SOCIAL CONTRACT – AN ANALYSIS

 SOCIAL CONTRACT – AN ANALYSIS

The social contract, according to political philosophy, is a real or hypothetical compact, or agreement, among the ruled or among the ruled and their rulers, describing the duties and rights of each. In prehistoric times, as per the theory, individuals were born into a lawless state of nature, which was happy or unhappy as per the specific version of the theory. They then, by performing natural reason, created a society and a government through a social contract. 

Although identical ideas can be traced to the Greek Sophists, social-contract theories had their exclusive currency in the 17th and 18th centuries and are related with the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. What differentiated these theories of political liability from other doctrines of the same period was their attempt to explain and demarcate political authority on the basis of rational consent and individual self-interest. By comparing the assets of organized government with the negatives of the state of nature, they highlighted why and under what situations government is effective and ought, therefore, to be approved by all logical people as a voluntary obligation. These results were then decreased to the form of a social contract, from which it was considered that all the prominent rights and duties of citizens could be decreased reasonably.

Theories of the social contract varied as per the objective: some were created to explain the power of the sovereign while others were designed to protect the individual from oppression by the powerful sovereign.

• The social contract in Hobbes

As per Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651), the state of nature was one in which there was no executable are of right or wrong. People took by themselves all that they could, and human life was "poor, solitary, brutish, nasty and short." The state of nature was hence a state of war, which could be concluded only if people agreed to hand over their liberty to a sovereign, for the sole reason that their lives were protected by sovereign power.

For Hobbes, the authority of the sovereign is ultimate, in a way where no authority is above the sovereign, whose will be law. That, however, does not mean that the power of the sovereign is all-enveloping: subjects are left free to act as they gratify in cases in which the sovereign is quiet. The social contract permits individuals to drop the state of nature and enter civil society, but the prior is still a threat and comes back as soon as the sovereign power collapses. Since the power of Leviathan is unchallenged, however, its downfall is very rare and can happen only when it is no longer able to safeguard its subjects.

• The social contract in Locke

Locke varied from Hobbes as he established that the state of nature is not a condition of complete license but as a state where humans are equal, free, and independent, and are liable under the law of nature to respect others' rights to liberty, life, and property. Individuals never agree to develop a commonwealth in order to establish a fair power capable of mediating disputes and compensating. Accordingly, Locke said that the liability to agree to the civil government under social contract was dependent upon the safeguarding of the natural rights of each individual, consisting of the right to private property. Sovereigns who infringed these conditions could be reasonably overthrown.

Locke thus held one of the fundamental principles of political liberalism: that there can be no oppression of power without consent-though once political society has been established, citizens are liable to agree with the decisions of a majority of their number. Such decisions are formed on behalf of the majority by the legislature, though the absolute power of selecting the legislature is held by the people; and even the powers of the legislature are not final, since the law of nature is still a permanent standard and as the principle of safeguarding from arbitrary authority.

• The social contract in Rousseau

Rousseau, in Discours sur l'origine de l'inegalite, said that in the state of nature humans were singular but also good, happy, and free. What Rousseau called "nascent societies" were created when humans started to live together as families and neighbours; that development, however, gave increase to destructive and negative passions such as pride and jealousy, which resulted in fostered social inequality. The entrance of private property made another step towards inequality since it made government and law necessary as means of safeguarding it. Rousseau deplored the "fatal" concept of property and the "horrors" that turned from departure from a situation in which the earth belonged to no one.

Civil society, as Rousseau determined it in the discourse, came into being to give 2 objectives: to give peace to everyone and to assure the right to property for anyone capable to have possessions. It was thus of some benefit to everyone, but mostly to the benefits o the rich, since it changed their de facto ownership into rightful ownership and kept the poor deprived. It was, indeed, a somewhat false social contract, since the poor got so little out of it as compared to the rich.

Rousseau's conception of citizenship was way more natural and much less conceited than Locke's. The giving up of independence, or natural obligation for political liberty means that all individual rights are lower than general will. For Rousseau's the state is a moral person whose life is the federation of its members, whose laws are the actions of the public will, whose end is the equality and liberty of its citizens. It pursues that when any sovereign usurps the power of the people, the social contract is damaged; and not only the people are forced to obey but also to have a liability to rebel.

• Conclusion 

The more incisive social-contract theorists, including Hobbes, perpetually knows that their ideas of the social contract and the state of nature were nonancient and that they could be explained only with hypotheses useful for understanding timeless political problems.

 

Written by Parul Sharma.