
Hobbesian moral and political philosophy. In that book, he makes a
strong argument that Hobbes was right: we can understand both politics
and morality as founded upon an agreement between exclusively
self-interested yet rational persons. He improves upon Hobbes'
argument, however, by showing that we can establish morality without
the external enforcement mechanism of the Sovereign. Hobbes argued
that men's passions were so strong as to make cooperation between them
always in danger of breaking down, and thus that a Sovereign was
necessary to force compliance. Gauthier, however, believes that
rationality alone convinces persons not only to agree to cooperate,
but to stick to their agreements as well.

We should understand ourselves as individual Robinson Crusoes, each
living on our own island, lucky or unlucky in terms of our talents and
the natural provisions of our islands, but able to enter into
negotiations and deals with one another to trade goods and services
with one another. Entering into such agreements is to our own
advantage, and so rationality convinces us to both make such
agreements and stick to them as well.

Gauthier has an advantage over Hobbes when it comes to developing the
argument that cooperation between purely self-interested agents is
possible. He has access to rational choice theory and its
sophisticated methodology for showing how such cooperation can arise.
In particular, he appeals to the model of the Prisoner's Dilemma to
show that self-interest can be consistent with acting cooperatively.
(There is a reasonable argument to be made that we can find in Hobbes
a primitive version of the problem of the Prisoner's Dilemma.)

According to the story of the Prisoner's Dilemma, two people have been
brought in for questioning, conducted separately, about a crime they
are suspected to have committed. The police have solid evidence of a
lesser crime that they committed, but need confessions in order to
convict them on more serious charges. Each prisoner is told that if
she cooperates with the police by informing on the other prisoner,
then she will be rewarded by receiving a relatively light sentence of
one year in prison, whereas her cohort will go to prison for ten
years. If they both remain silent, then there will be no such rewards,
and they can each expect to receive moderate sentences of two years.
And if they both cooperate with police by informing on each other,
then the police will have enough to send each to prison for five
years. The dilemma then is this: in order to serve her own interests
as well as possible, each prisoner reasons that no matter what the
other does she is better off cooperating with the police by
confessing. Each reasons: "If she confesses, then I should confess,
thereby being sentenced to five years instead of ten. And if she does
not confess, then I should confess, thereby being sentenced to one
year instead of two. So, no matter what she does, I should confess."
The problem is that when each reason this way, they each confess, and
each goes to prison for five years. However, had they each remained
silent, thereby cooperating with each other rather than with the
police, they would have spent only two years in prison.

According to Gauthier, the important lesson of the Prisoner's Dilemma
is that when one is engaged in interaction such that others' actions
can affect one's own interests, and vice versa, one does better if one
acts cooperatively. By acting to further the interests of the other,
one serves one's own interests as well. We should, therefore, insofar
as we are rational, develop within ourselves the dispositions to
constrain ourselves when interacting with others. We should become
"constrained maximizers" (CMs) rather remain the "straightforward
maximizers" (SMs) that we would be in a State of Nature (167).

Both SMs and CMs are exclusively self-interested and rational, but
they differ with regard to whether they take into account only
strategies, or both the strategies and utilities, of whose with whom
they interact. To take into account the others' strategies is to act
in accordance with how you expect the others will act. To take into
account their utilities is to consider how they will fare as a result
of your action and to allow that to affect your own actions. Both SMs
and CMs take into account the strategies of the other with whom they
interact. But whereas SMs do not take into account the utilities of
those with whom they interact, CMs do. And, whereas CMs are afforded
the benefits of cooperation with others, SMs are denied such
advantage. According to Gauthier, when interacting in Prisoner's
Dilemma-like situations, where the actions of others can affect one's
own outcome, and vice versa, rationality shows that one's own interest
is best pursued by being cooperative, and therefore agents rationally
dispose themselves to the constrain the maximization of their own
utility by adopting principles of morality. According to Gauthier,
rationality is a force strong enough to give persons internal reasons
to cooperate. They do not, therefore, need Hobbes' Sovereign with
absolute authority to sustain their cooperation. The enforcement
mechanism has been internalized. "Morals by agreement" are therefore
created out of the rationality of exclusively self-interested agents.
4. Contemporary Critiques of Social Contract Theory

Given the longstanding and widespread influence that social contract
theory has had, it comes as no surprise that it is also the objects of
many critiques from a variety of philosophical perspectives. Feminists
and race-conscious philosophers, in particular, have made important
arguments concerning the substance and viability of social contract
theory.
a. Feminist Arguments

