The Social Contract: Rousseau, Hobbes, and the Foundation of Modern Society

Why should you obey the government? This is not a question most people ask — but it is the foundational question of political philosophy. Every modern state rests on some claim to legitimate authority: the right to make laws that bind its citizens, to extract taxes, to conscript soldiers, to imprison those who break its rules. What justifies this authority? Why do rational individuals submit to it? The social contract tradition — developed most powerfully by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and later John Rawls — offers the most influential answer political philosophy has produced: government is legitimate because rational individuals would agree to it. This is part of our Philosophy & Society series.

Hobbes: The Case for the Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes, writing in the aftermath of the English Civil War (Leviathan, 1651), starts from the most pessimistic premise in the tradition. Without political authority, he argues, human beings exist in a “state of nature” — a condition of perpetual conflict. Every person is roughly equal in their capacity to harm others. Every person has reason to fear being killed. Therefore every person has reason to pre-emptively attack. The result is the “war of all against all,” in which life is famously “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Rational individuals, recognising this predicament, agree to surrender their natural freedom to a sovereign — a single authority whose power is absolute and indivisible — in exchange for security. The contract is: I give up my right to do whatever I need to survive; you give everyone else up too; and we all submit to the sovereign who will enforce these agreements and prevent the war of all against all from resuming.

Locke: Rights, Revolution, and Limited Government

John Locke’s social contract (Two Treatises of Government, 1689) begins from a very different premise. In Locke’s state of nature, human beings are essentially rational and sociable — not locked in perpetual war. They already have natural rights: life, liberty, and property. These rights pre-exist political authority. Government is not created to prevent chaos but to better secure rights that already exist but are imperfectly protected without an impartial authority.

This produces a radically different theory of legitimate government. For Locke, government is legitimate only as long as it actually protects these rights. A government that systematically violates the natural rights of its citizens — through arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation of property, or tyranny — loses its claim to legitimacy. Citizens retain the right, and in extreme cases the duty, to revolt and replace it. This argument directly inspired the American Declaration of Independence and the revolutionary tradition of liberal politics.

Rousseau: The General Will and Its Discontents

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract (Du Contrat Social, 1762) is the most radical and the most contested version. Rousseau begins with his famous observation that “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” — existing society has corrupted natural human goodness through inequality, private property, and the domination of the many by the few. His project is to find a form of political association that is genuinely legitimate: one in which obedience to the law is compatible with freedom, because citizens are in effect obeying themselves.

His solution is the concept of the general will (volonté générale): the will that citizens would have if they were deliberating about the common good rather than their private interests. A law that expresses the general will is one that free and equal citizens would rationally endorse as good for all. Rousseau is admirably clear about the concept’s limitations — the general will is always right, but citizens may be mistaken about what it actually is. This opens the door to a troubling possibility: a leader who claims to know the general will better than the people themselves, and forces them to be free. Rousseau’s critics argue this logic led directly to the Terror of the French Revolution.

Rawls: Justice Behind the Veil of Ignorance

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) revived the social contract tradition in 20th-century political philosophy. His innovation was the thought experiment of the “veil of ignorance”: imagine designing the basic institutions of society without knowing your position within it — your class, race, gender, talents, or even your conception of the good. What principles would rational individuals choose under these conditions?

Rawls argues they would choose two principles: equal basic liberties for all, and social and economic inequalities arranged to benefit the least advantaged members of society (the “difference principle”). This is because, not knowing where you will end up, you would rationally insure against the worst outcomes. Rawls’s framework provides the philosophical foundation for the modern welfare state and remains the most influential theory of justice in contemporary academic political philosophy — and the most controversial, as libertarians, communitarians, and others have mounted sustained challenges to every element of it.

Social Contract Theory in 2026

The tensions in social contract theory are the tensions of contemporary politics. Hobbes’s question — what security can government provide? — is answered differently by those who fear state violence and those who fear its absence. Locke’s question — which rights are inalienable? — is contested in every debate about free speech, property rights, and the limits of state authority. Rousseau’s question — what does genuine democratic self-government require? — is at the heart of debates about populism, technocracy, and the crisis of democratic legitimacy. Rawls’s question — what would fair terms of cooperation look like? — underlies every argument about inequality, taxation, and the distribution of AI’s economic gains — themes we examine in our analysis of AI and inequality.