Social contract theory

Social contract theory has been the dominant state theory for the past 2500 years, ever since Plato was the first to put it in writing. At its barest, it claims that the state is the result of an agreement among humans to form states in order to achieve a purpose (of some sort). Thus, because the agreement is artificial, a construct achieved by a group of humans, the state, it is argued, is artificial too. Plato’s epigones (almost every political philosopher ever since, including Aristotle, Cicero, St Augustine, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx—practically everybody up until the days of Rawls, as well as, science-specific experts such as Weber, Kelsen and Hayek, but also empiricists such as Hume and Bentham; regarding Aristotle, although he (alone) claimed that the state is natural to humans, he connected it with a purpose anyway, to secure the good life) never really got away from the ‘agreement’ idea. In essence, they either popularised and expanded, or viewed from a different angle the same, basic idea, namely that the state is an artificial association of humans, a group of humans deliberately formed on the basis of an underlying agreement among them for a particular reason and purpose.

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