Social Contract/Consent Theory. (Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau)

Imagine there is no police, no court, and no government of any kind — just you, and everyone else, each free to do whatever you can get away with. Three philosophers imagined exactly that “state of nature” and asked the same question from it: why would anyone agree to obey a State at all? Their three different answers are this topic.

In two minutes

Social contract theory explains the State's authority as arising from an agreement — real or hypothetical — among individuals in a pre-political “state of nature”, and Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau each imagine that starting condition, and the resulting contract, very differently.

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