The story of social contract

“Kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon Earth... but even by God himself they are called gods,” King James I of England proclaimed in 1610. In Europe, for nearly two centuries, kings claimed to have the divine right to rule. Their authority, they argued, came directly from God, and not from the people they ruled. Challenging the king, therefore, could be portrayed as challenging the divine order itself. By the end of the 17th Century, a profound intellectual change swept across Europe. The Age of Enlightenment began, and many thinkers argued that it is reason that must guide human affairs, not unquestioned traditions or superstitions. Intellectuals questioned political legitimacy: What gives someone the right to rule over others? Why should individuals obey a king or a government?Social ContractSocial Contract is an influential cluster of political theories that sought to answer these questions. It posits that a government derives its “legitimate authority” from a tacit agreement among the people who establish it. While philosophers who have tried to explain social contract differ widely on the nature of this agreement, many of them share the idea that a government’s powers are derived from the consent of its citizens.Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are three philosophers who have contributed immensely to the development of social contract theory and, thereby, shaped modern political thought. To explain the origins of political authority and limits of its powers, all three of them tried to imagine what natural freedoms human beings would have had if they lived in a state of nature – without governments, courts, or police. The state of nature is not a historical condition, but rather a philosophical thought experiment that serves as a starting point to describe human nature in the absence of authority. Thomas Hobbes A war of all against allThomas Hobbes is considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. In his highly influential work, Leviathan (1651), Hobbes paints a grim picture of human nature in the absence of authority. He suggests that in the state of nature, humans are likely to be trapped in a constant state of conflict. All human beings, he says, are roughly equal in their ability to cause harm to one another. Even the strongest are vulnerable to attacks and even the weakest may have the cunning, alliances, or weapons to cause harm to others. One of the main reasons for conflicts, according to Hobbes, would be a scarcity of resources, because of which people would have to constantly be on guard. Even if they have no resources, they may not be spared from conflict, as they may be considered a threat to others’ resources. Hobbes describes this condition as a war of all against all. Many scholars believe Hobbes’s pessimistic account of human nature was shaped, at least in part, by his experience of the English Civil War, during which time Leviathan was written.An absolute sovereignAs humans, in his view, are driven by fear, competition, and a continual desire for “power after power”, Hobbes argued that individuals must surrender nearly all their political freedoms to an absolute Sovereign. They may, however, retain their inalienable right to preserve their own lives. In exchange, the Sovereign’s purpose was to ensure the safety and security of its citizens. To make that possible, the Sovereign could use a credible threat of punishment and even curtail civil liberties. All ideas and religious teachings, in Hobbes’s view, had to be monitored by the State to prevent them from disrupting peace. “It is annexed to the sovereignty to be judge of what opinions and doctrines are averse and what conducing to peace; and consequently, on what occasions, how far, and what men are to be trusted withal, in speaking to multitudes of people, and who shall examine the doctrines of all books before they be published,” he writes in Leviathan. Hobbes believed ordinary subjects had virtually no role in the government. They also had no general right to start a rebellion against the government. The people were free to do anything that is not prohibited by the State, and in matters where the law is silent. It could, hence, be interpreted that to Hobbes, people’s consent is a one-time founding act. Once they authorise the Sovereign, they cannot simply change their minds because they dislike a policy. John Locke The right of revolutionJohn Locke pushed back against Hobbes’s pessimism. Writing decades later, he argued that in the state of nature, life would not have been as chaotic as Hobbes had suggested. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke says people can use their minds to figure out their moral duties without needing a king. While Hobbes believed every person had equal power and capability to harm one another, Locke believed that everyone is equal in jurisdiction or authority over one another, meaning none had the right to treat another as his subordinate. All human beings possess the natural rights to life, liberty, and property.Locke also differed in how he viewed material conditions in the state of nature. He believed Earth’s resources were initially abundant and available for everyone to appropriate through labour. While individuals could amass more land and goods, the introduction of money vastly accelerated inequality and accumulation of wealth. Property disputes became more common, increasing the need for an impartial authority. Larger and more unequal holdings made disputes increasingly difficult to resolve fairly. Without an impartial judge, every person believed he was right as, according to Locke, people are biased by self-interest. So, there arose a need for an unbiased authority. Guardian of rightsLocke had a drastically different view of the State. To him, the State was a neutral and impartial judge that must protect the natural rights (to life, liberty and estate) of