The Social Contract According to John Locke

John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, who is known as one of the

most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of

Liberalism". He is also considered as one of the first of the British empiricists, following

the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His

work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His

writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment

thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical

republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of

Independence.

There are many different versions of the concept of a social contract. One of the

most common definition of social contract is that people give up their rights in order to

benefit from living in a civil society. According to Wikipedia, “Social contract arguments

typically suggest that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender

some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the ruler or magistrate (or to the

decision of a majority), in exchange for protection of their remaining rights.”

Locke’s definition of political power has an immediate moral dimension. To him,

political power means a “right” to make laws and implement it for the “public good” or for

the betterment of a society. Power for Locke never simply means “capacity” but always

“morally sanctioned capacity.” Morality pervades the whole arrangement of society, and

it is this fact that makes society authentic or legitimate.

 According to Locke, social contract theory is saying that only right people give up

in order to enter into civil society and its benefits is the right to punish other people for

violating rights. No other rights are given up, only the right to be a vigilante. Even the right

to be a vigilante returns to the individual if the government breaks the social contract by

not punishing those who violate rights.

On this model, the government is limited in two ways. First, it cannot take away

from us any rights we would have in the state of nature, and is given only the right to

punish for things that deserve punishment. Second, the government can only punish for

things that deserve punishment, and these are the same things that would deserve

punishment in the state of nature. That is, while the government can operationalize the

law of nature in more detailed legislation, it cannot legislate anything that is not in the law

of nature.

John Locke said that social contract theory also begins with the state of nature. In

his state of nature there was peace, good will, mutual assistance and, preserve. Men

enjoyed complete freedom and equality in it. Each man lived according to his own wishes

and desires, humans are entirely free. But this freedom is not a state of complete license,

because it is set within the bounds of the law of nature. There was the law of nature,

which was based on reason and justice. People enjoyed certain rights such as life, liberty

and property. It is a state of equality, which is itself a central element of Locke’s account.

Each person is naturally free and equal under the law of nature, subject only to the

will of “the infinitely wise Maker.” Each person, moreover, is required to enforce as well

as to obey this law. It is this duty that gives to humans the right to punish offenders. But
in such a state of nature, it is obvious that placing the right to punish in each person’s

hands may lead to injustice and violence.

John Locke seems to be the first philosopher to introduce a new element in the

field of Political Science that was the consent or the will of the people. A government can

remain in power and be strong so long as it enjoys the support of the people or governs

according to the will of the people. In this way Locke gave the theory of limited sovereignty

or constitutional government. If the government fails to protect the life, liberty and property

the people, the people have the right to remove it and appoint a new government. He is

also the one who introduced or gave the idea of natural rights.

But the question is that, if people were happy and peaceful in the state of nature,

why did they say stop doing it so? The answer is that there were the following difficulties

faced by the people.

1. The law of nature was not clear. Each individual gave his own interpretation, which

created difficulties.

2. There were no impartial judges to interpret the law of nature.

3. There was no common and competent authority to enforce the law of nature.

Locke’s theory was almost perfect yet he did not mention about the legal sovereign.

Besides, he fail to understand that revolution can be dangerous and under normal

circumstances illegal.
 The Social Contract According to Jean Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a French philosopher and writer who

lead a life rich in contradiction. When he came to Paris he became increasingly aware

that ordering society was unfair. The rules were made by the rich to suit their own interests

not those of the common people.

In The Social Contract (1762) Rousseau argues that laws are binding only when

they are supported by the general will of the people. His famous idea, 'man is born free,

but he is everywhere in chains' challenged the traditional order of society. Rousseau

became the champion of the common person. To him, the will of the people was most

important. From this, Rousseau goes on to describe the ways in which the “chains” of civil

society suppress the natural birth right of man to physical freedom. He states that the civil

society does nothing to enforce the equality and individual liberty that were promised to

man when he entered into that society. For Rousseau, the only legitimate political

authority is the authority consented to by all the people, who have agreed to such

government by entering into a social contract for the sake of their mutual preservation.

Rousseau describes the ideal form of this social contract and also explains its

philosophical foundations. To Rousseau, the collective grouping of all people who by their

consent enter into a civil society is called the sovereign, and this sovereign may be

thought of as an individual person with a unified will. This principle is important, for while

actual individuals may naturally hold different opinions and wants according to their

individual circumstances, the sovereign as a whole expresses the general will of all the
people. Rousseau defines this general will as the collective need of all to provide for the

common good of all.

He acknowledges that the sovereign and the government will often have a frictional

relationship, as the government is sometimes liable to go against the general will of the

people. Rousseau states that to maintain awareness of the general will, the sovereign

must convene in regular assemblies to determine the general will, at which point it is

imperative that individual citizens vote not according to their own personal interests but

according to their conception of the general will of all the people at that moment.

Rousseau’s central argument in The Social Contract is that government attains its

right to exist and to govern by “the consent of the governed.” His focus was always on

figuring out how to ensure that the general will of all the people could be expressed as

truly as possible in their government. He always aimed to figure out how to make society

as democratic as possible. At one point in The Social Contract, Rousseau cites the

example of the Roman republic’s comitia to prove that even large states composed of

many people can hold assemblies of all their citizens.

To sum all these up, for Rousseau, the state of nature is relatively peaceful, but a

social contract becomes necessary to overcome conflicts that inevitably arise as society

grows and individuals become dependent on others to meet their needs. However,

uniquely in Rousseau’s account, the authority of the state is not inherently in conflict with

the free will of individuals, because it represents the collective will or the “general will”, of

which the individual will is a part, provided that the individual is moral.
Sources:

https://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/utopia/revolution1/rousseau1/rousseau.html
https://www.britannica.com/story/the-social-contract-and-philosophy
https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2018/6/17/the-social-contract-according-to-john-locke
https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Locke/Two-Treatises-of-Government#ref360483
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261181816_Summary_of_Social_Contract_Theory_
by_Hobbes_Locke_and_Rousseau