What is the social contract?

The social contract is the political theory that legitimate government rests on an agreement between free individuals and the authority that governs them, where people accept certain limits on absolute liberty in exchange for the protection of their lives, freedoms, and property. The idea was developed by seventeenth and eighteenth century thinkers whose work shaped the American Founding.

Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan in 1651 that life in a state of nature, without government, was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, and that people therefore consent to a sovereign who keeps order. John Locke responded in his Second Treatise of Government in 1689 with a more limited version. People in nature have natural rights to life, liberty, and property; they form government to secure those rights; and government holds power only as a trust from the people, who may withdraw that trust if government violates its terms. Jean-Jacques Rousseau took a different turn in The Social Contract in 1762, locating sovereignty in the general will of the people themselves rather than in a transferred sovereign.

Locke's version reached the colonies through pamphleteers, sermons, and political writers, and Thomas Jefferson built it into the Declaration of Independence. The famous claim that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed and that people may alter or abolish a government that becomes destructive of those ends is pure social contract theory.

The Constitution is the written form of an American social contract. Its Preamble, beginning We the People do ordain and establish this Constitution, frames the document as an act of collective consent. Each new state's admission, each elected official's oath of office, and each citizen's naturalization oath renew the bargain.

The contract has always been imperfect. Original protections excluded enslaved people, women, and Native Americans, and successive amendments and laws have expanded who is fully party to the agreement.

The theory still does serious work in American political argument. Almost any debate about police authority, taxation, immigration, or compulsory vaccination can be reframed as a question about the boundaries of what the social contract requires citizens to accept and what government must in return provide.