For the most part, feminism resists any simple or universal
definition. In general though, feminists take women's experiences
seriously, as well as the impact that theories and practices have for
women's lives. Given the pervasive influence of contract theory on
social, political, and moral philosophy, then, it is not surprising
that feminists should have a great deal to say about whether contract
theory is adequate or appropriate from the point of view of taking
women seriously. To survey all of the feminist responses to social
contract theory would carry us well beyond the boundaries of the
present article. I will concentrate therefore on just three of those
arguments: Carole Pateman's argument about the relation between the
contract and women's subordination to men, feminist arguments
concerning the nature of the liberal individual, and the care
argument.
i. The Sexual Contract

Carole Pateman's 1988 book, The Sexual Contract, argues that lying
beneath the myth of the idealized contract, as described by Hobbes,
Locke, and Rousseau, is a more fundamental contract concerning men's
relationship to women. Contract theory represents itself as being
opposed to patriarchy and patriarchal right. (Locke's social contract,
for example, is set by him in stark contrast to the work of Robert
Filmer who argued in favor of patriarchal power.) Yet the "original
pact" (2) that precedes the social contract entered into by equals is
the agreement by men to dominate and control women. This 'original
pact' is made by brothers, literally or metaphorically, who, after
overthrowing the rule of the father, then agree to share their
domination of the women who were previously under the exclusive
control of one man, the father. The change from "classical
patriarchalism" (24) to modern patriarchy is a shift, then, in who has
power over women. It is not, however, a fundamental change in whether
women are dominated by men. Men's relationships of power to one
another change, but women's relationship to men's power does not.
Modern patriarchy is characterized by a contractual relationship
between men, and part of that contract involves power over women. This
fact, that one form of patriarchy was not overthrown completely, but
rather was replaced with a different form, in which male power was
distributed amongst more men, rather than held by one man, is
illustrated by Freud's story of the genesis of civilization. According
to that story, a band of brothers, lorded over by a father who
maintained exclusive sexual access to the women of the tribe, kill the
father, and then establish a contract among themselves to be equal and
to share the women. This is the story, whether we understand Freud's
tale to be historically accurate or not, of modern patriarchy and its
deep dependence on contract as the means by which men control and
dominate women.

Patriarchal control of women is found in at least three paradigmatic
contemporary contracts: the marriage contract, the prostitution
contract, and the contract for surrogate motherhood. Each of these
contracts is concerned with men's control of women, or a particular
man's control of a particular woman generalized. According to the
terms of the marriage contract, in most states in the U.S., a husband
is accorded the right to sexual access, prohibiting the legal category
of marital rape. Prostitution is a case in point of Pateman's claim
that modern patriarchy requires equal access by men to women, in
particular sexual access, access to their bodies. And surrogate
motherhood can be understood as more of the same, although in terms of
access to women's reproductive capacities. All these examples
demonstrate that contract is the means by which women are dominated
and controlled. Contract is not the path to freedom and equality.
Rather, it is one means, perhaps the most fundamental means, by which
patriarchy is upheld.
ii. The Nature of the Liberal Individual

Following Pateman's argument, a number of feminists have also called
into question the very nature of the person at the heart of contract
theory. The Liberal Individual, the contractor, is represented by the
Hobbesian man, Locke's proprietor, Rousseau's "Noble Savage", Rawls's
person in the original position, and Gauthier's Robinson Crusoe. The
liberal individual is purported to be universal: raceless, sexless,
classless, disembodied, and is taken to represent an abstract,
generalized model of humanity writ large. Many philosophers have
argued, however, that when we look more closely at the characteristics
of the liberal individual, what we find is not a representation of
universal humanity, but a historically located, specific type of
person. C.B. Macpherson, for example, has argued that Hobbesian man
is, in particular, a bourgeois man, with the characteristics we would
expect of a person during the nascent capitalism that characterized
early modern Europe. Feminists have also argued that the liberal
individual is a particular, historical, and embodied person. (As have
race-conscious philosophers, such as Charles Mills, to be discussed
below.) More specifically, they have argued that the person at the
heart of liberal theory, and the social contract, is gendered.
Christine Di Stefano, in her 1991 book Configurations of Masculinity,
shows that a number of historically important modern philosophers can
be understood to develop their theories from within the perspective of
masculinity, as conceived of in the modern period. She argues that
Hobbes's conception of the liberal individual, which laid the
groundwork for the dominant modern conception of the person, is
particularly masculine in that it is conceived as atomistic and
solitary and as not owing any of its qualities, or even its very
existence, to any other person, in particular its mother. Hobbes's
human, is therefore, radically individual, in a way that is
specifically owing to the character of modern masculinity. Virginia
Held, in her 1993 book, Feminist Morality, argues that social contract
theory implicitly relies on a conception of the person that can be
best described as "economic man." "Economic man" is concerned first
and foremost to maximize his own, individually considered interests,
and he enters into contracts as a means by which to achieve this end.
"Economic man", however, fails to represent all persons in all times
and places. In particular, it fails to adequately represent children
and those who provide them with the care they require, who have
historically been women. The model of "economic man" cannot,
therefore, fairly claim to be a general representation of all persons.
Similarly, Annette Baier argues that Gauthier's conception of the
liberal individual who enters into the social contract as a means by
which to maximize his own individually considered interests is
gendered in that it does not take seriously the position of either
children or the women who most usually are responsible for caring for
those children.
iii. Arguing from Care

