essay on social contract theory

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Social contract theory.

Social contract theory, nearly as old as philosophy itself, is the view that persons’ moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement among them to form the society in which they live. Socrates uses something quite like a social contract argument to explain to Crito why he must remain in prison and accept the death penalty. However, social contract theory is rightly associated with modern moral and political theory and is given its first full exposition and defense by Thomas Hobbes. After Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are the best known proponents of this enormously influential theory, which has been one of the most dominant theories within moral and political theory throughout the history of the modern West. In the twentieth century, moral and political theory regained philosophical momentum as a result of John Rawls’ Kantian version of social contract theory, and was followed by new analyses of the subject by David Gauthier and others. More recently, philosophers from different perspectives have offered new criticisms of social contract theory. In particular, feminists and race-conscious philosophers have argued that social contract theory is at least an incomplete picture of our moral and political lives, and may in fact camouflage some of the ways in which the contract is itself parasitical upon the subjugations of classes of persons.

Table of Contents

• Socrates’ Argument
• Thomas Hobbes
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice
• David Gauthier
• The Sexual Contract
• The Nature of the Liberal Individual
• Arguing from Care
• Race-Conscious Argument
• References and Further Reading

1. Socrates’ Argument

In the early Platonic dialogue, Crito , Socrates makes a compelling argument as to why he must stay in prison and accept the death penalty, rather than escape and go into exile in another Greek city. He personifies the Laws of Athens, and, speaking in their voice, explains that he has acquired an overwhelming obligation to obey the Laws because they have made his entire way of life, and even the fact of his very existence, possible. They made it possible for his mother and father to marry, and therefore to have legitimate children, including himself. Having been born, the city of Athens, through its laws, then required that his father care for and educate him. Socrates’ life and the way in which that life has flourished in Athens are each dependent upon the Laws. Importantly, however, this relationship between citizens and the Laws of the city are not coerced. Citizens, once they have grown up, and have seen how the city conducts itself, can choose whether to leave, taking their property with them, or stay. Staying implies an agreement to abide by the Laws and accept the punishments that they mete out. And, having made an agreement that is itself just, Socrates asserts that he must keep to this agreement that he has made and obey the Laws, in this case, by staying and accepting the death penalty. Importantly, the contract described by Socrates is an implicit one: it is implied by his choice to stay in Athens, even though he is free to leave.

In Plato’s most well-known dialogue, Republic , social contract theory is represented again, although this time less favorably. In Book II, Glaucon offers a candidate for an answer to the question “what is justice?” by representing a social contract explanation for the nature of justice. What men would most want is to be able to commit injustices against others without the fear of reprisal, and what they most want to avoid is being treated unjustly by others without being able to do injustice in return. Justice then, he says, is the conventional result of the laws and covenants that men make in order to avoid these extremes. Being unable to commit injustice with impunity (as those who wear the ring of Gyges would), and fearing becoming victims themselves, men decide that it is in their interests to submit themselves to the convention of justice. Socrates rejects this view, and most of the rest of the dialogue centers on showing that justice is worth having for its own sake, and that the just man is the happy man. So, from Socrates’ point of view, justice has a value that greatly exceeds the prudential value that Glaucon assigns to it.

These views, in the Crito and the Republic , might seem at first glance inconsistent: in the former dialogue Socrates uses a social contract type of argument to show why it is just for him to remain in prison, whereas in the latter he rejects social contract as the source of justice. These two views are, however, reconcilable. From Socrates’ point of view, a just man is one who will, among other things, recognize his obligation to the state by obeying its laws. The state is the morally and politically most fundamental entity, and as such deserves our highest allegiance and deepest respect. Just men know this and act accordingly. Justice, however, is more than simply obeying laws in exchange for others obeying them as well. Justice is the state of a well-regulated soul, and so the just man will also necessarily be the happy man. So, justice is more than the simple reciprocal obedience to law, as Glaucon suggests, but it does nonetheless include obedience to the state and the laws that sustain it. So in the end, although Plato is perhaps the first philosopher to offer a representation of the argument at the heart of social contract theory, Socrates ultimately rejects the idea that social contract is the original source of justice.

2. Modern Social Contract Theory

A. thomas hobbes.

Thomas Hobbes , 1588-1679, lived during the most crucial period of early modern England’s history: the English Civil War, waged from 1642-1648. To describe this conflict in the most general of terms, it was a clash between the King and his supporters, the Monarchists, who preferred the traditional authority of a monarch, and the Parliamentarians, most notably led by Oliver Cromwell, who demanded more power for the quasi-democratic institution of Parliament. Hobbes represents a compromise between these two factions. On the one hand he rejects the theory of the Divine Right of Kings, which is most eloquently expressed by Robert Filmer in his Patriarcha or the Natural Power of Kings , (although it would be left to John Locke to refute Filmer directly). Filmer’s view held that a king’s authority was invested in him (or, presumably, her) by God, that such authority was absolute, and therefore that the basis of political obligation lay in our obligation to obey God absolutely. According to this view, then, political obligation is subsumed under religious obligation. On the other hand, Hobbes also rejects the early democratic view, taken up by the Parliamentarians, that power ought to be shared between Parliament and the King. In rejecting both these views, Hobbes occupies the ground of one who is both radical and conservative. He argues, radically for his times, that political authority and obligation are based on the individual self-interests of members of society who are understood to be equal to one another, with no single individual invested with any essential authority to rule over the rest, while at the same time maintaining the conservative position that the monarch, which he called the Sovereign, must be ceded absolute authority if society is to survive.

Hobbes’ political theory is best understood if taken in two parts: his theory of human motivation, Psychological Egoism , and his theory of the social contract, founded on the hypothetical State of Nature. Hobbes has, first and foremost, a particular theory of human nature, which gives rise to a particular view of morality and politics, as developed in his philosophical masterpiece, Leviathan , published in 1651. The Scientific Revolution, with its important new discoveries that the universe could be both described and predicted in accordance with universal laws of nature, greatly influenced Hobbes. He sought to provide a theory of human nature that would parallel the discoveries being made in the sciences of the inanimate universe. His psychological theory is therefore informed by mechanism, the general view that everything in the universe is produced by nothing other than matter in motion. According to Hobbes, this extends to human behavior. Human macro-behavior can be aptly described as the effect of certain kinds of micro-behavior, even though some of this latter behavior is invisible to us. So, such behaviors as walking, talking, and the like are themselves produced by other actions inside of us. And these other actions are themselves caused by the interaction of our bodies with other bodies, human or otherwise, which create in us certain chains of causes and effects, and which eventually give rise to the human behavior that we can plainly observe. We, including all of our actions and choices, are then, according to this view, as explainable in terms of universal laws of nature as are the motions of heavenly bodies. The gradual disintegration of memory, for example, can be explained by inertia. As we are presented with ever more sensory information, the residue of earlier impressions ‘slows down’ over time. From Hobbes’ point of view, we are essentially very complicated organic machines, responding to the stimuli of the world mechanistically and in accordance with universal laws of human nature.

In Hobbes’ view, this mechanistic quality of human psychology implies the subjective nature of normative claims. ‘Love’ and ‘hate’, for instance, are just words we use to describe the things we are drawn to and repelled by, respectively. So, too, the terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ have no meaning other than to describe our appetites and aversions. Moral terms do not, therefore, describe some objective state of affairs, but are rather reflections of individual tastes and preferences.

In addition to Subjectivism, Hobbes also infers from his mechanistic theory of human nature that humans are necessarily and exclusively self-interested. All men pursue only what they perceive to be in their own individually considered best interests – they respond mechanistically by being drawn to that which they desire and repelled by that to which they are averse. This is a universal claim: it is meant to cover all human actions under all circumstances – in society or out of it, with regard to strangers and friends alike, with regard to small ends and the most generalized of human desires, such as the desire for power and status. Everything we do is motivated solely by the desire to better our own situations, and satisfy as many of our own, individually considered desires as possible. We are infinitely appetitive and only genuinely concerned with our own selves. According to Hobbes, even the reason that adults care for small children can be explicated in terms of the adults’ own self-interest (he claims that in saving an infant by caring for it, we become the recipient of a strong sense of obligation in one who has been helped to survive rather than allowed to die).

In addition to being exclusively self-interested, Hobbes also argues that human beings are reasonable. They have in them the rational capacity to pursue their desires as efficiently and maximally as possible. Their reason does not, given the subjective nature of value, evaluate their given ends, rather it merely acts as “Scouts, and Spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things Desired” (139). Rationality is purely instrumental. It can add and subtract, and compare sums one to another, and thereby endows us with the capacity to formulate the best means to whatever ends we might happen to have.

From these premises of human nature, Hobbes goes on to construct a provocative and compelling argument for why we ought to be willing to submit ourselves to political authority. He does this by imagining persons in a situation prior to the establishment of society, the State of Nature.

According to Hobbes, the justification for political obligation is this: given that men are naturally self-interested, yet they are rational, they will choose to submit to the authority of a Sovereign in order to be able to live in a civil society, which is conducive to their own interests. Hobbes argues for this by imagining men in their natural state, or in other words, the State of Nature. In the State of Nature, which is purely hypothetical according to Hobbes, men are naturally and exclusively self-interested, they are more or less equal to one another, (even the strongest man can be killed in his sleep), there are limited resources, and yet there is no power able to force men to cooperate. Given these conditions in the State of Nature, Hobbes concludes that the State of Nature would be unbearably brutal. In the State of Nature, every person is always in fear of losing his life to another. They have no capacity to ensure the long-term satisfaction of their needs or desires. No long-term or complex cooperation is possible because the State of Nature can be aptly described as a state of utter distrust. Given Hobbes’ reasonable assumption that most people want first and foremost to avoid their own deaths, he concludes that the State of Nature is the worst possible situation in which men can find themselves. It is the state of perpetual and unavoidable war.

The situation is not, however, hopeless. Because men are reasonable, they can see their way out of such a state by recognizing the laws of nature, which show them the means by which to escape the State of Nature and create a civil society. The first and most important law of nature commands that each man be willing to pursue peace when others are willing to do the same, all the while retaining the right to continue to pursue war when others do not pursue peace. Being reasonable, and recognizing the rationality of this basic precept of reason, men can be expected to construct a Social Contract that will afford them a life other than that available to them in the State of Nature. This contract is constituted by two distinguishable contracts. First, they must agree to establish society by collectively and reciprocally renouncing the rights they had against one another in the State of Nature. Second, they must imbue some one person or assembly of persons with the authority and power to enforce the initial contract. In other words, to ensure their escape from the State of Nature, they must both agree to live together under common laws, and create an enforcement mechanism for the social contract and the laws that constitute it. Since the sovereign is invested with the authority and power to mete out punishments for breaches of the contract which are worse than not being able to act as one pleases, men have good, albeit self-interested, reason to adjust themselves to the artifice of morality in general, and justice in particular. Society becomes possible because, whereas in the State of Nature there was no power able to “overawe them all”, now there is an artificially and conventionally superior and more powerful person who can force men to cooperate. While living under the authority of a Sovereign can be harsh (Hobbes argues that because men’s passions can be expected to overwhelm their reason, the Sovereign must have absolute authority in order for the contract to be successful) it is at least better than living in the State of Nature. And, no matter how much we may object to how poorly a Sovereign manages the affairs of the state and regulates our own lives, we are never justified in resisting his power because it is the only thing which stands between us and what we most want to avoid, the State of Nature.

According to this argument, morality, politics, society, and everything that comes along with it, all of which Hobbes calls ‘commodious living’ are purely conventional. Prior to the establishment of the basic social contract, according to which men agree to live together and the contract to embody a Sovereign with absolute authority, nothing is immoral or unjust – anything goes. After these contracts are established, however, then society becomes possible, and people can be expected to keep their promises, cooperate with one another, and so on. The Social Contract is the most fundamental source of all that is good and that which we depend upon to live well. Our choice is either to abide by the terms of the contract, or return to the State of Nature, which Hobbes argues no reasonable person could possibly prefer.

Given his rather severe view of human nature, Hobbes nonetheless manages to create an argument that makes civil society, along with all its advantages, possible. Within the context of the political events of his England, he also managed to argue for a continuation of the traditional form of authority that his society had long since enjoyed, while nonetheless placing it on what he saw as a far more acceptable foundation.

b. John Locke

For Hobbes, the necessity of an absolute authority, in the form of a Sovereign, followed from the utter brutality of the State of Nature. The State of Nature was completely intolerable, and so rational men would be willing to submit themselves even to absolute authority in order to escape it. For John Locke , 1632-1704, the State of Nature is a very different type of place, and so his argument concerning the social contract and the nature of men’s relationship to authority are consequently quite different. While Locke uses Hobbes’ methodological device of the State of Nature, as do virtually all social contract theorists, he uses it to a quite different end. Locke’s arguments for the social contract, and for the right of citizens to revolt against their king were enormously influential on the democratic revolutions that followed, especially on Thomas Jefferson, and the founders of the United States.

Locke’s most important and influential political writings are contained in his Two Treatises on Government . The first treatise is concerned almost exclusively with refuting the argument of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha , that political authority was derived from religious authority, also known by the description of the Divine Right of Kings, which was a very dominant theory in seventeenth-century England. The second treatise contains Locke’s own constructive view of the aims and justification for civil government, and is titled “An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government”.

According to Locke, the State of Nature, the natural condition of mankind, is a state of perfect and complete liberty to conduct one’s life as one best sees fit, free from the interference of others. This does not mean, however, that it is a state of license: one is not free to do anything at all one pleases, or even anything that one judges to be in one’s interest. The State of Nature, although a state wherein there is no civil authority or government to punish people for transgressions against laws, is not a state without morality. The State of Nature is pre-political, but it is not pre-moral. Persons are assumed to be equal to one another in such a state, and therefore equally capable of discovering and being bound by the Law of Nature. The Law of Nature, which is on Locke’s view the basis of all morality, and given to us by God, commands that we not harm others with regards to their “life, health, liberty, or possessions” (par. 6). Because we all belong equally to God, and because we cannot take away that which is rightfully His, we are prohibited from harming one another. So, the State of Nature is a state of liberty where persons are free to pursue their own interests and plans, free from interference, and, because of the Law of Nature and the restrictions that it imposes upon persons, it is relatively peaceful.

The State of Nature therefore, is not the same as the state of war, as it is according to Hobbes. It can, however devolve into a state of war, in particular, a state of war over property disputes. Whereas the State of Nature is the state of liberty where persons recognize the Law of Nature and therefore do not harm one another, the state of war begins between two or more men once one man declares war on another, by stealing from him, or by trying to make him his slave. Since in the State of Nature there is no civil power to whom men can appeal, and since the Law of Nature allows them to defend their own lives, they may then kill those who would bring force against them. Since the State of Nature lacks civil authority, once war begins it is likely to continue. And this is one of the strongest reasons that men have to abandon the State of Nature by contracting together to form civil government.

Property plays an essential role in Locke’s argument for civil government and the contract that establishes it. According to Locke, private property is created when a person mixes his labor with the raw materials of nature. So, for example, when one tills a piece of land in nature, and makes it into a piece of farmland, which produces food, then one has a claim to own that piece of land and the food produced upon it. (This led Locke to conclude that America didn’t really belong to the natives who lived there, because they were, on his view, failing to utilize the basic material of nature. In other words, they didn’t farm it, so they had no legitimate claim to it, and others could therefore justifiably appropriate it.) Given the implications of the Law of Nature, there are limits as to how much property one can own: one is not allowed to take more from nature than one can use, thereby leaving others without enough for themselves. Because nature is given to all of mankind by God for its common subsistence, one cannot take more than his own fair share. Property is the linchpin of Locke’s argument for the social contract and civil government because it is the protection of their property, including their property in their own bodies, that men seek when they decide to abandon the State of Nature.

According to Locke, the State of Nature is not a condition of individuals, as it is for Hobbes. Rather, it is populated by mothers and fathers with their children, or families – what he calls “conjugal society” (par. 78). These societies are based on the voluntary agreements to care for children together, and they are moral but not political. Political society comes into being when individual men, representing their families, come together in the State of Nature and agree to each give up the executive power to punish those who transgress the Law of Nature, and hand over that power to the public power of a government. Having done this, they then become subject to the will of the majority. In other words, by making a compact to leave the State of Nature and form society, they make “one body politic under one government” (par. 97) and submit themselves to the will of that body. One joins such a body, either from its beginnings, or after it has already been established by others, only by explicit consent. Having created a political society and government through their consent, men then gain three things which they lacked in the State of Nature: laws, judges to adjudicate laws, and the executive power necessary to enforce these laws. Each man therefore gives over the power to protect himself and punish transgressors of the Law of Nature to the government that he has created through the compact.

