Understanding the Social Contract: Foundations of Authority

In 1971, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, a book that had been twenty years in preparation and that would go on to become the most cited work in political philosophy of the twentieth century.

At its center was a thought experiment so simple it could be explained in a sentence, yet so productive that philosophers have been unpacking its implications for fifty years.

Imagine, Rawls asked, that you were designing a society from scratch.^[1] You get to choose the basic rules: how much inequality is allowed, what liberties everyone has, what opportunities are available, what the safety net looks like.

But here is the constraint: you must make these choices from behind a "veil of ignorance." You do not know whether you will be born rich or poor, male or female, white or Black, talented or less talented, healthy or severely disabled.

You do not know what religion you will practice, what your conception of a good life will be, or what social class you will occupy. You know general facts about human psychology and society, but you have no idea what particular position you will hold in the society you are designing. What rules would you choose?

Rawls's bet was that rational people behind this veil would choose rules that gave everyone - including the worst-off - a defensible life. They would not gamble by designing a society that rewarded talent extravagantly and left the unlucky destitute, because they might be the destitute ones.

They would choose a floor, a set of basic liberties no one could be denied, and a principle that inequalities were only permissible if they actually benefited the least well-off.

This was not a new idea to root justice in some form of rational agreement. Hobbes had done it in 1651, Locke in 1689, Rousseau in 1762. What was new was the precision of Rawls's thought experiment and the rigor of the argument he drew from it.

He called this the original position, and with it he single-handedly revived a tradition that had been dormant for more than a century, turning political philosophy from a backward-looking history of ideas into a forward-looking analytical discipline.

The veil of ignorance was a device for modeling impartiality. If you don't know what position you'll occupy, you can't rig the rules in your favor.

Rawls was asking not whether existing institutions are fair - he thought they mostly weren't - but what principles rational agents would choose if they could not choose to favor themselves. The answer to that question, he argued, was the standard by which actual institutions should be judged.

"The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances." - John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)

Key Definitions

The social contract is the philosophical framework that grounds the legitimacy of political authority in the real or hypothetical consent of those subject to that authority.

The state of nature is the hypothetical pre-political condition that social contract theorists posit to explain why people would form governments - described by Hobbes as dangerous chaos, by Locke as relatively peaceful but uncertain, and by Rousseau as a condition of natural freedom corrupted by civilization.

Natural rights are rights that individuals possess prior to and independent of any political arrangement, derived (in Locke's account) from natural law and God's creation. They include life, liberty, and property for Locke.

The original position is Rawls's hypothetical deliberative situation in which individuals choose principles of justice without knowing their own place in the society they are designing.

The veil of ignorance is the informational constraint in Rawls's original position - the stipulation that choosers do not know their own race, class, sex, natural abilities, or conception of the good.

The difference principle is Rawls's criterion for just inequality: social and economic inequalities are just only if they maximize the long-run expectations of the least-advantaged members of society.

The general will (volonte generale) is Rousseau's concept of what the community collectively wills for the common good, distinguished from the mere sum of individual preferences.^[5]

Contractualism is the broader family of ethical theories that ground moral principles in what principles could be reasonably agreed to by all affected parties.^[10]

Why Political Authority Needs Justification

The problem the social contract addresses is deceptively simple to state and remarkably difficult to answer. Why should anyone obey the government? The question sounds like the complaint of a teenager avoiding homework, but it is the foundational question of political philosophy.

Governments demand obedience, compel taxation, and in extreme cases send people to die in wars. If the only justification for these demands is raw power - the government can punish you if you don't comply - then there is no morally relevant difference between the state and an armed robber.

Both take your money under threat of violence. Both will hurt you if you resist.

Social contract theorists answer this challenge by appealing to consent. The authority of government is legitimate, they argue, not merely because it is powerful, but because it has been agreed to - because the people subject to it have in some sense consented to the arrangement.

This consent might be explicit and ongoing, as in direct democracy; it might be represented through elected officials in a republic; it might be tacit, expressed through remaining in a territory rather than emigrating; or it might be purely hypothetical - what rational people would agree to if they could deliberate under the right conditions.

Each version of consent-based justification faces objections. Explicit consent is available only in small communities with direct participation. Tacit consent seems to ask very little - merely not emigrating - and migration itself is often not a genuine option for the poor.

Hypothetical consent, Rawls's approach, is the most philosophically sophisticated but raises the question of whether what hypothetical people would agree to has any authority over actual people who might disagree.

Hobbes: The Leviathan and the Logic of Absolute Authority

Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in the shadow of the English Civil War, a conflict that had already killed tens of thousands and would eventually execute a king. The experience of political disintegration was not abstract for Hobbes; it was the living nightmare of his historical moment.

His description of the state of nature reflects that experience: in the absence of a common authority to enforce peace, rational self-interest leads everyone to preemptively attack everyone else.

No one can trust their neighbor because there is no institution to punish betrayal. In this war of all against all, there is "no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

The solution, for Hobbes, is to create a sovereign - an individual or assembly - by authorizing it to act on behalf of all.^[3] Each person in the state of nature agrees with every other person to transfer their natural liberty to the sovereign, in exchange for the sovereign's provision of security and civil peace.