its subjects. If it fails in its duty, or violates these natural rights, the people retain the right to revolution. To Locke, a government has the legitimacy to govern only as long as it has the consent of the people. It can be removed if it betrays that trust. “The people shall be judge... whenever the legislators endeavour to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience,” he wrote.Locke was one of the early thinkers to understand the risks of centralising power in the hands of one authority. “It may be too great a temptation to human frailty, apt to grasp at power, for the same persons who have the power of making laws to have also in their hands the power to execute them, whereby they may exempt themselves from obedience to the laws they make,” Locke wrote. He advocated for the separation of powers into Legislative (make the laws), Executive (implement them), and Federative (manage foreign affairs) functions. He laid important intellectual groundwork for later theories on separation of powers, and was an inspiration for those like Montesquieu. Jean-Jacques Rousseau Compassion as a basic qualityPhilosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau takes yet another angle. He argues that humans would have been free and largely content in a state of nature as self-preservation and a sense of compassion (pitié) would deter them from mindless violence. Cooperation, he says, would have been limited and life would have been, largely, solitary. In his highly influential works Discourse on Inequality (1755) and On the Social Contract (1762), Rousseau argues that it is civilisation that corrupts people, enabling their fall from Amour de Soi - a natural mechanism of self-preservation and well-being - to Amour Propre - a form of self-love that is based on external validation. Therefore, the role of the government is to neither assume absolute powers (Hobbes) nor merely protect our pre-existing natural rights (Locke). It is to reconstitute freedom through what Rousseau calls General Will – the collective will of all citizens directed towards a common good or public interest. The General WillRousseau differentiates General Will from Private Will, an individual’s self-serving desire, and Will of All, which is a sum of all Private Wills. To enable the General Will, he advocates for a model of direct, participatory democracy in which citizens themselves exercise sovereign authority. Rousseau’s model has two bodies – a Sovereign and a Government. The Sovereign is a collective body of the whole people. According to Rousseau, in a legitimate state, every citizen is a member of the sovereign. It is the heart of the State and represents legislative power. Meanwhile, the Government represents executive power. It is an intermediate body established for administrative purposes. Rousseau calls the members of this body “magistrates” (or “kings” where the government takes a monarchical form). Unlike the state, which exists in its own right, the government exists only through the sovereign. Therefore, there was no question of people’s right of revolution, because in this model, people themselves are the Sovereign. They are the authors of the laws that govern them. The Government, Rousseau acknowledged, could try to usurp sovereign power and work against the General Will of the people. “Just as the individual will is constantly acting in opposition to the general will, so the government is continually exerting itself against Sovereignty. The more strenuously it does this, the more the constitution changes,” Rousseau says in Social Contract. But since the Government is just an intermediate body, “The sovereign can limit this power, modify it or take it back, just as it wishes.” Which means, citizens retain the right to strip the magistrates of their power, and reclaim their freedom.Rousseau was deeply sceptical of representative governments. He argued that sovereignty cannot truly be represented, it should ideally be exercised directly by citizens. Commenting on England’s Constitutional Monarchy, he wrote: “The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it.”Au contraireHow would you apply social contract theory to India under British rule or to South Africa under apartheid regimes? It was clear that these governments did not have the consent of the people it ruled. Philosophers such as Charles Mills have argued that social contract theory, as classically formulated, is Eurocentric. It excluded colonised and racialised peoples from that agreement.Even before Mills, Scottish philosopher David Hume, argued that almost no government in history was actually founded on the voluntary consent of its people. Instead, he believed governments more commonly emerge through conquest, usurpation, or the gradual consolidation of power than through any explicit agreement among citizens. Hume also famously challenged John Locke’s idea of tacit consent – the notion that people implicitly consent to government by remaining within its territory and enjoying the benefits of civil society. He says, imagine a man was carried into a ship while asleep. When he wakes up at sea, he is told that he must obey the captain or jump into the sea. In such a case, can you really claim the man has “consented” to stay on board just because he didn’t jump into the water to drown? Similarly, for people who lack the wealth, language skills, or freedom to simply leave their country, staying put may not really be a free choice.Social contract and constitutionalism If the social contract is understood as a normative or heuristic theory of political legitimacy, a written Constitution may be seen as one of its most practical institutional expressions. As Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said while delivering the Objective Resolution of the Constitution on December 13, 1946: “All power and authority of the Sovereign Independent India…and organs of government, are derived from the people.”