Given that the end of “men’s uniting into common-wealths”( par. 124) is the preservation of their wealth, and preserving their lives, liberty, and well-being in general, Locke can easily imagine the conditions under which the compact with government is destroyed, and men are justified in resisting the authority of a civil government, such as a King. When the executive power of a government devolves into tyranny, such as by dissolving the legislature and therefore denying the people the ability to make laws for their own preservation, then the resulting tyrant puts himself into a State of Nature, and specifically into a state of war with the people, and they then have the same right to self-defense as they had before making a compact to establish society in the first place. In other words, the justification of the authority of the executive component of government is the protection of the people’s property and well-being, so when such protection is no longer present, or when the king becomes a tyrant and acts against the interests of the people, they have a right, if not an outright obligation, to resist his authority. The social compact can be dissolved and the process to create political society begun anew.

Because Locke did not envision the State of Nature as grimly as did Hobbes, he can imagine conditions under which one would be better off rejecting a particular civil government and returning to the State of Nature, with the aim of constructing a better civil government in its place. It is therefore both the view of human nature, and the nature of morality itself, which account for the differences between Hobbes’ and Locke’s views of the social contract.

c. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau , 1712-1778, lived and wrote during what was arguably the headiest period in the intellectual history of modern France–the Enlightenment. He was one of the bright lights of that intellectual movement, contributing articles to the Encyclopdie of Diderot, and participating in the salons in Paris, where the great intellectual questions of his day were pursued.

Rousseau has two distinct social contract theories. The first is found in his essay, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men , commonly referred to as the Second Discourse, and is an account of the moral and political evolution of human beings over time, from a State of Nature to modern society. As such it contains his naturalized account of the social contract, which he sees as very problematic. The second is his normative , or idealized theory of the social contract, and is meant to provide the means by which to alleviate the problems that modern society has created for us, as laid out in the Social Contract .

Rousseau wrote his Second Discourse in response to an essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. (Rousseau had previously won the same essay contest with an earlier essay, commonly referred to as the First Discourse .) In it he describes the historical process by which man began in a State of Nature and over time ‘progressed’ into civil society. According to Rousseau, the State of Nature was a peaceful and quixotic time. People lived solitary, uncomplicated lives. Their few needs were easily satisfied by nature. Because of the abundance of nature and the small size of the population, competition was non-existent, and persons rarely even saw one another, much less had reason for conflict or fear. Moreover, these simple, morally pure persons were naturally endowed with the capacity for pity, and therefore were not inclined to bring harm to one another.

As time passed, however, humanity faced certain changes. As the overall population increased, the means by which people could satisfy their needs had to change. People slowly began to live together in small families, and then in small communities. Divisions of labor were introduced, both within and between families, and discoveries and inventions made life easier, giving rise to leisure time. Such leisure time inevitably led people to make comparisons between themselves and others, resulting in public values, leading to shame and envy, pride and contempt. Most importantly however, according to Rousseau, was the invention of private property, which constituted the pivotal moment in humanity’s evolution out of a simple, pure state into one characterized by greed, competition, vanity, inequality, and vice. For Rousseau the invention of property constitutes humanity’s ‘fall from grace’ out of the State of Nature.

Having introduced private property, initial conditions of inequality became more pronounced. Some have property and others are forced to work for them, and the development of social classes begins. Eventually, those who have property notice that it would be in their interests to create a government that would protect private property from those who do not have it but can see that they might be able to acquire it by force. So, government gets established, through a contract, which purports to guarantee equality and protection for all, even though its true purpose is to fossilize the very inequalities that private property has produced. In other words, the contract, which claims to be in the interests of everyone equally, is really in the interests of the few who have become stronger and richer as a result of the developments of private property. This is the naturalized social contract, which Rousseau views as responsible for the conflict and competition from which modern society suffers.

The normative social contract, argued for by Rousseau in The Social Contract (1762), is meant to respond to this sorry state of affairs and to remedy the social and moral ills that have been produced by the development of society. The distinction between history and justification, between the factual situation of mankind and how it ought to live together, is of the utmost importance to Rousseau. While we ought not to ignore history, nor ignore the causes of the problems we face, we must resolve those problems through our capacity to choose how we ought to live. Might never makes right, despite how often it pretends that it can.

The Social Contract begins with the most oft-quoted line from Rousseau: “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains” (49). This claim is the conceptual bridge between the descriptive work of the Second Discourse, and the prescriptive work that is to come. Humans are essentially free, and were free in the State of Nature, but the ‘progress’ of civilization has substituted subservience to others for that freedom, through dependence, economic and social inequalities, and the extent to which we judge ourselves through comparisons with others. Since a return to the State of Nature is neither feasible nor desirable, the purpose of politics is to restore freedom to us, thereby reconciling who we truly and essentially are with how we live together. So, this is the fundamental philosophical problem that The Social Contract seeks to address: how can we be free and live together? Or, put another way, how can we live together without succumbing to the force and coercion of others? We can do so, Rousseau maintains, by submitting our individual, particular wills to the collective or general will, created through agreement with other free and equal persons. Like Hobbes and Locke before him, and in contrast to the ancient philosophers, all men are made by nature to be equals, therefore no one has a natural right to govern others, and therefore the only justified authority is the authority that is generated out of agreements or covenants.

The most basic covenant, the social pact, is the agreement to come together and form a people, a collectivity, which by definition is more than and different from a mere aggregation of individual interests and wills. This act, where individual persons become a people is “the real foundation of society” (59). Through the collective renunciation of the individual rights and freedom that one has in the State of Nature, and the transfer of these rights to the collective body, a new ‘person’, as it were, is formed. The sovereign is thus formed when free and equal persons come together and agree to create themselves anew as a single body, directed to the good of all considered together. So, just as individual wills are directed towards individual interests, the general will, once formed, is directed towards the common good, understood and agreed to collectively. Included in this version of the social contract is the idea of reciprocated duties: the sovereign is committed to the good of the individuals who constitute it, and each individual is likewise committed to the good of the whole. Given this, individuals cannot be given liberty to decide whether it is in their own interests to fulfill their duties to the Sovereign, while at the same time being allowed to reap the benefits of citizenship. They must be made to conform themselves to the general will, they must be “forced to be free” (64).

For Rousseau, this implies an extremely strong and direct form of democracy. One cannot transfer one’s will to another, to do with as he or she sees fit, as one does in representative democracies. Rather, the general will depends on the coming together periodically of the entire democratic body, each and every citizen, to decide collectively, and with at least near unanimity, how to live together, i.e., what laws to enact. As it is constituted only by individual wills, these private, individual wills must assemble themselves regularly if the general will is to continue. One implication of this is that the strong form of democracy which is consistent with the general will is also only possible in relatively small states. The people must be able to identify with one another, and at least know who each other are. They cannot live in a large area, too spread out to come together regularly, and they cannot live in such different geographic circumstances as to be unable to be united under common laws. (Could the present-day U.S. satisfy Rousseau’s conception of democracy? It could not. ) Although the conditions for true democracy are stringent, they are also the only means by which we can, according to Rousseau, save ourselves, and regain the freedom to which we are naturally entitled.

Rousseau’s social contract theories together form a single, consistent view of our moral and political situation. We are endowed with freedom and equality by nature, but our nature has been corrupted by our contingent social history. We can overcome this corruption, however, by invoking our free will to reconstitute ourselves politically, along strongly democratic principles, which is good for us, both individually and collectively.

3. More Recent Social Contract Theories

A. john rawls’ a theory of justice.

In 1972, the publication of John Rawls ‘ extremely influential A Theory of Justice brought moral and political philosophy back from what had been a long hiatus of philosophical consideration. Rawls’ theory relies on a Kantian understanding of persons and their capacities. For Rawls, as for Kant, persons have the capacity to reason from a universal point of view, which in turn means that they have the particular moral capacity of judging principles from an impartial standpoint. In A Theory of Justice , Rawls argues that the moral and political point of view is discovered via impartiality. (It is important to note that this view, delineated in A Theory of Justice , has undergone substantial revisions by Rawls, and that he described his later view as “political liberalism”.) He invokes this point of view (the general view that Thomas Nagel describes as “the view from nowhere”) by imagining persons in a hypothetical situation, the Original Position, which is characterized by the epistemological limitation of the Veil of Ignorance. Rawls’ original position is his highly abstracted version of the State of Nature. It is the position from which we can discover the nature of justice and what it requires of us as individual persons and of the social institutions through which we will live together cooperatively. In the original position, behind the veil of ignorance, one is denied any particular knowledge of one’s circumstances, such as one’s gender, race, particular talents or disabilities, one’s age, social status, one’s particular conception of what makes for a good life, or the particular state of the society in which one lives. Persons are also assumed to be rational and disinterested in one another’s well-being. These are the conditions under which, Rawls argues, one can choose principles for a just society which are themselves chosen from initial conditions that are inherently fair. Because no one has any of the particular knowledge he or she could use to develop principles that favor his or her own particular circumstances, in other words the knowledge that makes for and sustains prejudices, the principles chosen from such a perspective are necessarily fair. For example, if one does not know whether one is female or male in the society for which one must choose basic principles of justice, it makes no sense, from the point of view of self-interested rationality, to endorse a principle that favors one sex at the expense of another, since, once the veil of ignorance is lifted, one might find oneself on the losing end of such a principle. Hence Rawls describes his theory as “justice as fairness.” Because the conditions under which the principles of justice are discovered are basically fair, justice proceeds out of fairness.

In such a position, behind such a veil, everyone is in the same situation, and everyone is presumed to be equally rational. Since everyone adopts the same method for choosing the basic principles for society, everyone will occupy the same standpoint: that of the disembodied, rational, universal human. Therefore all who consider justice from the point of view of the original position would agree upon the same principles of justice generated out of such a thought experiment. Any one person would reach the same conclusion as any other person concerning the most basic principles that must regulate a just society.

The principles that persons in the Original Position, behind the Veil of Ignorance, would choose to regulate a society at the most basic level (that is, prior even to a Constitution) are called by Rawls, aptly enough, the Two Principles of Justice. These two principles determine the distribution of both civil liberties and social and economic goods. The first principle states that each person in a society is to have as much basic liberty as possible, as long as everyone is granted the same liberties. That is, there is to be as much civil liberty as possible as long as these goods are distributed equally. (This would, for example, preclude a scenario under which there was a greater aggregate of civil liberties than under an alternative scenario, but under which such liberties were not distributed equally amongst citizens.) The second principle states that while social and economic inequalities can be just, they must be available to everyone equally (that is, no one is to be on principle denied access to greater economic advantage) and such inequalities must be to the advantage of everyone. This means that economic inequalities are only justified when the least advantaged member of society is nonetheless better off than she would be under alternative arrangements. So, only if a rising tide truly does carry all boats upward, can economic inequalities be allowed for in a just society. The method of the original position supports this second principle, referred to as the Difference Principle, because when we are behind the veil of ignorance, and therefore do not know what our situation in society will be once the veil of ignorance is lifted, we will only accept principles that will be to our advantage even if we end up in the least advantaged position in society.

These two principles are related to each other by a specific order. The first principle, distributing civil liberties as widely as possible consistent with equality, is prior to the second principle, which distributes social and economic goods. In other words, we cannot decide to forgo some of our civil liberties in favor of greater economic advantage. Rather, we must satisfy the demands of the first principle, before we move on to the second. From Rawls’ point of view, this serial ordering of the principles expresses a basic rational preference for certain kinds of goods, i.e., those embodied in civil liberties, over other kinds of goods, i.e., economic advantage.

Having argued that any rational person inhabiting the original position and placing him or herself behind the veil of ignorance can discover the two principles of justice, Rawls has constructed what is perhaps the most abstract version of a social contract theory. It is highly abstract because rather than demonstrating that we would or even have signed to a contract to establish society, it instead shows us what we must be willing to accept as rational persons in order to be constrained by justice and therefore capable of living in a well ordered society. The principles of justice are more fundamental than the social contract as it has traditionally been conceived. Rather, the principles of justice constrain that contract, and set out the limits of how we can construct society in the first place. If we consider, for example, a constitution as the concrete expression of the social contract, Rawls’ two principles of justice delineate what such a constitution can and cannot require of us. Rawls’ theory of justice constitutes, then, the Kantian limits upon the forms of political and social organization that are permissible within a just society.

b. David Gauthier

In his 1986 book, Morals by Agreement , David Gauthier set out to renew Hobbesian moral and political philosophy. In that book, he makes a strong argument that Hobbes was right: we can understand both politics and morality as founded upon an agreement between exclusively self-interested yet rational persons. He improves upon Hobbes’ argument, however, by showing that we can establish morality without the external enforcement mechanism of the Sovereign. Hobbes argued that men’s passions were so strong as to make cooperation between them always in danger of breaking down, and thus that a Sovereign was necessary to force compliance. Gauthier, however, believes that rationality alone convinces persons not only to agree to cooperate, but to stick to their agreements as well.

We should understand ourselves as individual Robinson Crusoes, each living on our own island, lucky or unlucky in terms of our talents and the natural provisions of our islands, but able to enter into negotiations and deals with one another to trade goods and services with one another. Entering into such agreements is to our own advantage, and so rationality convinces us to both make such agreements and stick to them as well.

Gauthier has an advantage over Hobbes when it comes to developing the argument that cooperation between purely self-interested agents is possible. He has access to rational choice theory and its sophisticated methodology for showing how such cooperation can arise. In particular, he appeals to the model of the Prisoner’s Dilemma to show that self-interest can be consistent with acting cooperatively. (There is a reasonable argument to be made that we can find in Hobbes a primitive version of the problem of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.)

According to the story of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, two people have been brought in for questioning, conducted separately, about a crime they are suspected to have committed. The police have solid evidence of a lesser crime that they committed, but need confessions in order to convict them on more serious charges. Each prisoner is told that if she cooperates with the police by informing on the other prisoner, then she will be rewarded by receiving a relatively light sentence of one year in prison, whereas her cohort will go to prison for ten years. If they both remain silent, then there will be no such rewards, and they can each expect to receive moderate sentences of two years. And if they both cooperate with police by informing on each other, then the police will have enough to send each to prison for five years. The dilemma then is this: in order to serve her own interests as well as possible, each prisoner reasons that no matter what the other does she is better off cooperating with the police by confessing. Each reasons: “If she confesses, then I should confess, thereby being sentenced to five years instead of ten. And if she does not confess, then I should confess, thereby being sentenced to one year instead of two. So, no matter what she does, I should confess.” The problem is that when each reason this way, they each confess, and each goes to prison for five years. However, had they each remained silent, thereby cooperating with each other rather than with the police, they would have spent only two years in prison.

According to Gauthier, the important lesson of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is that when one is engaged in interaction such that others’ actions can affect one’s own interests, and vice versa, one does better if one acts cooperatively. By acting to further the interests of the other, one serves one’s own interests as well. We should, therefore, insofar as we are rational, develop within ourselves the dispositions to constrain ourselves when interacting with others. We should become “constrained maximizers” (CMs) rather remain the “straightforward maximizers” (SMs) that we would be in a State of Nature (167).

Both SMs and CMs are exclusively self-interested and rational, but they differ with regard to whether they take into account only strategies, or both the strategies and utilities, of whose with whom they interact. To take into account the others’ strategies is to act in accordance with how you expect the others will act. To take into account their utilities is to consider how they will fare as a result of your action and to allow that to affect your own actions. Both SMs and CMs take into account the strategies of the other with whom they interact. But whereas SMs do not take into account the utilities of those with whom they interact, CMs do. And, whereas CMs are afforded the benefits of cooperation with others, SMs are denied such advantage. According to Gauthier, when interacting in Prisoner’s Dilemma-like situations, where the actions of others can affect one’s own outcome, and vice versa, rationality shows that one’s own interest is best pursued by being cooperative, and therefore agents rationally dispose themselves to the constrain the maximization of their own utility by adopting principles of morality. According to Gauthier, rationality is a force strong enough to give persons internal reasons to cooperate. They do not, therefore, need Hobbes’ Sovereign with absolute authority to sustain their cooperation. The enforcement mechanism has been internalized. “Morals by agreement” are therefore created out of the rationality of exclusively self-interested agents.

