Yahoo Web Search

Search results

  1. Sep 9, 2024 · Accessed 15 October 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.

    • The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
  2. 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 ...

  3. The starting point for most social contract theories is an examination of the human condition absent any political order (termed the "state of nature" by Thomas Hobbes). [4] In this condition, individuals' actions are bound only by their personal power and conscience , assuming that 'nature' precludes mutually beneficial social relationships.

  4. 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 ...

    • Mark Cartwright
  5. Jul 14, 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. There is only one contract that results in men leaving the “state of nature ...

  6. 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 ...

  7. People also ask

  8. Feb 12, 2002 · 1. Major Political Writings. Hobbes wrote several versions of his political philosophy, including The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (also under the titles Human Nature and De Corpore Politico) published in 1650, De Cive (1642) published in English as Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society in 1651, the English Leviathan published in 1651, and its Latin revision in 1668.