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May 6, 2024 · Social contract, in political philosophy, an actual or hypothetical compact, or agreement, between the ruled and their rulers, defining the rights and duties of each. The most influential social-contract theorists were the 17th–18th century philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Hobbes’ political theory is best understood if taken in two parts: his theory of human motivation, Psychological Egoism, and his theory of the social contract, founded on the hypothetical State of Nature.
Hobbes describes the covenant, or social contract, as a “real unity” among the multitude of natural men who have chosen to escape the state of nature. But Hobbes also says that this “multitude is not One, but Many; they cannot be understood for one.
Jul 15, 2023 · In the social contract of Hobbes, the state or civil society is created through a contract or mutual agreement among men. This contract is known as the “Social Contract” and it empowers a man or a group of men who will represent the supreme authority over society.
Feb 12, 2002 · Hobbes is famous for his early and elaborate development of what has come to be known as “social contract theory”, the method of justifying political principles or arrangements by appeal to the agreement that would be made among suitably situated rational, free, and equal persons.
The first modern philosopher to articulate a detailed contract theory was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", a state in which self-interest and the absence of rights and contracts prevented the "social", or society. Life was "anarchic ...
May 17, 2024 · According to Hobbes, political authority is justified by a hypothetical social contract among the many that vests in a sovereign (a monarch, a legislature, or almost any other form of political authority) the responsibility for the safety and well-being of all.