4. Contemporary Critiques of Social Contract Theory

Given the longstanding and widespread influence that social contract theory has had, it comes as no surprise that it is also the objects of many critiques from a variety of philosophical perspectives. Feminists and race-conscious philosophers, in particular, have made important arguments concerning the substance and viability of social contract theory.

a. Feminist Arguments

For the most part, feminism resists any simple or universal definition. In general though, feminists take women’s experiences seriously, as well as the impact that theories and practices have for women’s lives. Given the pervasive influence of contract theory on social, political, and moral philosophy, then, it is not surprising that feminists should have a great deal to say about whether contract theory is adequate or appropriate from the point of view of taking women seriously. To survey all of the feminist responses to social contract theory would carry us well beyond the boundaries of the present article. I will concentrate therefore on just three of those arguments: Carole Pateman’s argument about the relation between the contract and women’s subordination to men, feminist arguments concerning the nature of the liberal individual, and the care argument.

i. The Sexual Contract

Carole Pateman’s 1988 book, The Sexual Contract , argues that lying beneath the myth of the idealized contract, as described by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, is a more fundamental contract concerning men’s relationship to women. Contract theory represents itself as being opposed to patriarchy and patriarchal right. (Locke’s social contract, for example, is set by him in stark contrast to the work of Robert Filmer who argued in favor of patriarchal power.) Yet the “original pact” (2) that precedes the social contract entered into by equals is the agreement by men to dominate and control women. This ‘original pact’ is made by brothers, literally or metaphorically, who, after overthrowing the rule of the father, then agree to share their domination of the women who were previously under the exclusive control of one man, the father. The change from “classical patriarchalism” (24) to modern patriarchy is a shift, then, in who has power over women. It is not, however, a fundamental change in whether women are dominated by men. Men’s relationships of power to one another change, but women’s relationship to men’s power does not. Modern patriarchy is characterized by a contractual relationship between men, and part of that contract involves power over women. This fact, that one form of patriarchy was not overthrown completely, but rather was replaced with a different form, in which male power was distributed amongst more men, rather than held by one man, is illustrated by Freud’s story of the genesis of civilization. According to that story, a band of brothers, lorded over by a father who maintained exclusive sexual access to the women of the tribe, kill the father, and then establish a contract among themselves to be equal and to share the women. This is the story, whether we understand Freud’s tale to be historically accurate or not, of modern patriarchy and its deep dependence on contract as the means by which men control and dominate women.

Patriarchal control of women is found in at least three paradigmatic contemporary contracts: the marriage contract, the prostitution contract, and the contract for surrogate motherhood. Each of these contracts is concerned with men’s control of women, or a particular man’s control of a particular woman generalized. According to the terms of the marriage contract, in most states in the U.S., a husband is accorded the right to sexual access, prohibiting the legal category of marital rape. Prostitution is a case in point of Pateman’s claim that modern patriarchy requires equal access by men to women, in particular sexual access, access to their bodies. And surrogate motherhood can be understood as more of the same, although in terms of access to women’s reproductive capacities. All these examples demonstrate that contract is the means by which women are dominated and controlled. Contract is not the path to freedom and equality. Rather, it is one means, perhaps the most fundamental means, by which patriarchy is upheld.

ii. The Nature of the Liberal Individual

Following Pateman’s argument, a number of feminists have also called into question the very nature of the person at the heart of contract theory. The Liberal Individual, the contractor, is represented by the Hobbesian man, Locke’s proprietor, Rousseau’s “Noble Savage,” Rawls’s person in the original position, and Gauthier’s Robinson Crusoe. The liberal individual is purported to be universal: raceless, sexless, classless, disembodied, and is taken to represent an abstract, generalized model of humanity writ large. Many philosophers have argued, however, that when we look more closely at the characteristics of the liberal individual, what we find is not a representation of universal humanity, but a historically located, specific type of person. C.B. Macpherson, for example, has argued that Hobbesian man is, in particular, a bourgeois man, with the characteristics we would expect of a person during the nascent capitalism that characterized early modern Europe. Feminists have also argued that the liberal individual is a particular, historical, and embodied person. (As have race-conscious philosophers, such as Charles Mills, to be discussed below.) More specifically, they have argued that the person at the heart of liberal theory, and the social contract, is gendered. Christine Di Stefano, in her 1991 book Configurations of Masculinity , shows that a number of historically important modern philosophers can be understood to develop their theories from within the perspective of masculinity, as conceived of in the modern period. She argues that Hobbes’s conception of the liberal individual, which laid the groundwork for the dominant modern conception of the person, is particularly masculine in that it is conceived as atomistic and solitary and as not owing any of its qualities, or even its very existence, to any other person, in particular its mother. Hobbes’s human, is therefore, radically individual, in a way that is specifically owing to the character of modern masculinity. Virginia Held, in her 1993 book, Feminist Morality , argues that social contract theory implicitly relies on a conception of the person that can be best described as “economic man.” “Economic man” is concerned first and foremost to maximize his own, individually considered interests, and he enters into contracts as a means by which to achieve this end. “Economic man”, however, fails to represent all persons in all times and places. In particular, it fails to adequately represent children and those who provide them with the care they require, who have historically been women. The model of “economic man” cannot, therefore, fairly claim to be a general representation of all persons. Similarly, Annette Baier argues that Gauthier’s conception of the liberal individual who enters into the social contract as a means by which to maximize his own individually considered interests is gendered in that it does not take seriously the position of either children or the women who most usually are responsible for caring for those children.

iii. Arguing from Care

Theorizing from within the emerging tradition of care ethics, feminist philosophers such as Baier and Held argue that social contract theory fails as an adequate account of our moral or political obligations. Social contract theory, in general, only goes so far as to delineate our rights and obligations. But this may not be enough to adequately reveal the full extent of what it means to be a moral person, and how fully to respond to others with whom one interacts through relations of dependence. Baier argues that Gauthier, who conceives of affective bonds between persons as non-essential and voluntary, therefore fails to represent the fullness of human psychology and motivations. She argues that this therefore leads to a crucial flaw in social contract theory. Liberal moral theory is in fact parasitic upon the very relations between persons from which it seeks to liberate us. While Gauthier argues that we are freer the more that we can see affective relations as voluntary, we must nonetheless, in the first place, be in such relationships (e.g., the mother-child relationship) in order to develop the very capacities and qualities lauded by liberal theory. Certain kinds of relationships of dependence, in other words, are necessary in the first place if we are to become the very kinds of persons who are capable of entering into contracts and agreements. In a similar vein, Held has argued that the model of “economic man” fails to capture much of what constitutes meaningful moral relations between people. Understanding human relations in purely contractual terms constitutes, according to her argument “an impoverished view of human aspiration” (194). She therefore suggests that we consider other models of human relationships when looking for insight into morality. In particular, she offers up the paradigm of the mother-child relationship to at least supplement the model of individual self-interested agents negotiating with one another through contracts. Such a model is more likely to match up with many of the moral experiences of most people, especially women.

Feminist critiques of the contractarian approaches to our collective moral and political lives continue to reverberate through social and political philosophy. One such critique, that of Carole Pateman, has influenced philosophers writing outside of feminist traditions.

b. Race-Conscious Argument

Charles Mills’ 1997 book, The Racial Contract , is a critique not only of the history of Western political thought, institutions, and practices, but, more specifically, of the history of social contract theory. It is inspired by Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract , and seeks to show that non-whites have a similar relationship to the social contract as do women. As such, it also calls into question the supposed universality of the liberal individual who is the agent of contract theory.

Mills’ central argument is that there exists a ‘racial contract’ that is even more fundamental to Western society than the social contract. This racial contract determines in the first place who counts as full moral and political persons, and therefore sets the parameters of who can ‘contract in’ to the freedom and equality that the social contract promises. Some persons, in particular white men, are full persons according to the racial contract. As such they are accorded the right to enter into the social contract, and into particular legal contracts. They are seen as fully human and therefore as deserving of equality and freedom. Their status as full persons accords them greater social power. In particular, it accords them the power to make contracts, to be the subjects of the contract, whereas other persons are denied such privilege and are relegated to the status of objects of contracts.

This racial contract is to some extent a meta-contract, which determines the bounds of personhood and parameters of inclusion and exclusion in all the other contracts that come after it. It manifests itself both formally and informally. It is an agreement, originally among European men in the beginning of the modern period, to identify themselves as ‘white’ and therefore as fully human, and to identify all others, in particular the natives with whom they were beginning to come into contact, as ‘other’: non-white and therefore not fully human. So, race is not just a social construct, as others have argued, it is more especially a political construct, created to serve a particular political end, and the political purposes of a specific group. The contract allows some persons to treat other persons, as well as the lands they inhabit, as resources to be exploited. The enslavement of millions of Africans and the appropriation of the Americas from those who inhabited them, are examples of this racial contract at work in history (such as Locke’s claim that Native Americans did not own the land they lived on because they did not farm it and therefore did not own it). This contract is not hypothetical, as Hobbes describes the one argued for in his Leviathan . This is an actual contract, or series of contracts, made by real men of history. It is found in such documents as Papal Bulls and Locke’s writings on Native Americans, and acted upon in such historical events as the voyages of discovery made by Europeans and the colonization of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The racial contract makes possible and justifies some people, in virtue of their alleged superiority, exploiting the peoples, lands, and resources of other races.

From Mills’ perspective then, racism is not just an unhappy accident of Western democratic and political ideals. It is not the case that we have a political system that was perfectly conceived and unfortunately imperfectly applied. One of the reasons that we continue to think that the problem of race in the West is relatively superficial, that it does not go all the way down, is the hold that the idealized social contract has on our imagination. We continue to believe, according to Mills, in the myths that social contract theory tells us – that everyone is equal, that all will be treated the same before the law, that the Founding Fathers were committed to equality and freedom for all persons, etc. One of the very purposes of social contract theory, then, is to keep hidden from view the true political reality – some persons will be accorded the rights and freedoms of full persons, and the rest will be treated as sub-persons. The racial contract informs the very structure of our political systems, and lays the basis for the continuing racial oppression of non-whites. We cannot respond to it, therefore, by simply adding more non-whites into the mix of our political institutions, representation, and so on. Rather, we must reexamine our politics in general, from the point of view of the racial contract, and start from where we are, with full knowledge of how our society has been informed by the systematic exclusion of some persons from the realm of politics and contract. This “naturalized” feature of the racial contract, meaning that it tells a story about who we actually are and what is included in our history, is better, according to Mills, because it holds the promise of making it possible for us to someday actually live up to the norms and values that are at the heart of the Western political traditions.

5. Conclusion

Virginia Held has argued that “Contemporary Western society is in the grip of contractual thinking” (193). Contractual models have come to inform a vast variety of relations and interaction between persons, from students and their teachers, to authors and their readers. Given this, it would be difficult to overestimate the effect that social contract theory has had, both within philosophy, and on the wider culture. Social contract theory is undoubtedly with us for the foreseeable future. But so too are the critiques of such theory, which will continue to compel us to think and rethink the nature of both ourselves and our relations with one another.

6. References and Further Reading

• Baier, Annette. 1988. “Pilgrim’s Progress: Review of David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy Vol. 18, No. 2. (June 1988): 315-330.
• Baier, Annette. 1994. Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Braybrooke, David. 1976. “The Insoluble Problem of the Social Contract.” Dialogue Vol. XV, No. 1: 3-37.
• DiStefano, Christine. 1991. Configurations of Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Filmer, Robert. ‘Patriarcha’ and Other Writings . Cambridge University Press (1991).
• Gauthier, David. 1986. Morals by Agreement . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gauthier, David. 1988. “Hobbes’s Social Contract.” Noûs 22: 71-82.
• Gauthier, David. 1990. Moral Dealing: Contract, Ethics, and Reason . Cornell: Cornell University Press.
• Gauthier, David. 1991. “Why Contractarianism?” in Vallentyne 1991: 13-30.
• Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Hampton, Jean. 1986. Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hampton, Jean. 1993. “Feminist Contractarianism.” In Antony, Louise M. and Witt, Charlotte (Editors). 1993. A Mind of One’s Own: Essays on Reason and Objectivity . Boulder CO: Westview Press, Inc.: 1993: 227-255.
• Held, Virginia. 1977. “Rationality and Reasonable Cooperation.” Social Research (Winter 1977): 708-744.
• Held, Virginia. 1993. Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Hobbes, Thomas. 1651a. Leviathan . C.B Macpherson (Editor). London: Penguin Books (1985)
• Kavka, Gregory S. 1986. Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory . Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration . Yale University Press (2003).
• Macpherson, C.B. 1973. Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval . Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Mills, Charles. 1997. The Racial Contract . Cornell University Press.
• Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State and Utopia . New York: Basic Books.
• Okin, Susan Moller. 1989. Justice, Gender, and the Family . New York: Basic Books.
• Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract . Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Plato. Five Dialogues . (Trans. G.M.A. Grube) Hackett Publishing Company (1981).
• Plato. Republic . (Trans. G.M.A. Grube, Revised by C.D.C. Reeve) Hackett Publishing Company (1992)
• Poundstone, William. 1992. Prisoner’s Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb . New York: Doubleday.
• Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice . Harvard University Press.
• Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism . Columbia University Press.
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Basic Political Writings . (Trans. Donald A. Cress) Hackett Publishing Company (1987).
• Sandel, Michael. 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Vallentyne, Peter. (Editor). 1991. Contractarianism and Rational Choice: Essays on David Gauthier’s Morals by Agreement . New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Celeste Friend Email: [email protected] Hamilton College U. S. A.

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Social Contract Theory

Social Contract Theory is the idea that society exists because of an implicitly agreed-to set of standards that provide moral and political rules of behavior.

Social contract theory says that people live together in society in accordance with an agreement that establishes moral and political rules of behavior. Some people believe that if we live according to a social contract, we can live morally by our own choice and not because a divine being requires it.

Over the centuries, philosophers as far back as Socrates have tried to describe the ideal social contract, and to explain how existing social contracts have evolved. Philosopher Stuart Rachels suggests that morality is the set of rules governing behavior that rational people accept, on the condition that others accept them too.

Social contracts can be explicit, such as laws, or implicit, such as raising one’s hand in class to speak. The U.S. Constitution is often cited as an explicit example of part of America’s social contract.  It sets out what the government can and cannot do. People who choose to live in America agree to be governed by the moral and political obligations outlined in the Constitution’s social contract.

Indeed, regardless of whether social contracts are explicit or implicit, they provide a valuable framework for harmony in society.

Related Terms

Justice is a complicated concept that at its core requires fairness.

Morals are society’s accepted principles of right conduct that enable people to live cooperatively.

Prosocial Behavior

Prosocial Behavior occurs when people voluntarily help others.

Veil of Ignorance

The Veil of Ignorance is a device for helping people more fairly envision a fair society by pretending that they are ignorant of their personal circumstances.

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Social Contract Theory

Author: David Antonini Category: Social and Political Philosophy , Historical Philosophy , Ethics Word Count: 997

When you make an agreement of some significance (e.g., to rent an apartment, or join a gym, or divorce), you typically agree to certain terms: you sign a contract. This is for your benefit, and for the other party’s benefit: everyone’s expectations are clear, as are the consequences of failing to meet those expectations.

Contracts are common, and some influential thinkers in the “modern” period of philosophy argued that the whole of society is created and regulated by a contract. [1] Two of the most prominent “social contract theorists” are Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704). [2]

This essay explains the origins of this tradition and why the concept of a contract is illuminating for thinking about the structure of society and government.

1. The State of Nature and the First Contract

To see why we might seek a contract, imagine if there was no contract, no agreement, on what society should be like: no rules, no laws, no authorities. This is called “the state of nature.”

What would life in the state of nature be like? Most think it would be very bad: after all, there would be no officials to punish anyone who did anything bad to us, resulting in no deterrent for bad behavior: it’d be every man, woman and child for him or herself, it seems.

Hobbes has famously described life in the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” [3] Locke describes it as where everyone can be judge and jury in their own disputes, meaning they can personally decide when they have been wronged and how to punish the offender; clearly, this could get out of hand. [4]

Historically, we may not have ever been in a state of nature, but contract theorists use this idea to explain why rules for society, a contract, are desirable. It allows us to peacefully live together with the assurance that no one can simply harm us or take our property without consequence. Contract theorists argue that most people would freely enter into a contract to secure these benefits.