The sovereign's authority is essentially unlimited because any limitation recreates the possibility of conflict about whether the sovereign has overstepped, which unravels the peace.

Hobbes's conclusion - that the social contract justifies near-absolute authority - was used by royalists to defend monarchy, but his argument was actually more radical than that: the sovereign's authority derives not from divine right but from the consent of the governed.

And if the sovereign fails to provide security - the basic purpose of the contract - the obligation to obey lapses. Hobbes was not a simple defender of tyranny; he was a theorist of why people accept authority and what the limits of that acceptance are.

Locke: Natural Rights and the Right of Revolution

John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689) was written partly to provide intellectual justification for the Glorious Revolution, which had deposed James II and invited William and Mary to take the throne under constitutional constraints.

Locke's political theory begins from a different conception of human nature than Hobbes's: people in the state of nature are not inevitably at war but are instead subject to natural law, which reason tells them not to harm one another in life, health, liberty, or possessions.^[4]

In this pre-political condition, individuals have natural rights - rights to life, liberty, and property that are not grants from any government but preconditions of any legitimate political arrangement. People enter civil society to better protect these rights through institutional enforcement.

Government is therefore an agent acting on behalf of individuals who retain their natural rights; it is a trustee, not a sovereign. Its authority is strictly limited to the purposes for which it was constituted: protecting life, liberty, and property.

Crucially, Locke derives from this a right of revolution. If a government systematically violates natural rights - if a king taxes without consent, imposes arbitrary laws, or rules through fear rather than law - the people may dissolve the government and form a new one.

This is not anarchism; Locke is not saying government is unnecessary. He is saying that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, and that consent has conditions.

The influence of Locke on the American founding is direct and acknowledged. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is essentially Lockean political philosophy translated into a political manifesto: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Rousseau: The General Will and Democratic Self-Governance

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract (1762) opens with one of the most famous sentences in political philosophy: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." For Rousseau, the chains are not the state of nature but civilization itself - the property relations, social inequalities, and dependence on others' opinions that corrupted natural human goodness.

The problem is not how to escape the state of nature but how to create political institutions that preserve genuine human freedom rather than substituting social domination for natural freedom.

Rousseau's solution is the general will: political authority is legitimate only when it expresses what the community genuinely wills for the common good, not merely what any particular individual or faction wants.

The general will is not the will of all - the aggregate of individual preferences, which might be selfish and shortsighted.

It is what citizens would will when they think as citizens rather than as private individuals, when they ask not "what benefits me?" but "what benefits us?"

This leads Rousseau to conclusions that later influenced both democratic theory and totalitarianism. On one reading, the general will underwrites genuine popular sovereignty: legitimate law is self-imposed because it expresses the genuine will of the community, so obeying it is obeying oneself.

On another, more troubling reading, the claim to represent the general will can be used to override minority dissent: Rousseau writes that a person who is outvoted must recognize that the majority has correctly identified the general will and that their own dissenting will was mistaken.

This passage has been cited in critiques of Rousseau as a proto-totalitarian, most famously by Jacob Talmon in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952).

Rawls: Justice as Fairness

The original position and veil of ignorance are the most influential thought experiments in twentieth-century political philosophy, but the conclusions Rawls drew from them are equally important. He argued that rational people behind the veil of ignorance would choose two principles.

The first principle requires that each person have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all.

These liberties include freedom of speech and thought, freedom of conscience, freedom from arbitrary arrest, the right to vote and hold office, and the right to own personal property.

They cannot be traded off against economic advantages - you cannot sacrifice freedom of speech for a better income distribution.

The second principle governs social and economic inequalities. It has two parts.

First, positions of advantage must be open to everyone under fair equality of opportunity: not just formal but substantive equality, meaning children with similar talents and motivation should have genuinely similar prospects regardless of their starting point.

Second, the difference principle requires that any inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth be arranged to maximize the long-run expectations of the least advantaged group.

The Difference Principle in Context

The difference principle is demanding and counterintuitive to libertarian intuitions. It does not say that inequalities are just when they arise from fair choices. It does not say that inequalities are just when most people benefit.

It says that inequalities are just only when they work to the advantage of the worst-off - when the distribution of benefits is arranged so that even those at the bottom have reason to endorse the arrangement.

Rawls arrives at this through maximin reasoning: behind the veil of ignorance, knowing you might end up at the bottom, you would choose the principle that makes the bottom position as good as possible.

This is not the same as equality - the difference principle permits inequality if inequality actually makes the worst-off better off than equality would.

But it rules out the most common defense of existing inequality, which is that the affluent are entitled to their advantages because they earned them through talent, effort, or wise choices.

Rawls argues that natural talents are morally arbitrary - no one deserves their natural gifts, which are products of genetic luck. The social and economic institutions that reward talent should be justified in terms of benefits to all, including the least talented.

Nozick and the Libertarian Challenge

Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) provided the most influential challenge to Rawls and remains essential reading in political philosophy. Nozick agrees with Rawls that political authority needs justification, but reaches the opposite conclusion about what that justification permits.

