The social contract, as suggested by Thomas Hobbes, is an actual or hypothetical compact, or agreement, between the ruled or between the ruled and their rulers, defining the rights and duties of each. In primeval times, according to the theory, individuals were born into an anarchic state of nature, which was happy or unhappy according to the particular version of the theory. They then, by exercising natural reason, formed a society (and a government) by means of a social contract. Hobbes’ theory suggested that it saves people from lawlessness while other philosophers accepted the idea of the social contract but criticized Hobbes’s preference for monarchy as the ultimate solution. To name one, John Locke held suspicion of authorities and demanded a more egalitarian system where power is given by the acceptance from the public with the right to remove a tyrannical leader.
What distinguished these theories of political obligation from other doctrines of the period was their attempt to justify and delimit political authority on the grounds of individual self-interest and rational consent. By comparing the advantages of organized government with the disadvantages of the state of nature, they showed why and under what conditions government is useful and ought, therefore, to be accepted by all reasonable people as a voluntary obligation. These conclusions were then reduced to the form of a social contract, from which it was supposed that all the essential rights and duties of citizens could be logically deduced.