A contract has some costs though: to receive the advantages of an ordered society, everyone agrees to give up some benefits they had in the state of nature. Hobbes says we must give up “the right of nature” or the ability to judge for ourselves what counts as our “preservation.” This means that we could kill someone and claim it contributed to our “preservation,” [5] truthfully or not. Locke argues we must give up the right to be judge and jury of our own disputes.

Suppose, for mutual benefit, people contract to form some society. What are the details of that contract?

2. The Agreement to Form Government

A newly-formed society needs a mechanism for making decisions: who will make and enforce the rules? This authority needs to be established if the new community is to function together peacefully.

Hobbes argues that the sole decision-making authority should be an almighty ruler, who he calls the “Leviathan,” who rules by force so that citizens are afraid of whatever the ruler says. As Hobbes forebodingly reminds his readers: “And covenants [or contracts], without the sword , are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.” [6] The contract means that you obey the ruler and his laws or suffer severe consequences, such as imprisonment or even death.

Locke’s proposal for the creation of government reflects a more democratic approach in the sense of majority rule: “. . every man, by consenting with others to make one body politic under one government, puts himself under an obligation . . . to submit to the determination of the majority.” [7] According to Locke, the primary function of government is to pass laws through a majority vote regarding the protection of rights, especially one’s right to property: “The great and chief end . . . of men putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property . [8]

Government requires our submitting to someone else’s authority. Submitting yourself to be ruled by someone else requires sacrifice: we give up the right to make laws, enforce those laws, and punish transgressions of them. We transfer these rights to some individual or group who does them on our behalf. These three basic activities—making, enforcing and punishing—form the basis for the three branches of government common in many countries.

3. Conclusion

Living under a contract is likely better than living in the state of nature. Questions remain, however.

First, we usually explicitly agree to contracts, but we’ve done no such thing for society. If it’s said we tacitly agree, meaning that we’ve implicitly agreed, Locke responds: “The difficulty is what ought to be looked at as tacit consent , and . . . how far any one shall be looked on to have consented, and thereby submitted to any government, where he has made no expression of it at all.” [9]

We haven’t explicitly agreed to any social contract. Do citizens agree simply by enjoying the benefits of things only made possible by living in society? For example, being able to drive on public roads is a benefit. But this is possible only through the existence of government-funded roads. Unless someone refuses to drive on public roads, by accepting such a benefit, is one tacitly “consenting”? 

Locke’s notion of tacit consent is problematic because it assumes agreement based on our receiving benefits. However, explicit consent is important because this kind of consent is the mark of voluntarily entering into a contract. Explicit consent is often extremely important –  consider consent in sexual relationships – but it is never obtained, or even sought, to participate in and receive benefits from being part of society.

A second, deeper problem with the notion of a social contract is who was and is left out of it. Who was not allowed to sign the contract or help create its terms? In many societies, women and non-Europeans were intentionally excluded, and certainly many individuals and groups of people would not consent to much of many governments’ policies and practices, past or present. [10]

[1] “Modern,” for the purposes of the history of philosophy, refers roughly to the time period from the mid-17th century to the late-18th century. However, “modern” does not only designate a time period but refers to the beginning of the Enlightenment, the rise of modern scientific thinking (Galileo, Newton), and to a turning away from the established order of the Church.

[2] Generally included with Hobbes and Locke is a third theorist, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Rousseau is not discussed here because his views are quite different from Hobbes’ and Locke’s. Rousseau is critical of both Hobbes’s and Locke’s views on the social contract because he is not convinced that society and government are an improvement over the state of nature. He outlines such an argument in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754). His own version of the social contract is found in On the Social Contract (1762). See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contact (Penguin Books, 1968) and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Hackett, 1992)

[3] Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (1651), ed. Michael Oakeshott (Simon and Schuster, 1962), 100.

[4] Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690), ed. C.B. Macpherson (Hackett, 1980), 10-11. Locke proposes that we give up the right to be judge and jury of our own disputes in order “to avoid, and remedy those inconveniences of the state of nature, which necessarily follow from every man’s being judge in his own case,” p. 48.

[5] Hobbes, Leviathan, 104 .

[6] Hobbes, Leviathan , 129

[7] Locke, Second Treatise , 52.

[8] In Chapter 5 of Locke’s Second Treatise , he famously argues we have a natural right to private property by mixing our labor with land. For example, if I pick an apple from the tree, because I own the labor I used (picking the apple), the apple becomes “mine.” Government is created to protect the property I have acquired.

[9] Locke, Second Treatise of Government , 64.

[10] For an account of how race factored into the terms of the contract, see Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997).

For an account of how gender factored into the contract, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, 1988)

Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (1651) , ed. Michael Oakeshott (Simon and Schuster, 1962)

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690) , ed. C.B. Macpherson (Hackett, 1980)

Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, 1988)

Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762) (Penguin Books, 1968)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992)

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David Antonini received his PhD from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2018. He is the author of Public Space and Political Experience: An Arendtian Interpretation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). He is an instructor at Great Basin College in Pahrump, Nevada. davidantonini.wordpress.com  

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The social contract theorists : critical essays on Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau

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The Social Contract Theory Term Paper

Introduction, gender arguments against the social contract theory, race conscious argument, works cited.

The social contract theory states that there exists a common agreement among individuals in a given society. This agreement ensures that there is no anarchy within the society and every member in the society benefits from the mutual peace and order.

In addition, the accruing of social good developed by each individual exists for the benefit of the whole community. However, the social contract theory is not a perfect theory because it fails to meet the reality of the contemporary world. The theory fails to accommodate other people who do not fit its description of the ideal individual.

This essay looks at the social contract theory as constructed by Thomas Hobbes. It offers an analysis of the shortcoming of the theory in an effort to explain why it is inappropriate for the contemporary world.

The essay begins with a brief background description of the theory and then delves into the main controversy surrounding the theory. The social contract theory construction by other authors also form part of the description used in this essay.

Socrates first developed the social theory in his account of refusing to get out of prison. Socrates considered that it was appropriate for him to remain in prison as a way of being obedient to the state. According to Socrates, obedience to the state was a sign of obedience to the existing social organization that allows everyone to coexist peacefully.

Socrates argued his refusal for imprisonment would amount to justifying the disorganization of the society, whose organization was responsible for the individual achievements that everybody enjoyed. After Socrates’ recount, the social contract idea developed further to a different recognizable modern form through the contributions of several thinkers.

Thomas Hobbes formulated the theory, as we understand it today. Other notable contributions to the theory came through John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and later on, Immanuel Kant. Today the social contract theory has no individual name to its credit; instead, several moral and political philosophers are working on it (Evers 185).

The social contract theory simply states that in some way there is an agreement of all individuals. This agreement rests on the guide of collectively enforced social arrangements, which indicate the presence of a normative property. All the thinkers working on the social contract had different objectives.

However, a common characteristic of all the theories is their view on state. All the theories by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau justified the state and indicated that everyone consents the existence of the state to maintain the social contract. The reliance on consent presents a voluntary concept of political obligation and justice.

In this way, a just manner of doing things is that which people choose to agree to or what they will accept. The modern debate and criticism of the social contract theory and its thinkers revolves around this issue of justification. The debate looks at the principles that can be justified to all reasonable individuals (D’Agostino and Gaus para. 2-6).

The arguments against the social theory claim that it does not truly represent the society. Instead, it idealizes a particular kind of individual as correct and deserving of the opportunities present in the society. Other persons failing to meet the criteria set by the theory remain at the mercy of the ‘right’ individual.

Such persons exist to face judgment and direction by the ‘right’ individual on the correct way to participate in the society. The theory seems to fail to acknowledge, as equal members of the society, the property-less and women.

As a result, the main voices against the social contract theory have been feminist arguments and race-conscious arguments. Within the feminist arguments, there is the sexual contract argument, the nature of the liberal individual argument and the argument from care (Friend para.10-15).

In this paper, we shall refer to the social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes. According to Hobbes (241), there is a state of nature, which exists without a particular order. As a result, the state of nature is anarchy. This anarchy makes life poor, brutish and short.

Hobbes continues to explain that the nastiness of the state of nature exists because of the four main features of the human condition. These conditions are equality of need, scarcity, the essential quality of human power and a limited unselfishness.

The anarchy of the state of nature arises because of the lack of a particular order. Moreover, this lack of order manifests as an environment that has no social goods enjoyable for the common good. In this kind of environment, modern day activities and goods such as farming, industry, education, housing and technology are non-existent. The individual existing in the natural state has only one goal in life.

This is the goal of avoiding the fate of anarchy. In a summation, this realization presents the justification of a social contract. A social contract guarantees that people will not harm one another. In addition, the social contract ensures that people can rely on one another and are able to keep their agreements (Hobbes 493).

Hobbes presents a government as the entity that can be trusted with the role of enforcing a social contract. A government can provide and fulfill the two conditions that the social contract guarantees to people to ensure peaceful and fruitful coexistence.

Hobbes says that we need a government so that people can give up some of their personal freedom to the government. Though the enforcement of laws and contractual agreements, governments provide a mechanism that prevents individuals from engaging in practices that are only permissible under natural law and inflict harm on others.

A government is essentially the embodiment of the social contract. In case of a central governance system, all individuals commit to follow laws of the state on one premise, that everyone else within the system does the same. Thus, everyone is concurrently safe from the anarchy of the other and all benefit from the social goods that result from this arrangement (Hobbes 121-165).

The expectations of individuals to benefit from social goods that arise out of the communal agreement to the social contract are similar to morality. However, the social contract and morality are different as far as their enforcement is concerned.

In the social contract theory, the state’s role is to enforce the rules indispensable for social living. On the other hand, morality encompasses the set of rules that are essential for social living. A government is necessary for the enforcement of the basic rules of social living such as ‘do not break the law’.

Contrariwise, morality includes rules that allow an orderly social living but its rules exceed the jurisdiction of the state. A good example is the rule of not insulting other people for no particular reason.

The social contract seeks to ensure that the social rules covered in morality present a positive externality to every individual within that society. In this manner, the social contract theory views morality as a social contract without enforcement powers.

Without enforcement, the two preconditions of social order are unrealizable in a society. Let us use the case of a society with highly polluting cars to illustrate this point. A person could install a gadget to his or her vehicle that stops it from polluting the environment and the person will have to exchange a form of payment for the gadget.

When other individuals also use the gadget then the whole society will eliminate the problem of car pollution. In the case that all other individuals are using the gadget, an individual may opt not to use it for the sake of saving on the costs of the gadget. A single car will have a negligible pollution to the environment.

Alternatively, when all other individuals are not using the gadget, a single individual use will not make the air clean. A single gadget has negligible input of clean air to the environment. Thus, the individual using the gadget might consider not using it to save on its cost.

In this illustration, we observe that in both cases the individual faces the dilemma of not using the gadget or using the gadget. It highlights the need for the existence of cooperation in the observance of social rules for them to have a substantial effect. It is likely that not everyone will install the gadget to save on his or her individual costs.

As a result, everyone will be worst off with the pollution. The best solution to this dilemma would be to have a binding contract that enforces the use of the gadget for the benefit of everyone else. This binding contract is the social contract that a government enforces.

There are many situations, such as the pollution case illustrated above, in everyday life. In order to have an order away from the state of nature that Hobbes describes as anarchy, everybody needs to have binding contracts with all other persons that they engage with on a day-to-day basis.

As illustrated in the pollution example, without the consent of everyone or nearly everyone, there would still be anarchy. The evolution of the human population has led to the realization of basic social goods that need binding in social contracts for the benefit of all in the society. Without an order governing the generation and use of the basic needs for the good of all, a society cannot survive.

In any society, the social contract should protect life and property. In this provision, there should be prohibition against the killing of another individual, assault, unlawful possession of another person’s property and destruction of another person’s property.

Police serve as the state’s machinery of ensuring that life and property do not suffer the perils of disorder. Secondly, there should be rules that secure the benefits of social living through protection from the natural law of anarchy. The most common rule is a punishment for infringement of contract and a requirement for honesty from all contracting parties.

Another basic requirement for the state lies in the protection of the whole society from outside threats. In this case, governments institute an army to fulfill the protection function. Apart from the basic requirements, other things ought to be present in the society but are not paramount to its existence.

The inclusion of these other provisions in a social contract enhances the cohesiveness and the benefits accrued to the fulfillment of the basic needs of everyone. The first item on the list of possibly important inclusions in a social contract is civil rights. Law enforcers and protection agencies have a mandate and it is in everyone’s interest that they do not abuse this mandate.

In essence, civil rights ensure that law enforcers follow rules as they protect citizens. Civil rights allow individuals to have free speech and religious freedom without interference from other individuals as long as they reciprocate the mutual agreement.

In addition, civil rights protect against an arbitrary gender and race discrimination of the individual, which is an acknowledgement of the equality of all persons. Another recent inclusion to the civil rights is the protection from the environment.

The social contract has a longstanding and widespread influence. This essay has depicted some of the influence that the social contract has on any given society. Several conflicting thoughts exist on the extension of the social contract to a variety of philosophical perspectives.

The most vicious critiques have been from the feminist and race-conscious philosophers. Critics of the social contract point out the inadequacies of the theory on the contemporary world in terms of its substance and viability.

A characteristic of feminists is their serious consideration of women’s experiences. Moreover, feminists concern themselves with the impact that theories have on women’s lives. In the modern contemporary society, feminists have a considerable influence on social, political and moral philosophy. It is without doubt that they disagree with the adequacy of the social contract theory.

Friend (para.10-15) presents three arguments that feminists hold against the social contract theory. To begin with, Friend describes how the social contract hides the sexual contract, which governs men’s relations with women. In the description by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, the social contract theory appears to be opposed to patriarchy and patriarchal right.

However, the male control over women happens in the contemporary society through three main social contracts. These paradigmatic contemporary contracts concern men’s control over women. For example, in the United States, a husband has the right to sexual access within the marriage contract.

This provision of the marriage act does not allow the recognition of marital rape within the legal system and puts women at the mercy of men. On the case of prostitution, modernity and the male dominance of society has presented an equal access for both male and women.

This in particular gives men unrestricted sexual access to women’s bodies. Surrogate motherhood extends the same rights to women’s reproductive system. Using these examples, Friend notes that contracts offer a socially accepted way for women dominance and control.

Furthermore, Friend argues that the social contract is not the right way to achieving equality and freedom for all in the society. Friend sees social contract as a means for upholding patriarchy. In fact, a social contract may be the only means available (Friend para.10-15).

According to Pateman (57), feminists also question the nature of the individuals that forms the heart of the social contract. The social contract presented by Hobbes is a man. Locke presents the individual as a proprietor and Rousseau presents the individual as a noble savage. Others like Rawl and Gauthier present the individual as male.

In these accounts, the individual at the heart of the social contract is supposedly race-less, sexless, class-less, disembodied and represents the abstract form of humanity. A closer investigation of the individual at the heart of the social contract reveals that the representation of the individual in the social contract theory is not of the universal humanity.

Instead, as Pateman (57-58) reveals, the individual at the core of the social contract exist in history as a bourgeois man. The human presented by Hobbes is an individual with a masculine character. A notable feminist voice is Virginia Held who argues in her book titled ‘Feminist Morality’ that the social contract represents the individual as an economic man (Held 71-147).

According to Held (71-147), the individual presented by Hobbes, also referred to as the economic man, concerns himself with the maximization of his own personal interests. This individual agrees to contract terms that safeguard his personal interests or provide a way for him to serve his personal interests.

This representation of the ideal individual forming the core of the social contract theory by Hobbes is faulty. Considerably, the individual does not fit the description of children who do not have a means to provide for themselves.

In addition, the description fails to consider the person who provides for children. Historically women have provided for children. Even if all other accounts are disputable, the failure to acknowledge the provision for children by women fails the feminist test.

The feminist Held (213) argues from the emerging tradition of care ethics. In this argument, social contract theory fails to give a full account of morality and political compulsions. Instead, in the argument, the social contract theory demarcates individual’s rights and obligations.

Delineation does not fully describe how to be moral. The social theory relies on the assumption of bonds between people being non-essential and voluntary. In reality, this does not happen in all instances.

Humans have different motivations and act based on human psychology, which is much complex than its representation in the social contract theory by Hobbes. From the care perspective, liberal moral theory relies on the relations between the people it seeks to free the individual.

In this manner, people have to be in the relationships that they seek to be free of in the first place. Human relations exceed the contractual terms that Held (71-147) identifies with the economic man. To represent fully, human relationships, the social contract theory ought to incorporate other models of human relationships that offer an insight on morality.

