Social contract

In plain terms

Imagine people with no government at all, deciding whether to have one and on what terms. Whatever they would agree to is what a legitimate political order looks like.

That device does a lot of work. It makes authority answerable to those subject to it, it rules out anything nobody could accept, and it gives a standard for criticising existing arrangements that does not depend on tradition or divine appointment.

The obvious objection is that it never happened. No one signed anything, and the people alive now inherited arrangements made by people long dead. The modern reply is that the contract was never meant as history - it is a test. Could this arrangement be justified to everyone it binds? If not, it is not legitimate, whatever its origins.

As a philosopher would put it

Hobbes's covenant is among subjects, authorising a sovereign who is not party to it and therefore cannot breach it. Locke's is a two-stage account with a trust that can be forfeited, grounding a right of resistance Hobbes denies. Rousseau's general will is not an aggregate of preferences but what citizens will as citizens, and it makes sovereignty inalienable.

Rawls's revival is methodological. The original position with its veil of ignorance is explicitly hypothetical: not what anyone did agree to but what parties would choose if they did not know their place, talents or conception of the good, which models fairness by removing the information that biases bargaining.

Scanlon's contractualism shifts the test to what nobody could reasonably reject. And Pateman's Sexual Contract argues that the classical contract presupposed a prior arrangement subordinating women which its universal language concealed - so the story of free agreement rests on a relation nobody agreed to.

What is actually disputed

Whether a hypothetical agreement can bind.

The device's defenders say it was never about consent but about justifiability: an arrangement no one could reasonably reject has a claim on everyone. Critics reply that a hypothetical contract is not a contract, that the conclusions follow from how the choosing parties are described, and that stipulating the description is where the real work happens.

Hume's original objection remains: consent is a fiction, and people obey because they were born into arrangements they cannot escape.

The feminist and postcolonial critiques cut at the setup rather than the conclusion. If the parties in the state of nature are implicitly heads of households, the contract's universality is a description of who was already counted; and if whole populations were treated as outside the agreement entirely, the theory records a settlement rather than justifying one.