The notion of the social contract implies that the people give up sovereignty to a government or other authority in order to receive or maintain social order through the rule of law. It can also be thought of as an agreement by the governed on a set of rules by which they are governed.
Social contract theory formed a central pillar in the historically important notion that legitimate state authority must be derived from the consent of the governed. The starting point for most of these theories is a heuristic examination of the human condition absent from any structured social order, usually termed the “state of nature”. In this condition, an individual’s actions are bound only by his or her personal power and conscience. From this common starting point proponents of social contract theory attempt to prove, in different ways, why it is in an individual’s rational self-interest to voluntarily give up his or her natural freedom in order to obtain the benefits of political and economic order.
Thomas Hobbes (1651), John Locke (1689), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) are the most famous philosophers of contractarianism. However, they drew quite different conclusions from this starting-point. Hobbes advocated an authoritarian monarchy, Locke advocated a liberal monarchy, while Rousseau advocated liberal republicanism. Their work provi
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Personal Passion Formula
Subject: Social contract 
Sat Feb 12, 2011 3:45 am