Theorizing from within the emerging tradition of care ethics, feminist
philosophers such as Baier and Held argue that social contract theory
fails as an adequate account of our moral or political obligations.
Social contract theory, in general, only goes so far as to delineate
our rights and obligations. But this may not be enough to adequately
reveal the full extent of what it means to be a moral person, and how
fully to respond to others with whom one interacts through relations
of dependence. Baier argues that Gauthier, who conceives of affective
bonds between persons as non-essential and voluntary, therefore fails
to represent the fullness of human psychology and motivations. She
argues that this therefore leads to a crucial flaw in social contract
theory. Liberal moral theory is in fact parasitic upon the very
relations between persons from which it seeks to liberate us. While
Gauthier argues that we are freer the more that we can see affective
relations as voluntary, we must nonetheless, in the first place, be in
such relationships (e.g., the mother-child relationship) in order to
develop the very capacities and qualities lauded by liberal theory.
Certain kinds of relationships of dependence, in other words, are
necessary in the first place if we are to become the very kinds of
persons who are capable of entering into contracts and agreements. In
a similar vein, Held has argued that the model of "economic man" fails
to capture much of what constitutes meaningful moral relations between
people. Understanding human relations in purely contractual terms
constitutes, according to her argument "an impoverished view of human
aspiration" (194). She therefore suggests that we consider other
models of human relationships when looking for insight into morality.
In particular, she offers up the paradigm of the mother-child
relationship to at least supplement the model of individual
self-interested agents negotiating with one another through contracts.
Such a model is more likely to match up with many of the moral
experiences of most people, especially women.

Feminist critiques of the contractarian approaches to our collective
moral and political lives continue to reverberate through social and
political philosophy. One such critique, that of Carole Pateman, has
influenced philosophers writing outside of feminist traditions.
b. Race-Conscious Argument

Charles Mills' 1997 book, The Racial Contract, is a critique not only
of the history of western political thought, institutions, and
practices, but, more specifically, of the history of social contract
theory. It is inspired by Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract, and
seeks to show that non-whites have a similar relationship to the
social contract as do women. As such, it also calls into question the
supposed universality of the liberal individual who is the agent of
contract theory.

Mills' central argument is that there exists a 'racial contract' that
is even more fundamental to western society than the social contract.
This racial contract determines in the first place who counts as full
moral and political persons, and therefore sets the parameters of who
can 'contract in' to the freedom and equality that the social contract
promises. Some persons, in particular white men, are full persons
according to the racial contract. As such they are accorded the right
to enter into the social contract, and into particular legal
contracts. They are seen as fully human and therefore as deserving of
equality and freedom. Their status as full persons accords them
greater social power. In particular, it accords them the power to make
contracts, to be the subjects of the contract, whereas other persons
are denied such privilege and are relegated to the status of objects
of contracts.

This racial contract is to some extent a meta-contract, which
determines the bounds of personhood and parameters of inclusion and
exclusion in all the other contracts that come after it. It manifests
itself both formally and informally. It is an agreement, originally
among European men in the beginning of the modern period, to identify
themselves as 'white' and therefore as fully human, and to identify
all others, in particular the natives with whom they were beginning to
come into contact, as 'other': non-white and therefore not fully
human. So, race is not just a social construct, as others have argued,
it is more especially a political construct, created to serve a
particular political end, and the political purposes of a specific
group. The contract allows some persons to treat other persons, as
well as the lands they inhabit, as resources to be exploited. The
enslavement of millions of Africans and the appropriation of the
Americas from those who inhabited them, are examples of this racial
contract at work in history (such as Locke's claim that Native
Americans did not own the land they lived on because they did not farm
it and therefore did not own it). This contract is not hypothetical,
as Hobbes describes the one argued for in his Leviathan. This is an
actual contract, or series of contracts, made by real men of history.
It is found in such documents as Papal Bulls and Locke's writings on
Native Americans, and acted upon in such historical events as the
voyages of discovery made by Europeans and the colonization of Africa,
Asia, and the Americas. The racial contract makes possible and
justifies some people, in virtue of their alleged superiority,
exploiting the peoples, lands, and resources of other races.