Nozick argues for an entitlement theory of justice: what matters is not whether the distribution of holdings matches some pattern (like the difference principle) but whether each person's holdings were justly acquired and justly transferred.^[2]

If you acquired something legitimately (by creating it, or by voluntary exchange from a prior legitimate owner) and transferred it legitimately, you are entitled to it - regardless of what the resulting distribution looks like. Justice is not a matter of patterns but of history.

The Wilt Chamberlain argument is Nozick's most vivid illustration of why patterned principles require continuous violation of individual rights. Start from any just distribution. Let people make voluntary exchanges. The distribution changes.

To restore the original pattern, the state must take from those who accumulated more - an interference with the fruits of voluntary exchange. Enforcing any patterned principle therefore requires ongoing redistribution that violates the rights of those whose holdings result from legitimate exchange.

Against Rawls's difference principle, Nozick argues not just that it is wrong but that it rests on a mistaken model of the state as deciding how to distribute a common pool of resources. In a free-market economy, income and wealth are not distributed by a central authority but emerge from millions of individual transactions.

There is no distributor to hold responsible for the resulting pattern. People are not entitled to any share of what others produce; they are entitled to what they earn through voluntary exchange.

Nozick's minimal state - limited to protection against force, theft, fraud, and contract enforcement - has remained the intellectual foundation of modern libertarianism.

Communitarian and Feminist Critiques

The Communitarian Challenge

Beginning in the early 1980s, a group of philosophers who came to be called communitarians argued that social contract theory rests on a fundamentally mistaken picture of the self.

Michael Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) argued that Rawls's original position assumes a self that is defined prior to and independently of its ends, attachments, and community memberships - an "unencumbered self" that can strip away everything that makes it who it is and still be capable of rational choice.^[6]

But there is no such self, Sandel argued. Our identities are constituted by our particular communities, traditions, and conceptions of the good. A theory of justice that requires us to abstract from everything that makes us who we are cannot capture the moral significance of the communities and practices that give our lives meaning.

Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981) argued that the Enlightenment project of grounding morality in universal rational principles - of which social contract theory is one expression - was a philosophical mistake.^[9]

Morality is intelligible only within particular traditions with their particular narratives of human flourishing, not as a set of universal rules that rational agents could derive from first principles.

The Feminist Challenge

Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract (1988) made a more politically direct critique: the classical social contract excludes women by design.^[7] The "free and equal individuals" who enter Locke's and Rousseau's contracts are tacitly male heads of household.

Women, historically excluded from property ownership, legal personhood, contract, and political participation, were never parties to the social contract. The domestic sphere - where women's labor occurred - was explicitly excluded from the contractual domain and from the protections of justice.

Pateman argued that before there is a social contract among formally free individuals, there is a prior sexual contract that assigns women to men as wives and subordinates, enforcing this assignment through the institution of marriage and the legal doctrine of coverture.

The public social contract depends on and conceals this private sexual contract.

Carol Gilligan's critique (In a Different Voice, 1982) was more psychological: Kohlberg's developmental model of moral reasoning, which culminates in an abstract justice orientation compatible with social contract theory, reflected masculine moral development.^[8]

Women in Gilligan's studies more often reasoned in terms of care, relationships, and responsibility - a moral orientation systematically excluded from theories that ground morality in rational agreements among independent individuals.

Contemporary Applications

Social contract theory is not merely historical. Its central questions - who owes what to whom, and why - recur in contemporary political debates.

Health care is a social contract question: is access to medical treatment a right that citizens are owed by their society, or a commodity to be purchased?

Rawls's difference principle generates a strong argument for universal health care: rational people behind the veil of ignorance, not knowing whether they will be born healthy or chronically ill, would not choose a system that leaves the sick unable to afford treatment.

Education funding is a social contract question: the system of funding public schools through local property taxes creates vastly unequal educational opportunities based on ZIP code, which is difficult to justify under any principle of fair equality of opportunity.

Economic inequality is a social contract question: whether the current distribution of income and wealth is just - whether the least advantaged have reason to endorse the institutions that produce it - is precisely the question Rawls's difference principle was designed to answer.

Related Articles

For the broader philosophical tradition of theories about what justice requires, see what is justice. For the ideological tradition of classical liberalism that social contract theory helped create, see what is liberalism.

For the utilitarian and consequentialist tradition that stands as the main alternative to contractualist moral theory, see consequentialism: when outcomes justify actions.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press.
2. Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Basic Books.
3. Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan. (C. B. Macpherson, Ed., 1985). Penguin Classics.
4. Locke, J. (1689). Second Treatise of Government. (C. B. Macpherson, Ed., 1980). Hackett.
5. Rousseau, J.-J. (1762). The Social Contract. (V. Gourevitch, Trans., 1997). Cambridge University Press.
6. Sandel, M. J. (1982). Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge University Press.
7. Pateman, C. (1988). The Sexual Contract. Stanford University Press.
8. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Harvard University Press.
9. MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. University of Notre Dame Press.
10. Gauthier, D. (1986). Morals by Agreement. Oxford University Press.

Further Reading

• Kant, I. (1785). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. (M. Gregor, Trans., 1997). Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511809590