Social contract

The social contract is an actual or imagined agreement among people that explains political authority and the rules of social life. Its theories differ over what people agree to and what governments owe them.

State of nature: A hypothetical condition of human life without political authority or organized government. Social-contract theories use this imagined condition to explain why people would accept political rule.
Thomas Hobbes: An English philosopher whose political theory defended sovereign authority as a remedy for insecurity. Hobbes makes security the chief reason people authorize an undivided sovereign.
Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 work arguing that a powerful sovereign secures peace among people escaping a state of nature. It gives the social contract one of its most influential early modern formulations.
Liberalism: A political tradition emphasizing individual liberty, legal equality, and limits on government power. Lockean contract ideas helped supply liberalism with a theory of consent and protected rights.
Political legitimacy: The justified right of a government or institution to exercise authority. The contract offers one account of why political authority deserves obedience.
John Locke: An English philosopher who grounded government in consent and the protection of natural rights. Locke treats political power as limited and revocable when it violates its entrusted purpose.
John Locke's Two Treatises of Government: John Locke’s political work defending government by consent and resistance to tyranny. Its account of limited authority helped shape liberal contract theory.
Popular sovereignty: The principle that ultimate political authority belongs to the people. Rousseau’s contract makes the people, acting collectively, the source of legitimate law.
Consent of the governed: The principle that government authority depends on the consent of those subject to it. Consent is the contract’s central basis for legitimate rule.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Genevan philosopher whose political writings connect legitimate rule to popular sovereignty and the general will. Rousseau recasts the agreement as collective self-rule rather than submission to a ruler.

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