• Social Contract Theory | Agreement, Justification, and Political Obligation

  • Feb 27 2025
  • Length: 17 mins
  • Podcast

Social Contract Theory | Agreement, Justification, and Political Obligation

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  • Summary

  • The idea of the social contract goes back at least to Protagoras and Epicurus. In its recognizably modern form, however, the idea is revived by Thomas Hobbes and was later developed, in different ways, by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. After Kant, the idea fell out of favor with political philosophers until it was resurrected by John Rawls. It is now at the heart of the work of a number of moral and political philosophers.

    The basic idea seems simple: in some way, the agreement of all individuals subject to collectively enforced social arrangements shows that those arrangements have some normative property (they are legitimate, just, obligating, etc.). Even this basic idea, though, is anything but simple, and even this abstract rendering is objectionable in many ways.
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