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Definition: social contract from Philip's Encyclopedia

Concept that society is based on the surrender of natural freedoms by the individual to the organized group or state in exchange for personal security. It can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and was developed by Hobbes, Locke, and by Rousseau in The Social Contract (1762).


social contract

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
The idea that government authority derives originally from an agreement between ruler and ruled in which the former agrees to provide order in return for obedience from the latter. It has been used to support both absolutism (Thomas Hobbes ) and democracy (John Locke , Jean-Jacques Rousseau ). The term was revived in the UK in 1974 when a head-on clash between the Conservative government and the trade unions resulted in a general election which enabled a Labour government to take power. It now denotes an unofficial agreement (hence also called ‘social compact’) between a government and organized labour that, in return for control of prices, rents, and so on, the unions would refrain from economically disruptive wage demands. Thomas Hobbes The social contract derives its moral force from being one to which a free individual would reasonably consent. In Hobbes's version the position of free individuals ‘in a state of nature’ is presented as so dire that they contract to submit all except…
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Full text Article Social Contract

From World of Sociology, Gale
Social contract theories emerged during the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes , John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau questioned why individuals accepted the political authority of those who ruled. While each philosopher attached a…
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Full text Article social contract

From Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology
This concept derives from political theory to explain the acquiescence of free citizens in the political authority of the state . Under the unwritten contract, the citizen trades unfettered freedom for the freedom that derives from the rights and obligations of citizenship under the protection of…
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Full text Article social contract

From The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology
Contract theory seeks to explain the origins and binding force of mutual obligations and rights in society. T. Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), argued that in the pre-social ‘state of nature’ people enjoy absolute personal freedom, but this very freedom means that they are exposed to the threat of…
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Full text Article social contract

From Political Philosophy A-Z
The notion of a ‘social contract’ – a contract made by citizens to transfer certain rights to a state – provides a way of considering the rights and obligations of a state towards its citizens, and their rights and obligations towards it. Hobbes ’s, Locke ’s and Rousseau ’s accounts of the social…
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Full text Article social contract

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
agreement or covenant by which men are said to have abandoned the “state of nature” to form the society in which they now live. The theory of such a contract, first formulated by the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes (in the Leviathan , 1651) and John Locke , assumes that men at first lived in a…
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Full text Article social contract

From Encyclopedia of American Government and Civics
The social contract is not an actual contract, but a way to conceive the relationship between the ruler and the ruled characteristic of the modern social contract theorists Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Each of these theorists postulates a…
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From Encyclopedia of Ethics
The label “social contract” is applied to a wide variety of theories concerning legitimate government, justice, and political obligation. It is not easy to say, however, what features or family resemblances might justify their all having this label in common. In fact, as will become evident from the…
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Full text Article SOCIAL CONTRACT

From The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment
One of the outstanding characteristics of the American Enlightenment, recognized both by the colonists and by European onlookers, was the attempt of the Americans to transform Enlightenment theory into practice. And among the enlightened theories of the day none was more important in 1776 when the…
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Full text Article Social Contract

From American Governance
The concept of the social contract, in the distinctively modern form in which it is ordinarily understood, reconsiders political power from the standpoint of the individual rather than as a given expression of an established organic community. The idea of government resting on popular consent…
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Full text Article social contract

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Actual or hypothetical compact between the ruled and their rulers. The original inspiration for the notion may derive from the biblical covenant between God and Abraham , but it is most closely associated with the writings of Thomas Hobbes , John Locke , and Jean-Jacques Rousseau . Hobbes argued…
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