The Social Contract and Consent Theory

In one line

The social contract says that political authority is a human creation: people who were not under any government agreed to set one up, and the duty to obey is nothing more mysterious than the duty to keep your own agreement.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the social contract theory holds that political authority and the duty of obedience arise from an agreement, made by individuals in a pre-political condition called the state of nature, to leave that condition and submit to a common authority; the theory therefore founds obligation on the consent of the governed rather than on divine appointment, superior force or immemorial custom.

The machinery, common to every version

Every social contract theory has the same four parts. Learn them once and the three thinkers become variations rather than three separate systems.

1. The state of nature

A condition without government, used to ask what political authority is for. It is not, in these writers, a claim about prehistory. It is a device: strip away the state and see what is missing.

The three answers differ sharply, and the difference decides everything that follows. If the state of nature is intolerable, the contract must buy security at any price. If it is inconvenient but tolerable, the contract can be a limited grant with conditions attached.

2. Natural law and natural rights

What people have before any government: rules binding on them without any legislator, and rights they hold without any state to confer them. This is the part of the theory a law student should attend to most, because a right that exists before the state can be asserted against the state, and the whole apparatus of fundamental rights descends from this idea.

3. The contract itself

The act by which the condition is left. Two questions decide the shape of the whole theory.

Who are the parties? Each with all the others, or the people with a ruler? A contract among the people leaves the ruler outside it and therefore not bound by it, which is Hobbes's route to absolutism. A contract that includes the ruler makes the ruler a party who can breach.

What is transferred? Everything, or only what is needed for the purpose? Total surrender produces a sovereign with no limits. A limited grant produces a government with defined powers.

4. The obligation that results

Because you agreed, you are bound. The duty to obey is the duty to keep a promise, which is the most familiar moral duty there is, and that familiarity is the theory's great attraction.

What consent explains that nothing else does

Particularity. You are bound to this state because it was this agreement you made.