From Mills' perspective then, racism is not just an unhappy accident
of Western democratic and political ideals. It is not the case that we
have a political system that was perfectly conceived and unfortunately
imperfectly applied. One of the reasons that we continue to think that
the problem of race in the West is relatively superficial, that it
does not go all the way down, is the hold that the idealized social
contract has on our imagination. We continue to believe, according to
Mills, in the myths that social contract theory tells us – that
everyone is equal, that all will be treated the same before the law,
that the Founding Fathers were committed to equality and freedom for
all persons, etc. One of the very purposes of social contract theory,
then, is to keep hidden from view the true political reality – some
persons will be accorded the rights and freedoms of full persons, and
the rest will be treated as sub-persons. The racial contract informs
the very structure of our political systems, and lays the basis for
the continuing racial oppression of non-whites. We cannot respond to
it, therefore, by simply adding more non-whites into the mix of our
political institutions, representation, and so on. Rather, we must
reexamine our politics in general, from the point of view of the
racial contract, and start from where we are, with full knowledge of
how our society has been informed by the systematic exclusion of some
persons from the realm of politics and contract. This "naturalized"
feature of the racial contract, meaning that it tells a story about
who we actually are and what is included in our history, is better,
according to Mills, because it holds the promise of making it possible
for us to someday actually live up to the norms and values that are at
the heart of the Western political traditions.
5. Conclusion

Virginia Held has argued that "Contemporary Western society is in the
grip of contractual thinking" (193). Contractual models have come to
inform a vast variety of relations and interaction between persons,
from students and their teachers, to authors and their readers. Given
this, it would be difficult to overestimate the effect that social
contract theory has had, both within philosophy, and on the wider
culture. Social contract theory is undoubtedly with us for the
foreseeable future. But so too are the critiques of such theory, which
will continue to compel us to think and rethink the nature of both
ourselves and our relations with one another.
6. References and Further Reading

* Baier, Annette. 1988. "Pilgrim's Progress: Review of David
Gauthier, Morals by Agreement." Canadian Journal of Philosophy Vol.
18, No. 2. (June 1988): 315-330.
* Baier, Annette. 1994. Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
* Braybrooke, David. 1976. "The Insoluble Problem of the Social
Contract." Dialogue Vol. XV, No. 1: 3-37.
* DiStefano, Christine. 1991. Configurations of Masculinity: A
Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
* Filmer, Robert. 'Patriarcha' and Other Writings. Cambridge
University Press (1991).
* Gauthier, David. 1986. Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
* Gauthier, David. 1988. "Hobbes's Social Contract." Noûs 22: 71-82.
* Gauthier, David. 1990. Moral Dealing: Contract, Ethics, and
Reason. Cornell: Cornell University Press.
* Gauthier, David. 1991. "Why Contractarianism?" in Vallentyne 1991: 13-30.
* Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological
Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
* Hampton, Jean. 1986. Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Hampton, Jean. 1993. "Feminist Contractarianism." In Antony,
Louise M. and Witt, Charlotte (Editors). 1993. A Mind of One's Own:
Essays on Reason and Objectivity. Boulder CO: Westview Press, Inc.:
1993: 227-255.
* Held, Virginia. 1977. "Rationality and Reasonable Cooperation."
Social Research (Winter 1977): 708-744.
* Held, Virginia. 1993. Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture,
Society, and Politics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
* Hobbes, Thomas. 1651a. Leviathan. C.B Macpherson (Editor).
London: Penguin Books (1985)
* Kavka, Gregory S. 1986. Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
* Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning
Toleration. Yale University Press (2003).
* Macpherson, C.B. 1973. Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
* Mills, Charles. 1997. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press.
* Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.
* Okin, Susan Moller. 1989. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New
York: Basic Books.
* Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
* Plato. Five Dialogues. (Trans. G.M.A. Grube) Hackett Publishing
Company (1981).
* Plato. Republic. (Trans. G.M.A. Grube, Revised by C.D.C. Reeve)
Hackett Publishing Company (1992)
* Poundstone, William. 1992. Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann,
Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb. New York: Doubleday.
* Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press.
* Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press.
* Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Basic Political Writings. (Trans.
Donald A. Cress) Hackett Publishing Company (1987).
* Sandel, Michael. 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Vallentyne, Peter. (Editor). 1991. Contractarianism and Rational
Choice: Essays on David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement. New York:
Cambridge University Press.