Search results
Jun 17, 2024 · social contract, in political philosophy, 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 ...
Social contract theory says that people live together in society in accordance with an agreement that establishes moral and political rules of behavior. Some people believe that if we live according to a social contract, we can live morally by our own choice and not because a divine being requires it. Over the centuries, philosophers as far ...
Social Contract Theory. Social contract theory, nearly as old as philosophy itself, is the view that persons’ moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement among them to form the society in which they live. Socrates uses something quite like a social contract argument to explain to Crito why he must remain in ...
v. t. e. In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is an idea, theory or model that usually, although not always, concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. [1] Conceptualized in the Age of Enlightenment, it is a core concept of constitutionalism, while not necessarily convened and written down in a ...
Feb 2, 2024 · The Social Contract is an idea in philosophy that at some real or hypothetical point in the past, humans left the state of nature to join together and form societies by mutually agreeing which rights they would enjoy and how they would be governed. The social contract aims to improve the human condition by establishing an authority based on ...
Oct 16, 2016 · Social contract theory is a political philosophy that questions the origins of society, and the legitimacy of governmental control over individual people. It is an argument that all men have an obligation to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”. Seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbs made the point that, if people aren ...
Rousseau’s response to the problem is to define civil society as an artificial person united by a general will, or volonté générale. The social contract that brings society into being is a pledge, and the society remains in being as a pledged group. Rousseau’s republic is a creation of the general will—of a will that never falters in ...
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. He is infamous for having used the social contract method to ...
The classic social-contract theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries— Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78)—held that the social contract is the means by which civilized society, including government, arises from a historically or logically preexisting condition of stateless anarchy, or ...
Mar 17, 2022 · Definition. Social contract is a political philosophy and theory of how governments justify the existence of the state and the exercise of government power. It is based on an imaginary state in which humans living in nature decide to organize themselves in a manner which would be recognized as the modern state – i.e., surrendering to a non ...
