Rousseau casts the social contract both as a genealogical account of how governments arise and a prescriptive account of how they ought to be made. He can also be read as casting the social contract in a critical role: showing how society would organize itself in certain counterfactual circumstances. A merely hypothetical contract can serve the critical role of reconciling us to our actual circumstances while at the same time specifying what reforms are demanded. Rousseau’s social contract creates a general will, volonté générale, which is not an aggregation of separate wills, nor is it simply the immersion of several selves into a “hive mind.” It is what each wills, even those who disagree with the majority, which announces what the general will wills. Especially interesting is the act by which the general will arises: Citizens abstract from their own selves and situations and surrender all their rights to the political community. And “since each gives himself entirely, the condition is equal for all, and [thus] no one has any interest in making it burdensome to the rest.” Rousseau’s social contract requires there be a civil religion intolerant of those who believe their own faith to be the unique way to salvation.

Rousseau took up the challenge of explaining the origin of social inequality. Primitive humans lived simply and independently. Their natural amour de soi – self-love – was tempered by natural pity. As families connected into tribes, and nomads settled into stationary dwellings, a new sentiment arose: amour propre, or self-esteem. People began to compare themselves to one another and to seek attention. Natural pity was eclipsed by the urge to be admired and to dominate. The introduction of agriculture brought with it private property and competitive accumulation. Human society magnified modest natural inequalities, and immiserated itself in the process. Rousseau’s thought showed a sunnier side in his Du Contrat Sociale: the social contract. He professed not to know how humanity had come to be “everywhere” in chains, but proceeded to show how that condition was legitimate. The device was the social contract, to which individuals bring their possessions in order to secure them as property.

The increasing acceptance of marquee “liberal” doctrines such as liberty of conscience, limited government, and universal adult suffrage occurred mainly during a period in which social contract theory was dormant and other philosophies – Hegelianism, Marxism, and utilitarianism –largely prevailed in the West. If Rawls’s social contract apparatus can deliver something beyond mere “yea-saying” to the liberal consensus, one could confidently say that contract doctrine has helped. Substantive political equality might be that something, but its delivery is still contested.

Hobbes argues that in a “condition of meer nature,” lacking a common power, reason requires that we appoint one, lest our lives be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” No covenant of peace can be effective without a Sovereign arbiter to enforce it. Therefore, reason requires each of us to surrender the natural right to judge for ourselves, and to appoint a Sovereign. An effective Sovereign must have authority to determine religious practice and to raise an army – precisely the powers the “Roundhead” rebels had denied Charles I.

During the century-and-a-half slumber of social contract theory the idea of universal adult suffrage became commonplace. It had long been assumed that formal political equality would more than suffice to defend the less advantaged against class legislation (although the worry shared by Ireton and Mill, that majority rule would enable class legislation favoring the less advantaged, has never disappeared). Rawls argued that a well-ordered constitutional democracy must guarantee the fair value of the equal political liberties (and those liberties alone: The others come within the difference principle in its special form). Rawls complained that this position seemed “never to have been taken seriously.” Rawls suggested a number of devices to secure fair value: promotion devices, such as subsidies of political parties and public debate; insulation devices, such as limits upon campaign contributions and expenditures; and anti-accumulation devices, such as inheritance taxes and public ownership of the means of production. Why, though, would parties in the original position insist on the fair-value guarantee? One argument extends the argument for the priority of the whole family of basic liberties, with special emphasis on stability “for the right reasons” and the shared sense of justice essential to it.

Starting with three good ideas – natural equality, government resting on consent, and government limited by the terms of that consent – Hobbes derives distressing conclusions. Reason requires submission to the Sovereign even in matters of conscience. The Sovereign can do subjects no injustice. Mixed government must lead to civil war. This chapter traces and tests Hobbes’s reasoning.

Rawls had misgivings about the account of stability he gave in A Theory of Justice. It ignored “the fact of reasonable pluralism,” that is, that the social contract has to attract people who disagree about fundamental values of the kind embraced in “comprehensive” doctrines. The contract doctrine welcomes reasonable comprehensive doctrines but forbids the use of state power to promote a comprehensive liberalism, which he confessed he had assumed. There is also a “fact of oppression,” that no state can stabilize itself by imposing a comprehensive doctrine without resorting to the tactics of Torquemada or Stalin. A “liberal principle of legitimacy” forbids this. One must hope for an “overlapping consensus” of reasonable, comprehensive doctrines to settle upon a “political conception of justice.” Rawls’s concessions may lead even further, amounting to a “fact of justice pluralism,” that is, that there are multiple, incompatible, but equally reasonable political conceptions of justice – including ones that reject political equality as Rawls conceives it. Rawls admitted there was a “family” of such conceptions but insisted that each must satisfy a “criterion of reciprocity.” This chapter ekes out Rawls’s published remarks to construct a “reciprocity” argument for fair value, complementing the “stability” argument of Chapter 15.

Locke held that any number of persons might join together to form a government. He imposed no limitation on the knowledge or reasoning that joiners might make use of. It is likely that Locke imagined that governments typically arose by consensus among private landowners, who then by a majority vote chose the procedure by which the legislative power was to operate. It is safe to say that Locke did not favor a wide suffrage or democracy. Locke also did not insist on any strict separation of executive and legislative powers: Of necessity, the executive must have a “prerogative power” to further the common good even if contrary to legislation. The notions of an independent judiciary and judicial review of legislation are nowhere found in Locke. Locke did, however, advocate reform of the composition of Parliament to make it more representative. And he was defensive of the rights of commoners against enclosures – so, logically, he may have favored a wider franchise.