A first step would be to consider the mother to child relationship. To sum up, the social contract theory should incorporate the moral experiences of most people such as women and children in order to qualify as gender neutral.

The race conscious argument also comes from Pateman’s arguments. Using Pateman’s arguments, Mills (10-94) offers a critique of the history of Western political thought using the social contract theory. In Mills’ argument, the social contract only serves as an over layer of a stronger racial contract that governs human relationships within the Western society.

In essence, the racial contract determines the qualification of an individual worthy of full representation in the social contract. In this argument, some individuals such as whites have more capacity than other races. Without the recognition as full persons, individuals do not possess the power to make contracts or to be the subject of such contracts.

The racial contract acts as a meta-contract determining the extent of individualism and the criteria for inclusion and exclusion into the society. The racial contract serves as a guide for operation of other contracts coming after it. In this nature, the racial contract serves as a facility to allow persons to treat other persons and their lands as exploitable assets.

Hobbes reinforces the fact that the racial and social contracts are hypothetical in the reference of the state of nature. On the contrary, it is an actual contract whose traces exist in historical documents. While racism appears to be a negative externality of the Western democratic and political ideal, evidence presented by Mills (68-134) claims the contrary.

The social contract theory assumes that racism does not go beyond its superficiality. According to the social contract theory, everyone is equal and the law treats all in the same way by the law. However, an examination of reality indicates that a racial contract informs the structure of the political system that claims to uphold the social contract.

For example, before the establishment of governments, Native Americans did not own land. Likewise, in the colonization and enslavement of Africans, there are indications that such people did not express their ownership of property and thus were unequal to their colonizers or masters.

Mills (121-156) concludes the argument against the social contract theory by saying that its very purpose is to keep hidden from the view of political reality the fact that some individuals are full persons while others are incomplete persons.

To remedy this misconception, a new contract would be appropriate. This new contract is a naturalized racial contract that would tell the story of individuals and the details their history.

While the social contract may be faulty as shown by the feminist and race conscious arguments, the justification of a social contract still exists. Individuals implicitly enter into contracts that allow them to enjoy the benefits of the society.

The arguments presented above indicate that the social contract only covers self-interested parties who, under the social contract, are full humans. Therefore, we can rightly claim that the inclusion of all humans in a given society is not sensible because their inclusion was not in the interest of the parties under the contract.

Persons who affect the life of others will be of interest to the people whose lives they are likely to affect (Evers 188). The social contract theory should not be a universal contract governing human interactions in all societies.

The ideal individual presented in the social contract cannot fit into every aspect of individuals in the contemporary world. Hence, the social contract theory should only serve as an explanation of the historical social engagement that fits its ideal individual environment.

The social contract theory remains an abstract theory that fails to explain the contemporary realities. Although it serves as an explanation and justification for the existence of the state, largely, it fails miserably at accommodation of all individuals.

On one part, the theory describes the benefits that all individuals get from the common observance of the contract. However, on another part the theory fails to account for relationships among individuals that do not arise out of the assumptions it represents.

This essay has presented a background description of the social contract theory in order to form a basis for the argument against the theory.

Then, the essay has delved into gender and racial controversies facing the social contract theory to show that the application of this theory can only be partial to be acceptable. Modern societies are complex and include attributes and retaliations that are missing in Hobbes explanation of the social contract theory.

D’Agostino, Fred and Gerald Gaus. “ Contemporary approaches to the social contract .” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008. Web.

Evers, Williamson M. “Social contract: A critique.” Journal of Liberation Studies 1.3 (1977): 185-194.

Friend, Celeste. “ The Social Contract Theory .” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2004. Web.

Held, Virginia. Feminist morality: Transforming culture, society, and politics . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan . Forgotten Books, 2008.

Mills, Charles Wade. The racial contract . Ithaaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Pateman, Carole. The sexual contract. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.

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John Locke (b. 1632, d. 1704) was a British philosopher, Oxford academic and medical researcher. Locke’s monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) is one of the first great defenses of modern empiricism and concerns itself with determining the limits of human understanding in respect to a wide spectrum of topics. It thus tells us in some detail what one can legitimately claim to know and what one cannot. Locke’s association with Anthony Ashley Cooper (later the First Earl of Shaftesbury) led him to become successively a government official charged with collecting information about trade and colonies, economic writer, opposition political activist, and finally a revolutionary whose cause ultimately triumphed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Among Locke’s political works he is most famous for The Second Treatise of Government in which he argues that sovereignty resides in the people and explains the nature of legitimate government in terms of natural rights and the social contract. He is also famous for calling for the separation of Church and State in his Letter Concerning Toleration . Much of Locke’s work is characterized by opposition to authoritarianism. This is apparent both on the level of the individual person and on the level of institutions such as government and church. For the individual, Locke wants each of us to use reason to search after truth rather than simply accept the opinion of authorities or be subject to superstition. He wants us to proportion assent to propositions to the evidence for them. On the level of institutions it becomes important to distinguish the legitimate from the illegitimate functions of institutions and to make the corresponding distinction for the uses of force by these institutions. Locke believes that using reason to try to grasp the truth, and determine the legitimate functions of institutions will optimize human flourishing for the individual and society both in respect to its material and spiritual welfare. This in turn, amounts to following natural law and the fulfillment of the divine purpose for humanity.

1.1 Locke’s Life up to His Meeting with Lord Ashley in 1666

1.2 locke and lord shaftesbury 1666 to 1688, 1.3 the end of locke’s life 1689–1704, 2.2 book ii, 2.3 book iii, 2.4 book iv, 2.5 knowledge and probability, 2.6 reason, faith and enthusiasm, 3. locke’s major works on education, 4.1 the second treatise of government, 4.2 human nature and god’s purposes, 4.3 of war and slavery, 4.4 of property, 4.5 the social contract theory, 4.6 the function of civil government, 4.7 rebellion and regicide, 5. locke and religious toleration, primary sources, secondary sources, other internet resources, related entries, 1. historical background and locke’s life.

John Locke (1632–1704) was one of the greatest philosophers in Europe at the end of the seventeenth century. Locke grew up and lived through one of the most extraordinary centuries of English political and intellectual history. It was a century in which conflicts between Crown and Parliament and the overlapping conflicts between Protestants, Anglicans and Catholics swirled into civil war in the 1640s. With the defeat and death of Charles I, there began a great experiment in governmental institutions including the abolishment of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the Anglican church, and the establishment of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate in the 1650s. The collapse of the Protectorate after the death of Cromwell was followed by the Restoration of Charles II—the return of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the Anglican Church. This period lasted from 1660 to 1688. It was marked by continued conflicts between King and Parliament and debates over religious toleration for Protestant dissenters and Catholics. This period ends with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in which James II was driven from England and replaced by William of Orange and his wife Mary. The final period during which Locke lived involved the consolidation of power by William and Mary, and the beginning of William’s efforts to oppose the domination of Europe by the France of Louis XIV, which later culminated in the military victories of John Churchill—the Duke of Marlborough.

Locke was born in Wrington to Puritan parents of modest means. His father was a country lawyer who served in a cavalry company on the Puritan side in the early stages of the English Civil War. His father’s commander, Alexander Popham, became the local MP, and it was his patronage which allowed the young John Locke to gain an excellent education. In 1647 Locke went to Westminster School in London.

From Westminster school he went to Christ Church, Oxford, in the autumn of 1652 at the age of twenty. As Westminster school was the most important English school, so Christ Church was the most important Oxford college. Education at Oxford was medieval. Locke, like Hobbes before him, found the Aristotelian philosophy he was taught at Oxford of little use. There was, however, more at Oxford than Aristotle. The new experimental philosophy had arrived. John Wilkins, Cromwell’s brother in law, had become Warden of Wadham College. The group around Wilkins was the nucleus of what was to become the English Royal Society. The Society grew out of informal meetings and discussion groups and moved to London after the Restoration and became a formal institution in the 1660s with charters from Charles II. The Society saw its aims in contrast with the Scholastic/Aristotelian traditions that dominated the universities. The program was to study nature rather than books. [ 1 ] Many of Wilkins associates were people interested in pursuing medicine by observation rather than the reading of classic texts. Bacon’s interest in careful experimentation and the systematic collection of facts from which generalizations could be made was characteristic of this group. One of Locke’s friends from Westminster school, Richard Lower, introduced Locke to medicine and the experimental philosophy being pursued by the virtuosi at Wadham.

Locke received his B.A. in February 1656. His career at Oxford, however, continued beyond his undergraduate days. In June of 1658, Locke qualified as a Master of Arts and was elected a Senior Student of Christ Church College. The rank was equivalent to a Fellow at any of the other colleges, but was not permanent. Locke had yet to determine what his career was to be. Locke was elected Lecturer in Greek at Christ Church in December of 1660 and he was elected Lecturer in Rhetoric in 1663. At this point, Locke needed to make a decision. The statutes of Christ Church laid it down that fifty five of the senior studentships should be reserved for men in orders or reading for orders. Only five could be held by others, two in medicine, two in law and one in moral philosophy. Thus, there was good reason for Locke to become a clergyman. Since his graduation Locke had been studying medicine. Locke decided to become a doctor.

John Wilkins had left Oxford with the Restoration of Charles II. The new leader of the Oxford scientific group was Robert Boyle. He was also Locke’s scientific mentor. Boyle (with the help of his astonishing assistant Robert Hooke) built an air pump which led to the formulation of Boyle’s law and devised a barometer as a weather indicator. The work on the air pump led to a controversy with Thomas Hobbes because Boyle’s explanations of the working of the air pump were incompatible with Hobbes’ micro-corpuscular theory. This controversy continued for ten years. Boyle was, however, most influential as a theorist. He was a mechanical philosopher who treated the world as reducible to matter in motion. But he had no micro-corpuscular account of the air.

Locke read Boyle before he read Descartes. When he did read Descartes, he saw the great French philosopher as providing a viable alternative to the sterile Aristotelianism he had been taught at Oxford. In writing An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke adopted Descartes’ ‘way of ideas’; though it is transformed so as to become an organic part of Locke’s philosophy. Still, while admiring Descartes, Locke’s involvement with the Oxford scientists gave him a perspective that made him critical of the rationalist elements in Descartes’ philosophy.

In the Epistle to the Reader at the beginning of the Essay Locke remarks:

The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity: but everyone must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge …. (N: 9–10; all quotations are from the Nidditch edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [N])

Locke knew all of these men and their work. Locke, Boyle and Newton were all founding or early members of the English Royal Society. It is from Boyle that Locke learned about atomism (or the corpuscular hypothesis) and it is from Boyle’s book The Origin of Forms and Qualities that Locke took the language of primary and secondary qualities. Sydenham was an English physician and Locke did medical research with him. Sydenham championed careful observation of disease and rejected appeal to underlying causes. Both Boyle and Newton did work on colors that did not involve micro-corpuscular explanations. Locke read Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis while in exile in Holland, and consulted Huygens as to the soundness of its mathematics. Locke and Newton became friends after Locke’s return from Holland in 1688. It may be that in referring to himself as an ‘under-labourer’, Locke is not only displaying a certain literary modesty, he is contrasting the positive discoveries of these men, with his own attempt to show the inadequacies of the Aristotelian and Scholastic and to some degree the Cartesian philosophies. There are, however, many aspects of Locke’s project to which this image of an under-labourer does not do justice (see Jolley 1999: 15–17). While the corpuscular philosophy and Newton’s discoveries clearly influenced Locke, it is the Baconian program of producing natural histories that Locke makes reference to when he talks about the Essay in the Introduction. He writes:

It shall suffice to my present Purpose, to consider the discerning Faculties of a Man, as they are employ’d about the Objects, which they have to do with: and I shall imagine that I have not wholly misimploy’d my self in the Thoughts I shall have on this Occasion, if in this Historical, Plain Method, I can give any Account of the Ways, whereby our Understanding comes to attain those Notions of Things, and can set down any Measure of the Certainty of our Knowledge…. (I.1.2, N: 43–4—the three numbers, are book, chapter and section numbers respectively, followed by the page number in the Nidditch edition)

The ‘Historical, Plain Method’ is apparently to give a genetic account of how we come by our ideas. Presumably this will reveal the degree of certainty of the knowledge based on such ideas. Locke’s own active involvement with the scientific movement was largely through his informal studies of medicine. Dr. David Thomas was his friend and collaborator. Locke and Thomas had a laboratory in Oxford which was very likely, in effect, a pharmacy. In 1666 Lord Ashley, one of the richest men in England, came to Oxford in order to drink some medicinal waters there. He had asked Dr. Thomas to provide them. Thomas had to be out of town and asked Locke to see that the water was delivered. As a result of this encounter, Ashley invited Locke to come to London as his personal physician. In 1667 Locke did move to London becoming not only Lord Ashley’s personal physician, but secretary, researcher, political operative and friend. Living with him Locke found himself at the very heart of English politics in the 1670s and 1680s.

Locke’s chief work while living at Lord Ashley’s residence, Exeter House, in 1668 was as Ashley’s physician. Locke used his medical training to organize a successful operation on Ashley. This was perhaps the most carefully documented operation in the 17th century. Locke consulted doctors across the country to determine what the best practices were for this operation and made cleanliness a priority. In doing so he saved his patron’s life and thus changed English history.

Locke had a number of other jobs. He worked as secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations and Secretary to the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas. Lord Ashley was one of the advocates of the view that England would prosper through trade and that colonies could play an important role in promoting trade. Ashley persuaded Charles II to create a Board of Trade and Plantations to collect information about trade and colonies, and Locke became its secretary. In his capacity as the secretary of the Board of Trade Locke was the collection point for information from around the globe about trade and colonies for the English government. Among Ashley’s commercial projects was an effort to found colonies in the Carolinas. In his capacity as the secretary to the Lords Proprietors, Locke was involved in the writing of the fundamental constitution of the Carolinas. There is some controversy about the extent of Locke’s role in writing the constitution. [ 2 ] In addition to issues about trade and colonies, Locke was involved through Shaftesbury in other controversies about public policy. There was a monetary crisis in England involving the value of money, and the clipping of coins. Locke wrote papers for Lord Ashley on economic matters, including the coinage crisis.

While living in London at Exeter House, Locke continued to be involved in philosophical discussions. He tells us that:

Were it fit to trouble thee with the history of this Essay, I should tell thee, that five or six friends meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the difficulties that rose on every side. After we had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course; and that before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with. This I proposed to the company, who all readily assented; and thereupon it was agreed that this should be our first inquiry. Some hasty and undigested thoughts, on a subject I had never before considered, which I set down against our next meeting, gave the first entrance into this Discourse; which having been thus begun by chance, was continued by intreaty; written by incoherent parcels; and after long intervals of neglect, resumed again, as my humour or occasions permitted; and at last, in a retirement where an attendance on my health gave me leisure, it was brought into that order thou now seest it. (Epistle to the Reader, N: 7)

James Tyrrell, one of Locke’s friends was at that meeting. He recalls the discussion being about the principles of morality and revealed religion (Cranston 1957: 140–1). Thus the Oxford scholar and medical researcher came to begin the work which was to occupy him off and on over the next twenty years.

In 1674 after Shaftesbury had left the government, Locke went back to Oxford, where he acquired the degree Bachelor of medicine, and a license to practice medicine, and then went to France (Cranston 1957: 160). In France Locke went from Calais to Paris, Lyons and on to Montpellier, where he spent the next fifteen months. Much of Locke’s time was spent learning about Protestantism in France. The Edict of Nantes (promulgated by Henry IV in 1598) was in force, and so there was a degree of religious toleration in France. Louis XIV was to revoke the edict in 1685 and French Protestants were then killed while some 400,000 went into exile.

While Locke was in France, Shaftesbury’s fortunes fluctuated. In 1676 Shaftesbury was imprisoned in the tower. His imprisonment lasted for a year. In 1678, after the mysterious murder of a London judge, informers (most notably Titus Oates) started coming forward to reveal a supposed Catholic conspiracy to assassinate the King and put his brother on the throne. This whipped up public anti-Catholic frenzy. Though Shaftesbury had not fabricated the conspiracy story, nor did he prompt Oates to come forward, he did exploit the situation to the advantage of his party. In the public chaos surrounding the sensational revelations, Shaftesbury organized an extensive party network, exercised great control over elections, and built up a large parliamentary majority. His strategy was to secure the passage of an Exclusion bill that would prevent Charles II’s openly Catholic brother from becoming King. Although the Exclusion bill passed in the Commons it was rejected in the House of Lords because of the King’s strong opposition to it. As the panic over the Popish plot receded, Shaftesbury was left without a following or a cause. Shaftesbury was seized on July 21, 1681 and again put in the tower. He was tried on trumped-up charges of treason but acquitted by a London grand jury (filled with his supporters) in November.

