A Social Contract Is an Agreement between Citizens and
-
The most fundamental alliance, the Social Pact, is the agreement to come together and form a people, a collectivity which, by definition, is more than different from a mere accumulation of individual interests and wills. This act, in which individuals become a people, is “the very foundation of society” (59). Through the collective renunciation of individual rights and freedoms that one has in the state of nature, and the transfer of these rights to the collective body, a new “person” emerges, so to speak. The sovereign is thus formed when free and equal persons come together and agree to recreate themselves as one body focused on the good of all those who are considered together. Just as the individual will is directed towards individual interests, so the general will, once formed, is directed towards the common good, is collectively understood and agreed. This version of the social contract contains the idea of mutual duties: the sovereign is committed to the good of the individuals who do it, and each individual is also committed to the good of the whole. In view of the above, individuals cannot have the freedom to decide whether it is in their own interest to discharge their duties to the sovereign while enjoying the benefits of citizenship. They must be made to conform to the general will, they must be “forced to be free” (64). Thus, the ultimate goal of social contract theories is to show in the more general than social sense (moral, political, legal, etc.). Rules can be rationally justified. However, this does not distinguish the social contract from other approaches to moral and political philosophy, all of which attempt to show that moral and political rules are rationally justifiable in some sense. The real peculiarity of the social contract approach is that justification is not based on exogenous reason or truth.
Justification is created by rational agreement (or the absence of rejection in T.M. Scanlon`s version), not by the reasons that generate consent. That is, the fact that everyone in a society would accept a particular rule or principle based on their individual reasoning is the crucial justification for that rule and not certain just or reasonable reasons that sufficiently rational individuals would appreciate and, if valued, would lead to a correspondence. Quentin Skinner argued that several critical modern innovations in contract theory can be found in the writings of French Calvinists and Huguenots, whose work was in turn invoked by writers in the Netherlands who opposed their submission to Spain, and later by Catholics in England. [11] Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) of the Salamanca School could be considered an early theorist of the social contract, who theorized natural law in order to restrict the divine right of absolute monarchy. All these groups were led to articulate notions of popular sovereignty through a social alliance or contract, and all these arguments began with proto-“state of nature” arguments, in the sense that the basis of politics is that everyone is inherently free to submit to a government. At this point, the debate seems to focus on two positions that we might call the positions of robustness and sensitivity. According to proponents of robustness, moral actors, regardless of which moral agents disagree, can safely assume that they are all committed to the basic standards of rationality (Moehler 2017, 2013). We should therefore adopt the same fundamental and common idea of rationality and agency: if people do not achieve more moralistic ideals and virtues, the Treaty will still work. It will be robust. According to this view, we had better follow Hume (1741) if we assume that every human being is an instrumental thief, although this maxim is indeed false. The position of sensitivity rejects this and believes that if the individuals in I* are indeed not resolutely selfish, the problems of I, decidedly selfish individuals, and their contractual solutions for I* will be inappropriate.
Perhaps, while I can rely on social trust, selfish entrepreneurs will find it elusive and offer second-choice alternatives that trusted people would find stupid and ineffective. In fact, the sensitivity theorist may insist that while selfish agents may persuade themselves to act as moral agents, they do so for the wrong reasons (Gaus 2011, 185ff). The starting point of most social contract theories is an examination of the human condition without a political order (called by Thomas Hobbes “the state of nature”). [4] In this state, the actions of the individual are bound only by his personal power and conscience. From this common starting point, social contract theorists seek to show why rational individuals would willingly agree to give up their natural freedom in order to gain the benefits of the political order. Prominent theorists of the social contract and natural rights of the 17th and 18th centuries were Hugo Grotius (1625), Thomas Hobbes (1651), Samuel von Pufendorf (1673), John Locke (1689), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), and Immanuel Kant (1797), each of whom approached the concept of political authority differently. Grotius postulated that individual human beings have natural rights. Thomas Hobbes said that in a “state of nature,” human life would be “lonely, poor, evil, brutal, and short.” Without political order and law, everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the “right to all things” and thus the freedom to plunder, rape and kill; there would be an endless “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes). To avoid this, free people make contracts with each other to establish a political community (civil society) through a social contract in which they receive all the security in exchange for submitting to an absolute ruler, a man or a gathering of men.
Although the ruler`s edicts may be arbitrary and tyrannical, Hobbes saw absolute government as the only alternative to the frightening anarchy of a state of nature. Hobbes claimed that people agree to give up their rights in favor of the absolute authority of the government (whether monarchical or parliamentary). .