The notion of Social Contract, although particularly
influential in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
has a history which reaches back to the time of the
ancient Greeks. The term refers to the act by which
men are assumed to establish a communally agreed
form of social organization. This act has been given
varying characteristics by the numerous theorists who
have described it. They may refer to the establishment
of society as prior to the inauguration of government,
or alternatively to the state and society having arisen
concurrently. In the first case the Social Contract is
often thought of as a pact that all men make with each
other as equals, whilst in the latter case it may be a
less egalitarian agreement by which the rulers and the
ruled are differentiated, and their various rights and
obligations made explicit.
In order to express certain variations in the assumed
agreement, some writers chose to use the closely re-
lated notions of “compact” or “covenant,” rather than
that of “contract.” A further difference is that the
contract is sometimes regarded as an act that has been
made and ought to be adhered to, and at other times
as one that ought to be made. Amongst all these varia-
tions, however, some points of agreement do emerge.
First, there is the view that human society and govern-
ment are the work of man, constructed according to
human will, even if sometimes operating under divine
guidance. Such a notion implies a conception of man
as a free agent, rather than a being totally determined
by external forces. Second, the emphasis on contract
implies that the nature both of society and of govern-
ment ought to be based on mutual agreement rather
than on force. We shall later see how these beliefs
played an important role in justifying the acceptance
of liberal democratic views.
The belief that men once came together to form a
contract implies the prior existence of a pre-
governmental condition. It is this which is usually
referred to as the State of Nature. This image, by
portraying what man was like without government,
serves to demonstrate exactly what it is man owes to
government. The idea of a State of Nature became
acceptable in that it had formed part of popular myth-
ology from the times of antiquity, being portrayed
as a former Golden Age of complete equality in both
Greek and Latin literature. This assumption, found in
the
Metamorphoses of Ovid and in the writings of the
Stoics, gained further expression amongst the Scholas-
tics of the later Middle Ages, and much later still was
more than echoed in Rousseau's
Discours sur l'inégalité
(1754). Most later Social Contract theorists, from the
time of Hobbes onwards, have taken this accepted
notion of a pre-political condition, but by altering its
character have inverted its function. The State of Na-
ture, rather than being an ideal, is now provided with
deficiencies. It is in order to remedy these deficiencies
that the contract has to be made. The method, then,
has many uses. Sometimes the State of Nature has been
portrayed as a Golden Age of peace and equality,
obviously superior to anything that has replaced it.
Alternatively, in order to demonstrate the extreme
necessity of strong government, the nongovernmental
situation can be described as a terrible and wretched
condition in which
there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is
uncertain; and consequently no culture of the Earth, no
Navigation... no commodious building... no account
of time; no arts; no letters; no Society; and which is worst
of all, continual feare, and danger of violent death; and
the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short
(Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], Part I, Ch. XIII).
Or again, if one's argument is that man requires gov-
ernment, whilst not owing all advantages to it, the
State of Nature can be portrayed as reasonably ade-
quate, but still containing deficiencies which only a
state structure can remedy (Locke, Second Treatise of
Government, 1690).
Thus the Social Contract serves the intermediary
function of explaining how man transforms his condi-
tion from the State of Nature to a proposed form of
civil society. The particular form of contract used will
bear the marks of this relationship, of its connection
both with the condition it supposedly replaces and
with that which it is intended to inaugurate.
If such an account of social and governmental origins
sounds both involved and implausible, we might men-
tion that there were influential factors promoting belief
not only in a State of Nature, but also in the usual
narrative accounts of its replacement by society and
government. Thus, the notion of contract was made
familiar by Old Testament accounts of covenant, such
as those that God made with Noah, and with Abraham,
and that at Hebron between King David and the elders
of Israel. Once the Christian faith gained predominance
in Europe, belief in the absolute historical accuracy
of the Old Testament was, for many centuries, largely
taken for granted. The one society of which men had
early records appeared to be founded on covenant or
compact, so what could be more plausible than to
assume a somewhat similar origin for other societies?
That the notion of contract is also, and more usually,
associated with legal and commercial terminology is
a further important factor explaining its acceptance.
For what metaphor could be more apt in aiding the
understanding of a certain conception of government,
than one derived from an activity with which men
were familiar in their daily life?