At this point some of the Country Party leaders began plotting an armed insurrection which, had it come off, would have begun with the assassination of Charles and his brother on their way back to London from the races at Newmarket. The chances of such a rising occurring were not as good as the plotters supposed. Memories of the turmoil of the civil war were still relatively fresh. Eventually Shaftesbury, who was moving from safe house to safe house, gave up and fled to Holland in November 1682. He died there in January 1683. Locke stayed in England until the Rye House Plot (named after the house from which the plotters were to fire upon the King and his brother) was discovered in June of 1683. Locke left for the West country to put his affairs in order the very week the plot was revealed to the government and by September he was in exile in Holland. [ 3 ]

While in exile, Locke finished An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and published a fifty-page advanced notice of it in French. (This was to provide the intellectual world on the continent with most of their information about the Essay until Pierre Coste’s French translation appeared in 1704.) He also wrote and published his Epistola de Tolerentia in Latin. Richard Ashcraft, in his Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1986) suggests that while in Holland, Locke was not only finishing An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and nursing his health, he was closely associated with the English revolutionaries in exile. The English government was much concerned with this group. They tried to get a number of them, including Locke, extradited to England. Locke’s studentship at Oxford was taken away from him. In the meanwhile, the English intelligence service infiltrated the rebel group in Holland and effectively thwarted their efforts—at least for a while. While Locke was living in exile in Holland, Charles II died on Feb. 6, 1685, and was succeeded by his brother, who became James II of England. Soon after this, the rebels in Holland sent a force of soldiers under the Duke of Monmouth to England to try to overthrow James II. The revolt was crushed, and Monmouth was captured and executed (Ashcraft 1986). For a meticulous, if cautious review, of the evidence concerning Locke’s involvement with the English rebels in exile see Roger Woolhouse’s Locke: A Biography (2007).

Ultimately, however, the rebels were successful. James II alienated most of his supporters, and William of Orange was invited to bring a Dutch force to England. After William’s army landed, James II, realizing that he could not mount an effective resistance, fled the country to exile in France. This became known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It is a watershed in English history. For it marks the point at which the balance of power in the English government passed from the King to the Parliament. Locke returned to England in February 1689.

After his return from exile, Locke published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and The Two Treatises of Government . In addition, Popple’s translation of Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration was also published. It is worth noting that the Two Treatises and the Letter Concerning Toleration were published anonymously. Locke took up residence in the country at Oates in Essex, the home of Sir Francis and Lady Masham (Damaris Cudworth). Locke had met Damaris Cudworth in 1682 and became involved intellectually and romantically with her. She was the daughter of Ralph Cudworth, the Cambridge Platonist, and a philosopher in her own right. After Locke went into exile in Holland in 1683, she married Sir Francis Masham. Locke and Lady Masham remained good friends and intellectual companions to the end of Locke’s life. During the remaining years of his life, Locke oversaw four more editions of the Essay and engaged in controversies over the Essay most notably in a series of published letters with Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester. In a similar way, Locke defended the Letter Concerning Toleration against a series of attacks. He wrote The Reasonableness of Christianity and Some Thoughts on Education during this period as well.

Nor was Locke finished with public affairs. In 1696 the Board of Trade was revived. Locke played an important part in its revival and served as the most influential member on it until 1700. The new Board of Trade had administrative powers and was, in fact, concerned with a wide range of issues, from the Irish wool trade and the suppression of piracy, to the treatment of the poor in England and the governance of the colonies. It was, in Peter Laslett’s phrase “the body which administered the United States before the American Revolution” (Laslett 1954 [1990: 127]). During these last eight years of his life, Locke was asthmatic, and he suffered so much from it that he could only bear the smoke of London during the four warmer months of the year. Locke plainly engaged in the activities of the Board out of a strong sense of patriotic duty. After his retirement from the Board of Trade in 1700, Locke remained in retirement at Oates until his death on Sunday 28 October 1704.

2. The Limits of Human Understanding

Locke is often classified as the first of the great English empiricists (ignoring the claims of Bacon and Hobbes). This reputation rests on Locke’s greatest work, the monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Locke explains his project in several places. Perhaps the most important of his goals is to determine the limits of human understanding. Locke writes:

For I thought that the first Step towards satisfying the several Enquiries, the Mind of Man was apt to run into, was, to take a Survey of our own Understandings, examine our own Powers, and see to what Things they were adapted. Till that was done, I suspected that we began at the wrong end, and in vain sought for Satisfaction in a quiet and secure Possession of Truths, that most concern’d us whilst we let loose our Thoughts into the vast Ocean of Being , as if all the boundless Extent, were the natural and undoubted Possessions of our Understandings, wherein there was nothing that escaped its Decisions, or that escaped its Comprehension. Thus Men, extending their Enquiries beyond their Capacities, and letting their Thoughts wander into those depths where they can find no sure Footing; ’tis no Wonder, that they raise Questions and multiply Disputes, which never coming to any clear Resolution, are proper to only continue and increase their Doubts, and to confirm them at last in a perfect Skepticism. Wheras were the Capacities of our Understanding well considered, the Extent of our Knowledge once discovered, and the Horizon found, which sets the boundary between the enlightened and the dark Parts of Things; between what is and what is not comprehensible by us, Men would perhaps with less scruple acquiesce in the avow’d Ignorance of the one; and employ their Thoughts and Discourse, with more Advantage and Satisfaction in the other. (I.1.7, N: 47)

Some philosophers before Locke had suggested that it would be good to find the limits of the Understanding, but what Locke does is to carry out this project in detail. In the four books of the Essay Locke considers the sources and nature of human knowledge. Book I argues that we have no innate knowledge. (In this he resembles Berkeley and Hume, and differs from Descartes and Leibniz.) So, at birth, the human mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes. In Book II Locke claims that ideas are the materials of knowledge and all ideas come from experience. The term ‘idea’, Locke tells us “…stands for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a man thinks” (I.1.8, N: 47). Experience is of two kinds, sensation and reflection. One of these—sensation—tells us about things and processes in the external world. The other—reflection—tells us about the operations of our own minds. Reflection is a sort of internal sense that makes us conscious of the mental processes we are engaged in. Some ideas we get only from sensation, some only from reflection and some from both.

Locke has an atomic or perhaps more accurately a corpuscular theory of ideas. [ 4 ] There is, that is to say, an analogy between the way atoms or corpuscles combine into complexes to form physical objects and the way ideas combine. Ideas are either simple or complex. We cannot create simple ideas, we can only get them from experience. In this respect the mind is passive. Once the mind has a store of simple ideas, it can combine them into complex ideas of a variety of kinds. In this respect the mind is active. Thus, Locke subscribes to a version of the empiricist axiom that there is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses—where the senses are broadened to include reflection. Book III deals with the nature of language, its connections with ideas and its role in knowledge. Book IV, the culmination of the previous reflections, explains the nature and limits of knowledge, probability, and the relation of reason and faith. Let us now consider the Essay in some detail.

At the beginning of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke says that since his purpose is “to enquire into the Original, Certainty and Extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of Belief, Opinion and Assent” he is going to begin with ideas—the materials out of which knowledge is constructed. His first task is to “enquire into the Original of these Ideas…and the ways whereby the Understanding comes to be furnished with them” (I.1.3, N: 44). The role of Book I of the Essay is to make the case that being innate is not a way in which the understanding is furnished with principles and ideas. Locke treats innateness as an empirical hypothesis and argues that there is no good evidence to support it.

Locke describes innate ideas as “some primary notions…Characters as it were stamped upon the Mind of Man, which the Soul receives in its very first Being; and brings into the world with it” (I.2.1, N: 48). In pursuing this enquiry, Locke rejects the claim that there are speculative innate principles (I.2), practical innate moral principles (I.3) or that we have innate ideas of God, identity or impossibility (I.4). Locke rejects arguments from universal assent and attacks dispositional accounts of innate principles. Thus, in considering what would count as evidence from universal assent to such propositions as “What is, is” or “It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be” he holds that children and idiots should be aware of such truths if they were innate but that they “have not the least apprehension or thought of them”. Why should children and idiots be aware of and able to articulate such propositions? Locke says:

It seems to me a near Contradiction to say that there are truths imprinted on the Soul, which it perceives or understands not; imprinting if it signify anything, being nothing else but the making certain Truths to be perceived. (I.2.5, N: 49)

So, Locke’s first point is that if propositions were innate they should be immediately perceived—by infants and idiots (and indeed everyone else)—but there is no evidence that they are. Locke then proceeds to attack dispositional accounts that say, roughly, that innate propositions are capable of being perceived under certain circumstances. Until these circumstances come about the propositions remain unperceived in the mind. With the advent of these conditions, the propositions are then perceived. Locke gives the following argument against innate propositions being dispositional:

For if any one [proposition] may [be in the mind but not be known]; then, by the same Reason, all Propositions that are true, and the Mind is ever capable of assenting to, may be said to be in the Mind, and to be imprinted: since if any one can be said to be in the Mind, which it never yet knew, it must be only because it is capable of knowing it; and so the Mind is of all Truths it ever shall know. (I.2.5, N: 50)

The essence of this argument and many of Locke’s other arguments against dispositional accounts of innate propositions is that such dispositional accounts do not provide an adequate criterion for distinguishing innate propositions from other propositions that the mind may come to discover. Thus, even if some criterion is proposed, it will turn out not to do the work it is supposed to do.

When Locke turns from speculative principles to the question of whether there are innate practical moral principles, many of the arguments against innate speculative principles continue to apply, but there are some additional considerations. Practical principles, such as the Golden Rule, are not self-evident in the way such speculative principles as “What is, is” are. Thus, one can clearly and sensibly ask reasons for why one should hold the Golden Rule true or obey it (I.3.4, N: 68). There are substantial differences between people over the content of practical principles. Thus, they are even less likely candidates to be innate propositions or to meet the criterion of universal assent. In the fourth chapter of Book I, Locke raises similar points about the ideas which compose both speculative and practical principles. The point is that if the ideas that are constitutive of the principles are not innate, this gives us even more reason to hold that the principles are not innate. He examines the ideas of identity, impossibility and God to make these points.

In Book I Locke says little about who holds the doctrine of innate principles that he is attacking. For this reason he has sometimes been accused of attacking straw men. John Yolton has persuasively argued (Yolton 1956) that the view that innate ideas and principles were necessary for the stability of religion, morality and natural law was widespread in England in the seventeenth century, and that in attacking both the naive and the dispositional account of innate ideas and innate principles, Locke is attacking positions which were widely held and continued to be held after the publication of the Essay . Thus, the charge that Locke’s account of innate principles is made of straw, is not a just criticism. But there are also some important connections with particular philosophers and schools that are worth noting and some points about innate ideas and inquiry.

At I. 4. 24. Locke tells us that the doctrine of innate principles once accepted “eased the lazy from the pains of search” and that the doctrine is an inquiry stopper that is used by those who “affected to be Masters and Teachers” to illegitimately gain control of the minds of their students. Locke rather clearly has in mind the Aristotelians and scholastics at the universities. Thus Locke’s attack on innate principles is connected with his anti-authoritarianism. It is an expression of his view of the importance of free and autonomous inquiry in the search for truth. Ultimately, Locke holds, this is the best road to knowledge and happiness. Locke, like Descartes, is tearing down the foundations of the old Aristotelian scholastic house of knowledge. But while Descartes focused on the empiricism at the foundation of the structure, Locke is focusing on the claims that innate ideas provide its first principles. The attack on innate ideas is thus the first step in the demolition of the scholastic model of science and knowledge. Ironically, it is also clear from II.1.9. that Locke sees Descartes’ claim that his essence is to be a thinking thing as entailing a doctrine of innate ideas and principles.

In Book II of the Essay , Locke gives his positive account of how we acquire the materials of knowledge. Locke distinguishes a variety of different kinds of ideas in Book II. Locke holds that the mind is a tabula rasa or blank sheet until experience in the form of sensation and reflection provide the basic materials—simple ideas—out of which most of our more complex knowledge is constructed. While the mind may be a blank slate in regard to content, it is plain that Locke thinks we are born with a variety of faculties to receive and abilities to manipulate or process the content once we acquire it. Thus, for example, the mind can engage in three different types of action in putting simple ideas together. The first of these kinds of action is to combine them into complex ideas. Complex ideas are of two kinds, ideas of substances and ideas of modes. Substances are independent existences. Beings that count as substances include God, angels, humans, animals, plants and a variety of constructed things. Modes are dependent existences. These include mathematical and moral ideas, and all the conventional language of religion, politics and culture. The second action which the mind performs is the bringing of two ideas, whether simple or complex, by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them. This gives us our ideas of relations (II.12.1, N: 163). The third act of the mind is the production of our general ideas by abstraction from particulars, leaving out the particular circumstances of time and place, which would limit the application of an idea to a particular individual. In addition to these abilities, there are such faculties as memory which allow for the storing of ideas.

Having set forth the general machinery of how simple and complex ideas of substances, modes, relations, and so forth are derived from sensation and reflection, Locke also explains how a variety of particular kinds of ideas, such as the ideas of solidity, number, space, time, power, identity, and moral relations arise from sensation and reflection. Several of these are of particular interest. Locke’s chapter on power gives rise to a discussion of free will and voluntary action (see the entry on Locke on freedom ). Locke also made a number of interesting claims in the philosophy of mind. He suggested, for example, that for all we know, God could as easily add the powers of perception and thought to matter organized in the right way as he could add those powers to an immaterial substance which would then be joined to matter organized in the right way. His account of personal identity in II. xxvii was revolutionary. (See the entry on Locke on personal identity) . Both of these topics and related ones are treated in the supplementary document: Some Interesting Issues in Locke’s Philosophy of Mind

In what follows, we focus on some central issues in Locke’s account of physical objects. (See also the entry Locke’s philosophy of science , which pursues a number of topics related to Locke’s account of physical objects that are of considerable importance but largely beyond the scope of this general account of Locke’s philosophy.) These include Locke on knowledge in natural philosophy, the limitations of the corpuscular philosophy and Locke’s relation to Newton.

Locke offers an account of physical objects based on the mechanical philosophy and the corpuscular hypothesis. The adherents of the mechanical philosophy held that all material phenomena can be explained by matter in motion and the impact of one body on another. They viewed matter as passive. They rejected the “occult qualities” and “causation at a distance” of the Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophy. Robert Boyle’s corpuscularian hypothesis treated the material world as made up of particles. Some corpuscularians held that corpuscles could be further divided and that the universe was full of matter with no void space. Atomists, on the other hand, held that the particles were indivisible and that the material world is composed of atoms and the void or empty space in which the atoms move. Locke was an atomist.

Atoms have properties. They are extended, they are solid, they have a particular shape and they are in motion or rest. They combine together to produce the familiar stuff and physical objects, the gold and the wood, the horses and violets, the tables and chairs of our world. These familiar things also have properties. They are extended, solid, have a particular shape, and are in motion and at rest. In addition to these properties that they share with the atoms that compose them, they have other properties such as colors, smells, tastes that they get by standing in relation to perceivers. The distinction between these two kinds of properties goes back to the Greek atomists. It is articulated by Galileo and Descartes as well as Locke’s mentor Robert Boyle.

Locke makes this distinction in Book II Chapter 8 of the Essay and using Boyle’s terminology calls the two different classes of properties the primary and secondary qualities of an object. This distinction is made by both of the main branches of the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Both the Cartesian plenum theorists, who held that the world was full of infinitely divisible matter and that there was no void space, and the atomists such as Gassendi, who held that there were indivisible atoms and void space in which the atoms move, made the distinction between these two classes of properties. Still, the differences between these two branches of the mechanical philosophy affect their account of primary qualities. In the chapter on Solidity (II.4) Locke rejects the Cartesian definition of body as simply extended and argues that bodies are both extended and impenetrable or solid. The inclusion of solidity in Locke’s account of bodies and of primary qualities distinguishes them from the void space in which they move.

The primary qualities of an object are properties which the object possesses independent of us—such as occupying space, being either in motion or at rest, having solidity and texture. The secondary qualities are powers in bodies to produce ideas in us like color, taste, smell and so on that are caused by the interaction of our particular perceptual apparatus with the primary qualities of the object. Our ideas of primary qualities resemble the qualities in the object, while our ideas of secondary qualities do not resemble the powers that cause them. Locke also distinguishes a second class of secondary properties that are the powers that one substance has to effect another, e.g. the power of a fire to melt a piece of wax.