Rawls expounded “a theory of justice that generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the traditional conception of the social contract.” His theory applies to society’s basic structure, a system of productive cooperation over generations. The state of nature was reconfigured as an “original position” which “incorporates certain procedural constraints on arguments.” The “parties” in the original position have general knowledge but no knowledge specific to themselves: their strengths, weaknesses, values, desires, social position, and so on. The “parties” choose principles that will maximize their fund of “primary goods,” or all-purpose means – means useful to all, whatever their particular interests, talents, etc. Two principles would be chosen: a maximum-equal-liberties principle, and a principle governing the distribution of opportunities, wealth, and income. These are in “lexical” order: equal basic liberties, then fair equal opportunity, then the “difference principle,” viz. distribute so to maximize the resources of the least-advantaged class. The chapter describes the “fact of reasonable pluralism” the social contract must accommodate, and the “well-ordered society” the social contract is to stabilize “for the right reasons,” securing the three great achievements of the tradition: toleration, limited government by popular consent, and “the winning of the working classes to democracy.”

Humans seek not happiness but “power after power,” says Hobbes, and so we are perpetually at odds. We are equals in cunning and therefore equally insecure and equally error-prone. Our language contains “words of inconstant signification,” which means we must ever disagree about right and justice. Reason requires us to submit our disagreements to an arbiter – a “Common Power” – lacking whom we must be perpetually at war or on the verge of war with one another over things that matter.

The original-position setup and argument for Rawls’s two principles are the focus of this chapter. Economic inequality is inevitable because the parties accept economic inequalities that benefit all classes. The equal basic liberties can be of unequal worth to persons, under the difference principle. But the political liberties (and they alone) are guaranteed to be of “fair value,” that is, individuals equally motivated and adept are to have roughly equal political influence. Universal adult suffrage is an inadequate measure to prevent money distorting political results. The difference principle in its “general form” could endorse Mill’s plural voting scheme, and would be indifferent to substantive political inequality if, on balance, the least advantaged realized a greater worth of their basket of primary goods. Robert Nozick’s objection to Rawls’s attention to patterns of wealth distribution is taken up, and Rawls’s ambition to render unequal distributions as acceptable as a matter of “pure procedural justice” is explained. John Harsanyi and Kenneth Arrow objected to the difference principle as applied to wealth and income. Rawls’s answer depends on establishing the lexical priority of the equal basic liberties, the argument for which was made toward the end of Rawls’s monumental A Theory of Justice.

Hume’s critique and English revulsion at the French Revolution dampened interest in social contract theorizing. The rise of utilitarianism was another factor. The cause of a universal franchise was taken up by Jeremy Bentham, a founding utilitarian who was dismissive of the social contract idea as an “anarchical fallacy.” The Chartists, who demanded universal manhood suffrage, held up both Bentham and Tom Paine as heroes. The Reform Act of 1832 expanded the power of the propertied in the burgeoning English manufacturing centers. The reformed Parliament passed the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which introduced the hated workhouse system. The Chartists’ million-plus petition for universal manhood suffrage was finally received by Parliament, but ignored. John Stuart Mill, another utilitarian, dismissed Locke’s theory as a fiction but found a truth in the social-contract idea: a principle of reciprocity. Reciprocity requires government to benefit all. Mill advocated votes for women and an expanded electorate but retention of the property qualification until workers could be educated sufficiently not to vote for unwise laws favoring their class. As a safeguard, he proposed plural votes for the educated. On the European continent the social contract tradition succumbed to the idealism of Hegel and the materialism of Marx.

Hume criticized the idea that all legitimate government rests on consent of any sort, tacit or express. He did not deny that some governments originated that way, or that it was an admirable way. But he thought it absurd to claim that legitimate government authority is contingent upon each subject’s consent. To say that it is so is contrary to common opinion and, moreover, simply shifts the question to that of the bindingness of promises. That bindingness must rest on the idea of necessity, and so it is needlessly indirect to appeal to promises when government can be justified directly by its necessity to prosperous and secure society. Hume, however, also made a positive contribution to the social contract tradition. He described how a convention, or common practice, can coordinate expectations and behavior without the need for any express agreement or contract. Later theorists make use of Humean convention in order to connect the idea of hypothetical consent to the actual circumstances of life. In short, government is legitimate where there is a convention of conformance to a social contract that would, hypothetically, be approved by clear-minded individuals.

Locke’s work in epistemology and personal identity secures his reputation. His excursion into political philosophy seems to have been guided by his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, to make a case for mixed government, in which Parliament is supreme and the monarch a Protestant. Locke argued for toleration among Protestant sects but excluded atheists and Roman Catholics. Locke’s argument for limited government describes the state of nature as one in which each has an equal right to punish infractions of natural law. Civil society comes into being when any number of people agree to surrender this “natural executive right,” on the condition that others do so as well. But, Locke says, contrary to Hobbes, submission to an absolute Sovereign is worse than a condition of civil war.