The political tradition that grounds the legitimacy of government in a (usually hypothetical) agreement among free individuals about the terms of their common life. Hobbes invented the framework in the 17th century to defend absolute sovereignty; Locke transformed it to defend limited government and natural rights; Rousseau radicalized it into popular sovereignty; Rawls revived it in the 20th century to ground a theory of distributive justice. Almost every modern attempt to ground political legitimacy in rational consent works in this tradition.
Tradition
Social Contract Theory
The tradition that grounds political legitimacy in a hypothetical agreement among free individuals about the terms of their common life.
Thinkers
Thinker
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712–1778
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the Genevan philosopher of popular sovereignty whose argument that humans are good by nature and corrupted by society shaped both the French Revolution and modern democratic thought
ThinkerJohn Rawls
1921–2002
John Rawls was the liberal egalitarian philosopher whose A Theory of Justice (1971) revived political philosophy and dominated late-20th-century debates about justice, equality, and democratic legitimacy
ThinkerRobert Nozick
1938–2002
Robert Nozick was the libertarian philosopher whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) answered John Rawls and became the foundational text of contemporary libertarian political theory
ThinkerThomas Hobbes
1588–1679
Thomas Hobbes was the philosopher of absolute sovereignty who invented the social contract framework and argued that only an all-powerful Leviathan could save human beings from each other
ThinkerJohn Locke
1632–1704
John Locke was the founding philosopher of modern liberalism, grounding political legitimacy in consent, natural rights, and the protection of property
Related through shared thinkers