There has been considerable scholarly debate concerning the details of Locke’s account of the distinction. Among the issues are which qualities Locke assigns to each of the two categories. Locke gives several lists. Another issue is what the criterion is for putting a quality in one list rather than another. Does Locke hold that all the ideas of secondary qualities come to us by one sense while the ideas of primary qualities come to us through two or is Locke not making the distinction in this way? Another issue is whether there are only primary qualities of atoms or whether compounds of atoms also have primary qualities. And while Locke claims our ideas of primary qualities resemble the primary qualities in objects, and the ideas of secondary qualities do not resemble their causes in the object, what does ‘resemble’ mean in this context? Related to this issue is how we are supposed to know about particles that we cannot sense. It seems clear that Locke holds that there are certain analogies between the middle sized macroscopic objects we encounter in the world, e.g. porphyry and manna for example, and the particles that compose these things. Maurice Mandelbaum called this process ‘transdiction’. These analogies allow us to say certain things about the nature of particles and primary and secondary qualities. For example we can infer that atoms are solid and that heat is a greater rate of motion of atoms while cold is a slower motion. But these analogies may not get us very far in grasping the necessary connections between qualities in nature. Yet another issue is whether Locke sees the distinction as reductionistic. If what we mean by reductionistic here is that only the primary qualities are real and these explain the secondary qualities then there does not seem to be a clear answer. Secondary qualities surely are nothing more than certain primary qualities that affect us in certain ways. This seems to be reductionistic. But on Locke’s account of “real ideas” in II.30 both the ideas of primary and secondary qualities count as real. And while Locke holds that our ideas of secondary qualities are caused by primary qualities, in certain important respects the primary qualities do not explain them. Locke holds that we cannot even conceive how the size, figure and motion of particles could cause any sensation in us. So, knowing the size, figure and motion of the particles would be of no use to us in this regard (see IV.3.11–40, N: 544–546).

Locke probably holds some version of the representational theory of perception, though some scholars dispute this. On such a theory what the mind immediately perceives are ideas, and the ideas are caused by and represent the objects which cause them. Thus perception is a triadic relation, rather than simply being a dyadic relation between an object and a perceiver. Such a dyadic relational theory is often called naive realism because it suggests that the perceiver is directly perceiving the object, and naive because this view is open to a variety of serious objections. Some versions of the representational theory are open to serious objections as well. If, for example, one treats ideas as things, then one can imagine that because one sees ideas, the ideas actually block one from seeing things in the external world. The idea would be like a picture or painting. The picture would copy the original object in the external world, but because our immediate object of perception is the picture we would be prevented from seeing the original just as standing in front of a painting on an easel might prevent us from seeing the person being painted. Thus, this is sometimes called the picture/original theory of perception. Alternatively, Jonathan Bennett called it “the veil of perception” to emphasize that ‘seeing’ the ideas prevents us from seeing the external world. One philosopher who arguably held such a view was Nicholas Malebranche, a follower of Descartes. Antoine Arnauld, by contrast, while believing in the representative character of ideas, is a direct realist about perception. Arnauld engaged in a lengthy controversy with Malebranche, and criticized Malebranche’s account of ideas. Locke follows Arnauld in his criticism of Malebranche on this point (Locke, 1823, Vol. IX: 250). Yet Berkeley attributed the veil of perception interpretation of the representational theory of perception to Locke as have many later commentators including Bennett. A.D. Woozley puts the difficulty of doing this succinctly:

…it is scarcely credible both that Locke should be able to see and state so clearly the fundamental objection to the picture-original theory of sense perception, and that he should have held the same theory himself. (Woozley 1964: 27)

Just what Locke’s account of perception involves, is still a matter of scholarly debate. A review of this issue at a symposium including John Rogers, Gideon Yaffe, Lex Newman, Tom Lennon, and Vere Chappell at a meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2003 and later expanded and published in the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (2004, volume 85, issue 3) found most of the symposiasts holding the view that Locke holds a representative theory of perception but that he is not a skeptic about the external world in the way that the veil of perception doctrine might suggest.

Another issue that has been a matter of controversy since the first publication of the Essay is what Locke means by the term ‘substance’. The primary/secondary quality distinction gets us a certain ways in understanding physical objects, but Locke is puzzled about what underlies or supports the primary qualities themselves. He is also puzzled about what material and immaterial substances might have in common that would lead us to apply the same word to both. These kinds of reflections led him to the relative and obscure idea of substance in general. This is an “I know not what” which is the support of qualities which cannot subsist by themselves. We experience properties appearing in regular clumps, but we must infer that there is something that supports or perhaps ‘holds together’ those qualities. For we have no experience of that supporting substance. It is clear that Locke sees no alternative to the claim that there are substances supporting qualities. He does not, for example, have a theory of tropes (tropes are properties that can exist independently of substances) which he might use to dispense with the notion of substance. (In fact, he may be rejecting something like a theory of tropes when he rejects the Aristotelian doctrine of real qualities and insists on the need for substances.) He is thus not at all a skeptic about ‘substance’ in the way that Hume is. But, it is also quite clear that he is regularly insistent about the limitations of our ideas of substances. Bishop Stillingfleet accused Locke of putting substance out of the reasonable part of the world. But Locke is not doing that.

Since Berkeley, Locke’s doctrine of the substratum or substance in general has been attacked as incoherent. It seems to imply that we have a particular without any properties, and this seems like a notion that is inconsistent with empiricism. We have no experience of such an entity and so no way to derive such an idea from experience. Locke himself acknowledges this point (I.4.18, N: 95). In order to avoid this problem, Michael Ayers has proposed that we must understand the notions of ‘substratum’ and ‘substance in general’ in terms of Locke’s distinction between real and nominal essences and particularly his doctrine of real essences developed in Book III of the Essay rather than as a separate problem from that of knowing real essences. The real essence of a material thing is its atomic constitution. This atomic constitution is the causal basis of all the observable properties of the thing, from which we create nominal essences. Were the real essence known, all the observable properties could be deduced from it. Locke claims that the real essences of material things are quite unknown to us. Locke’s concept of substance in general is also a ‘something I know not what’. Thus, on Ayers’ interpretation ‘substance in general’ means something like ‘whatever it is that supports qualities’ while the real essence means ‘this particular atomic constitution that explains this set of observable qualities’. Thus, Ayers wants to treat the unknown substratum as picking out the same thing as the real essence—thus eliminating the need for particulars without properties. This proposed way of interpreting Locke has been criticized by scholars both because of a lack of textural support, and on the stronger grounds that it conflicts with some things that Locke does say (see Jolley 1999: 71–3). As we have reached one of the important concepts in Book III, let us turn to that Book and Locke’s discussion of language.

Locke devotes Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding to language. This is a strong indication that Locke thinks issues about language were of considerable importance in attaining knowledge. At the beginning of the Book he notes the importance of abstract general ideas to knowledge. These serve as sorts under which we rank all the vast multitude of particular existences. Thus, abstract ideas and classification are of central importance in Locke’s discussion of language and its importance for knowledge. Without general terms and classes we would be faced with the impossible task of trying to know a vast world of particulars.

There is a clear connection between Books II and III in that Locke claims that words stand for ideas. In his discussion of language Locke distinguishes words according to the categories of ideas established in Book II of the Essay . So there are ideas of substances, simple modes, mixed modes, relations and so on. It is in this context that Locke makes the distinction between real and nominal essences noted above. Perhaps because of his focus on the role that kind terms play in classification, Locke pays vastly more attention to nouns than to verbs. Locke recognizes that not all words relate to ideas. There are also the many particles, words that “…signify the connexion that the Mind gives to Ideas, or Propositions, one with another” (II.7.1, N: 471). Still, it is the relation of words and ideas that gets most of Locke’s attention in Book III.

Norman Kretzmann calls the claim that “words in their primary or immediate signification signify nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them ” (III.2.2) “Locke’s main semantic thesis” (see Kretzmann 1968:179). This thesis has often been criticized as a classic blunder in semantic theory. Thus Mill, for example, wrote, “When I say, ‘the sun is the cause of the day’, I do not mean that my idea of the sun causes or excites in me the idea of day” (Mill 1843: bk 1, ch. 2, § 1). This criticism of Locke’s account of language parallels the “veil of perception” critique of his account of perception and suggests that Locke is not distinguishing the meaning of a word from its reference. Kretzmann, however, argues persuasively that Locke distinguishes between meaning and reference and that ideas provide the meaning but not the reference of words. Thus, the line of criticism represented by the quotation from Mill is ill founded.

In addition to the kinds of ideas noted above, there are also particular and abstract ideas. Particular ideas have in them the ideas of particular places and times which limit the application of the idea to a single individual, while abstract general ideas leave out the ideas of particular times and places in order to allow the idea to apply to other similar qualities or things. There has been considerable philosophical and scholarly debate about the nature of the process of abstraction and Locke’s account of it. Berkeley argued that the process as Locke conceives it is incoherent. In part this is because Berkeley is an imagist—that is he believes that all ideas are images. If one is an imagist it becomes impossible to imagine what idea could include both the ideas of a right and equilateral triangle. Michael Ayers has recently argued that Locke too was an imagist. This would make Berkeley’s criticism of Locke very much to the point. Ayers’ claim, however, has been disputed (see, for example, Soles 1999). The process of abstraction is of considerable importance to human knowledge. Locke thinks most words we use are general (III.1.1, N: 409). Clearly, it is only general or sortal ideas that can serve in a classificatory scheme.

In his discussion of names of substances and in the contrast between names of substances and names of modes, a number of interesting features of Locke’s views about language and knowledge emerge. Physical substances are atoms and things made up of atoms. But we have no experience of the atomic structure of horses and tables. We know horses and tables mainly by secondary qualities such as color, taste and smell and so on and primary qualities such as shape, motion and extension. So, since the real essence (the atomic constitution) of a horse is unknown to us, our word ‘horse’ cannot get its meaning from that real essence. What the general word signifies is the complex of ideas we have decided are parts of the idea of that sort of thing. These ideas we get from experience. Locke calls such a general idea that picks out a sort, the nominal essence of that sort.

One of the central issues in Book III has to do with classification. On what basis do we divide things into kinds and organize those kinds into a system of species and genera? In the Aristotelian and Scholastic tradition that Locke rejects, necessary properties are those that an individual must have in order to exist and continue to exist. These contrast with accidental properties. Accidental properties are those that an individual can gain and lose and yet continue in existence. If a set of necessary properties is shared by a number of individuals, that set of properties constitutes the essence of a natural kind. The borders between kinds are supposed to be sharp and determinate. The aim of Aristotelian science is to discover the essences of natural kinds. Kinds can then be organized hierarchically into a classificatory system of species and genera. This classification of the world by natural kinds will be unique and privileged because it alone corresponds to the structure of the world. This doctrine of essences and kinds is often called Aristotelian essentialism. Locke rejects a variety of aspects of this doctrine. He rejects the notion that an individual has an essence apart from being treated as belonging to a kind. He also rejects the claim that there is a single classification of things in nature that the natural philosopher should seek to discover. He holds that there are many possible ways to classify the world each of which might be particularly useful depending on one’s purposes.

Locke’s pragmatic account of language and the distinction between nominal and real essences constitute an anti-essentialist alternative to this Aristotelian essentialism and its correlative account of the classification of natural kinds. He claims that there are no fixed boundaries in nature to be discovered—that is there are no clear demarcation points between species. There are always borderline cases. There is debate over whether Locke’s view is that this lack of fixed boundaries is true on both the level of appearances and nominal essences, and atomic constitutions and real essences, or on the level of nominal essences alone. The first view is that Locke holds that there are no Aristotelian natural kinds on either the level of appearance or atomic reality. The second view holds that Locke thinks there are Aristotelian natural kinds on the atomic level, it is simply that we cannot get at them or know what they are. On either of these interpretations, the real essence cannot provide the meaning to names of substances. A.O. Lovejoy in the Great Chain of Being , and David Wiggins are proponents of the second interpretation while Michael Ayers and William Uzgalis argue for the first (Uzgalis 1988; Ayers 1991: II. 70).

By contrast, the ideas that we use to make up our nominal essences come to us from experience. Locke claims that the mind is active in making our ideas of sorts and that there are so many properties to choose among that it is possible for different people to make quite different ideas of the essence of a certain substance. This has given some commentators the impression that the making of sorts is utterly arbitrary and conventional for Locke and that there is no basis for criticizing a particular nominal essence. Sometimes Locke says things that might suggest this. But this impression should be resisted. Peter Anstey has characterized Locke’s conventionalism about classificatory terms as both constrained and convergent (Anstey 2011: 209, 212). Locke claims that while the making of nominal essences is the work of the understanding, that work is constrained both by usage (where words stand for ideas that are already in use) and by the fact that substance words are supposed to copy the properties of the substances they refer to. Locke says that our ideas of kinds of substances have as their archetype the complex of properties that produce the appearances we use to make our nominal essences and which cause the unity of the complex of ideas that appear to us regularly conjoined. The very notion of an archetype implies constraints on what properties (and hence what ideas) can go together. If there were no such constraints there could be no archetype. (For further discussion of the nominal-real essence distinction see the entry Locke on Real Essences) .

Let us begin with the usage of words. It is important in a community of language users that words be used with the same meaning. If this condition is met it facilitates the chief end of language which is communication. If one fails to use words with the meaning that most people attach to them, one will fail to communicate effectively with others. Thus one would defeat the main purpose of language. It should also be noted that traditions of usage for Locke can be modified. Otherwise we would not be able to improve our knowledge and understanding by getting more clear and determinate ideas.

In the making of the names of substances, there is a period of discovery as the abstract general idea is put together (e.g. the discovery of violets or gold) and then the naming of that idea and then its introduction into language. Language itself is viewed as an instrument for carrying out the mainly prosaic purposes and practices of everyday life. Ordinary people are the chief makers of language.

Vulgar Notions suit vulgar Discourses; and both though confused enough, yet serve pretty well for the Market and the Wake. Merchants and Lovers, Cooks and Taylors, have Words wherewith to dispatch their ordinary affairs; and so, I think, might Philosophers and Disputants too, if they had a mind to understand and to be clearly understood. (III.11.10, N: 514)

These ordinary people use a few apparent qualities, mainly ideas of secondary qualities to make ideas and words that will serve their purposes.

Natural philosophers (i.e. scientists) come along later to try to determine if the connections between properties which the ordinary folk have put together in a particular idea in fact holds in nature. Scientists are seeking to find the necessary connections between properties. Still, even scientists, in Locke’s view, are restricted to using observable (and mainly secondary) qualities to categorize things in nature. Sometimes, the scientists may find that the ordinary folk had erred, as when they called whales ‘fish’. A whale is not a fish, as it turns out, but a mammal. There is a characteristic group of qualities that fish have that whales do not have. There is a characteristic group of qualities that mammals have that whales also have. To classify a whale as a fish, therefore, is a mistake. Similarly, we might make an idea of gold that only included being a soft metal and gold color. If so, we would be unable to distinguish between gold and fool’s gold. Thus, since it is the mind that makes complex ideas (they are ‘the workmanship of the understanding’), one is free to put together any combination of ideas one wishes and call it what one will. But the product of such work is open to criticism, either on the grounds that it does not conform to already current usage or that it inadequately represents the archetypes that it is supposed to copy in the world. We engage in such criticism in order to improve human understanding of the material world and thus the human condition. This is the convergent character of Locke’s conventionalism. In becoming more accurate, the nominal essence converges on the real essence.

However, we should not forget the master-builders that Locke mentions at the beginning of the Essay . Stephen Gaukroger (2010) claims that Locke’s great achievement was to provide a philosophical justification for the kind of experimental philosophy that Boyle’s work on the air pump, and his and Newton’s work on colors, as well as Sydenham’s observational medicine. All of these had been attacked for not providing explanations in terms of matter theory. Thus, Locke is justifying the autonomy of experimental philosophy. Such experimental explanations depend solely on the relation between phenomena, even when there is some micro-corpuscular basis for the phenomena being explained. According to Gaukroger, this is Locke’s contribution to the collapse of mechanism. For the details of the problem and its solution, see Chapters 4 and 5 of Gaukroger (2010).

The distinction between modes and substances is surely one of the most important in Locke’s philosophy. In contrast with substances, modes are dependent existences—they can be thought of as the ordering of substances. These are technical terms for Locke, so we should see how they are defined. Locke writes:

First, Modes I call such complex Ideas , which however compounded, contain not in themselves the supposition of subsisting by themselves; such are the ideas signified by the Words Triangle, Gratitude, Murther, etc . (II.12.4, N: 165)

Locke goes on to distinguish between simple and mixed modes. He writes:

Of these Modes , there are two sorts, which deserve distinct consideration. First, there are some that are only variations, or different combinations of the same simple Idea , without the mixture of any other, as a dozen or score; which are nothing but the ideas of so many distinct unities being added together, and these I call simple Modes , as being contained within the bounds of one simple Idea . Secondly, There are others, compounded of Ideas of several kinds, put together to make one complex one; v.g. Beauty , consisting of a certain combination of Colour and Figure, causing Delight to the Beholder; Theft , which being the concealed change of the Possession of any thing, without the consent of the Proprietor, contains, as is visible, a combination of several Ideas of several kinds; and these I call Mixed Modes . (II.12.5, N: 165)

When we make ideas of modes, the mind is again active, but the archetype is in our mind. The question becomes whether things in the world fit our ideas, and not whether our ideas correspond to the nature of things in the world. Our ideas are adequate. Thus we define ‘bachelor’ as an unmarried, adult, male human being. If we find that someone does not fit this definition, this does not reflect badly on our definition, it simply means that that individual does not belong to the class of bachelors. Modes give us the ideas of mathematics, of morality, of religion and politics and indeed of human conventions in general. Since these modal ideas are not only made by us but serve as standards that things in the world either fit or do not fit and thus belong or do not belong to that sort, ideas of modes are clear and distinct, adequate and complete. Thus in modes, we get the real and nominal essences combined. One can give precise definitions of mathematical terms (that is, give necessary and sufficient conditions), and one can give deductive demonstrations of mathematical truths. Locke sometimes says that morality too is capable of deductive demonstration. Though pressed by his friend William Molyneux to produce such a demonstrative morality, Locke never did so. The entry Locke’s moral philosophy provides an excellent discussion of Locke’s views on morality and issues related to them for which there is no room in this general account. The terms of political discourse also have some of the same modal features for Locke. When Locke defines the states of nature, slavery, and war in the Second Treatise of Government , for example, we are presumably getting precise modal definitions from which one can deduce consequences. It is possible, however, that with politics we are getting a study that requires both experience as well as the deductive modal aspect.

In the fourth book of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke tells us what knowledge is and what humans can know and what they cannot (not simply what they do and do not happen to know). Locke defines knowledge as “the perception of the connexion and agreement or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas” (IV.1.1, N: 525). This definition of knowledge contrasts with the Cartesian definition of knowledge as any ideas that are clear and distinct. Locke’s account of knowledge allows him to say that we can know substances in spite of the fact that our ideas of them always include the obscure and relative idea of substance in general. Still, Locke’s definition of knowledge raises in this domain a problem analogous to those we have seen with perception and language. If knowledge is the “perception of … the agreement or disagreement … of any of our Ideas”—are we not trapped in the circle of our own ideas? What about knowing the real existence of things? Locke is plainly aware of this problem, and very likely holds that the implausibility of skeptical hypotheses, such as Descartes’ Dream hypothesis (he doesn’t even bother to mention Descartes’ malin genie or Evil Demon hypothesis), along with the causal connections between qualities and ideas in his own system is enough to solve the problem. It is also worth noting that there are significant differences between Locke’s brand of empiricism and that of Berkeley that would make it easier for Locke to solve the veil of perception problem than Berkeley. Locke, for example, makes transdictive inferences about atoms where Berkeley is unwilling to allow that such inferences are legitimate. This implies that Locke has a semantics that allows him to talk about the unexperienced causes of experience (such as atoms) where Berkeley cannot. (See Mackie’s perceptive discussion of the veil of perception problem, in Problems from Locke , 1976: 51 through 67.)

What then can we know and with what degree of certainty? We can know that God exists with the second highest degree of assurance, that of demonstration. We also know that we exist with the highest degree of certainty. The truths of morality and mathematics we can know with certainty as well, because these are modal ideas whose adequacy is guaranteed by the fact that we make such ideas as ideal models which other things must fit, rather than trying to copy some external archetype which we can only grasp inadequately. On the other hand, our efforts to grasp the nature of external objects are limited largely to the connection between their apparent qualities. The real essence of elephants and gold is hidden from us: though in general we suppose them to be some distinct combination of atoms which cause the grouping of apparent qualities which leads us to see elephants and violets, gold and lead as distinct kinds. Our knowledge of material things is probabilistic and thus opinion rather than knowledge. Thus our “knowledge” of external objects is inferior to our knowledge of mathematics and morality, of ourselves, and of God. We do have sensitive knowledge of external objects, which is limited to things we are presently experiencing. While Locke holds that we only have knowledge of a limited number of things, he thinks we can judge the truth or falsity of many propositions in addition to those we can legitimately claim to know. This brings us to a discussion of probability.

Knowledge involves the seeing of the agreement or disagreement of our ideas. What then is probability and how does it relate to knowledge? Locke writes:

The Understanding Faculties being given to Man, not barely for Speculation, but also for the Conduct of his Life, Man would be at a great loss, if he had nothing to direct him, but what has the Certainty of true Knowledge … Therefore, as God has set some Things in broad day-light; as he has given us some certain Knowledge…So in the greater part of our Concernment, he has afforded us only the twilight, as I may say so, of Probability, suitable, I presume, to that State of Mediocrity and Probationership, he has been pleased to place us in here, wherein to check our over-confidence and presumption, we might by every day’s Experience be made sensible of our short sightedness and liableness to Error… (IV.14.1–2, N: 652)

So, apart from the few important things that we can know for certain, e.g. the existence of ourselves and God, the nature of mathematics and morality broadly construed, for the most part we must lead our lives without knowledge. What then is probability? Locke writes:

As Demonstration is the shewing of the agreement or disagreement of two Ideas, by the intervention of one or more Proofs, which have a constant, immutable, and visible connexion one with another: so Probability is nothing but the appearance of such an Agreement or Disagreement, by the intervention of Proofs, whose connection is not constant and immutable, or at least is not perceived to be so, but is or appears, for the most part to be so, and is enough to induce the Mind to judge the Proposition to be true, or false, rather than the contrary. (IV.15.1, N: 654)

Probable reasoning, on this account, is an argument, similar in certain ways to the demonstrative reasoning that produces knowledge but different also in certain crucial respects. It is an argument that provides evidence that leads the mind to judge a proposition true or false but without a guarantee that the judgment is correct. This kind of probable judgment comes in degrees, ranging from near demonstrations and certainty to unlikeliness and improbability in the vicinity of impossibility. It is correlated with degrees of assent ranging from full assurance down to conjecture, doubt and distrust.

The new science of mathematical probability had come into being on the continent just around the time that Locke was writing the Essay . His account of probability, however, shows little or no awareness of mathematical probability. Rather it reflects an older tradition that treated testimony as probable reasoning. Given that Locke’s aim, above all, is to discuss what degree of assent we should give to various religious propositions, the older conception of probability very likely serves his purposes best. Thus, when Locke comes to describe the grounds for probability he cites the conformity of the proposition to our knowledge, observation and experience, and the testimony of others who are reporting their observation and experience. Concerning the latter we must consider the number of witnesses, their integrity, their skill in observation, counter testimony and so on. In judging rationally how much to assent to a probable proposition, these are the relevant considerations that the mind should review. We should, Locke also suggests, be tolerant of differing opinions as we have more reason to retain the opinions we have than to give them up to strangers or adversaries who may well have some interest in our doing so.

Locke distinguishes two sorts of probable propositions. The first of these have to do with particular existences or matters of fact, and the second that are beyond the testimony of the senses. Matters of fact are open to observation and experience, and so all of the tests noted above for determining rational assent to propositions about them are available to us. Things are quite otherwise with matters that are beyond the testimony of the senses. These include the knowledge of finite immaterial spirits such as angels or things such as atoms that are too small to be sensed, or the plants, animals or inhabitants of other planets that are beyond our range of sensation because of their distance from us. Concerning this latter category, Locke says we must depend on analogy as the only help for our reasoning. He writes:

Thus the observing that the bare rubbing of two bodies violently one upon the other, produce heat, and very often fire it self, we have reason to think, that what we call Heat and Fire consist of the violent agitation of the imperceptible minute parts of the burning matter…. (IV.16.12, N: 665–6)

We reason about angels by considering the Great Chain of Being; figuring that while we have no experience of angels, the ranks of species above us is likely as numerous as that below of which we do have experience. This reasoning is, however, only probable.

The relative merits of the senses, reason and faith for attaining truth and the guidance of life were a significant issue during this period. As noted above James Tyrrell recalled that the original impetus for the writing of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was a discussion about the principles of morality and revealed religion. In Book IV Chapters 17, 18, and 19 Locke deals with the nature of reason, the relation of reason to faith and the nature of enthusiasm. Locke remarks that all sects make use of reason as far as they can. It is only when this fails them that they have recourse to faith and claim that what is revealed is above reason. But he adds:

And I do not see how they can argue with anyone or even convince a gainsayer who uses the same plea, without setting down strict boundaries between faith and reason. (IV.18.2, N: 689)

Locke then defines reason as

the discovery of the certainty or probability of such propositions or truths, which the mind arrives at by deduction made from such ideas, as it has got by the use of its natural faculties; viz, by the use of sensation or reflection. (IV.18.2, N: 689)

Faith, on the other hand, is assent to any proposition “…upon the credit of the proposer, as coming from God, in some extraordinary way of communication”. That is we have faith in what is disclosed by revelation and which cannot be discovered by reason. Locke also distinguishes between the original revelation by God to some person, and traditional revelation which is the original revelation “…delivered over to others in Words, and the ordinary ways of our conveying our Conceptions one to another” (IV.18.3, N: 690).

Locke makes the point that some things could be discovered both by reason and by revelation—God could reveal the propositions of Euclid’s geometry, or they could be discovered by reason. In such cases there would be little use for faith. Traditional revelation can never produce as much certainty as the contemplation of the agreement or disagreement of our own ideas. Similarly revelations about matters of fact do not produce as much certainty as having the experience oneself. Revelation, then, cannot contradict what we know to be true. If it could, it would undermine the trustworthiness of all of our faculties. This would be a disastrous result. Where revelation comes into its own is where reason cannot reach. Where we have few or no ideas for reason to contradict or confirm, these are the proper matters for faith.

…that Part of the Angels rebelled against GOD, and thereby lost their first happy state: and that the dead shall rise, and live again: These and the like, being Beyond the Discovery of Reason, are purely matters of Faith; with which Reason has nothing to do. (IV.18.8, N: 694)

Still, reason does have a crucial role to play in respect to revelation. Locke writes:

Because the Mind, not being certain of the Truth of that it evidently does not know, but only yielding to the Probability that appears to it, is bound to give up its assent to such Testimony, which, it is satisfied, comes from one who cannot err, and will not deceive. But yet, it still belongs to Reason, to judge of the truth of its being a Revelation, and of the significance of the Words, wherein it is delivered. (IV.18.8, N: 694)

So, in respect to the crucial question of how we are to know whether a revelation is genuine, we are supposed to use reason and the canons of probability to judge. Locke claims that if the boundaries between faith and reason are not clearly marked, then there will be no place for reason in religion and one then gets all the “extravagant Opinions and Ceremonies, that are to be found in the religions of the world…” (IV.18.11, N: 696).

Should one accept revelation without using reason to judge whether it is genuine revelation or not, one gets what Locke calls a third principle of assent besides reason and revelation, namely enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a vain or unfounded confidence in divine favor or communication. It implies that there is no need to use reason to judge whether such favor or communication is genuine or not. Clearly when such communications are not genuine they are “the ungrounded Fancies of a Man’s own Brain” (IV.19.2, N: 698). This kind of enthusiasm was characteristic of Protestant extremists going back to the era of the civil war. Locke was not alone in rejecting enthusiasm, but he rejects it in the strongest terms. Enthusiasm violates the fundamental principle by which the understanding operates—that assent be proportioned to the evidence. To abandon that fundamental principle would be catastrophic. This is a point that Locke also makes in The Conduct of the Understanding and The Reasonableness of Christianity . Locke wants each of us to use our understanding to search after truth. Of enthusiasts, those who would abandon reason and claim to know on the basis of faith alone, Locke writes:

…he that takes away Reason to make way for Revelation, puts out the Light of both, and does much what the same, as if he would perswade a Man to put out his eyes, the better to receive the remote Light of an invisible Star by a Telescope. (IV.19.4, N: 698)

Rather than engage in the tedious labor required to reason correctly to judge of the genuineness of their revelation, enthusiasts persuade themselves that they are possessed of immediate revelation. This leads to “odd Opinions and extravagant actions” that are characteristic of enthusiasm and which should warn that this is a wrong principle. Thus, Locke strongly rejects any attempt to make inward persuasion not judged by reason a legitimate principle.

We turn now to a consideration of Locke’s educational works.

Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education and his Conduct of the Understanding form a nice bridge between An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and his political works. Ruth Grant and Nathan Tarcov write in the introduction to their edition of these works:

The idea of liberty, so crucial to all of Locke’s writings on politics and education, is traced in the Essay to reflection on the power of the mind over one’s own actions, especially the power to suspend actions in the pursuit of the satisfaction of one’s own desires until after a full consideration of their objects (II.21.47, N: 51–52). The Essay thus shows how the independence of mind pursued in the Conduct is possible. (G&T 1996: xvi)

Some Thoughts Concerning Education was first published in 1693. This book collected together advice that Locke had been giving his friend Edward Clarke about the education of Clarke’s son (and also his daughters) since 1684. In preparing the revision for the fourth edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke began writing a chapter called “The Conduct of the Understanding”. This became quite long and was never added to the Essay or even finished. It was left to Locke’s literary executors to decide what to do with it. The Conduct was published by Peter King in his posthumous edition of some of Locke’s works in 1706. As Locke was composing these works, some of the material from the Conduct eventually made its way into the Thoughts . Grant and Tarcov write that the Thoughts and the Conduct “complement each other well: the Thoughts focuses on the education of children by their parents, whereas the Conduct addresses the self-education of adults” (G&T 1996: vii). Though they also note tensions between the two that illustrate paradoxes in liberal society. The Thoughts is addressed to the education of the sons and daughters of the English gentry in the late seventeenth century. It is in some ways thus significantly more limited to its time and place than the Conduct . Yet, its insistence on the inculcating such virtues as

justice as respect for the rights of others, civility, liberality, humanity, self-denial, industry, thrift, courage, truthfulness, and a willingness to question prejudice, authority and the biases of one’s own self-interest

very likely represents the qualities needed for citizens in a liberal society (G&T 1996: xiii).

Locke’s Thoughts represents the culmination of a century of what has been called “the discovery of the child”. In the Middle Ages the child was regarded as

only a simple plaything, as a simple animal, or a miniature adult who dressed, played and was supposed to act like his elders…Their ages were unimportant and therefore seldom known. Their education was undifferentiated, either by age, ability or intended occupation. (Axtell 1968: 63–4)

Locke treated children as human beings in whom the gradual development of rationality needed to be fostered by parents. Locke urged parents to spend time with their children and tailor their education to their character and idiosyncrasies, to develop both a sound body and character, and to make play the chief strategy for learning rather than rote learning or punishment. Thus, he urged learning languages by learning to converse in them before learning rules of grammar. Locke also suggests that the child learn at least one manual trade.

In advocating a kind of education that made people who think for themselves, Locke was preparing people to effectively make decisions in their own lives—to engage in individual self-government—and to participate in the government of their country. The Conduct reveals the connections Locke sees between reason, freedom and morality. Reason is required for good self-government because reason insofar as it is free from partiality, intolerance and passion and able to question authority leads to fair judgment and action. We thus have a responsibility to cultivate reason in order to avoid the moral failings of passion, partiality and so forth (G&T 1996: xii). This is, in Tarcov’s phrase, Locke’s education for liberty.

We turn now to Locke’s political writings. (See the entry on Locke’s political philosophy , which focuses on five topics (the state of nature, natural law, property, consent and toleration) and goes into these topics in more depth than is possible in a general account and provides much useful information on the debates about them.)

4. The Two Treatises Of Government

Lord Shaftsbury had been dismissed from his post as Lord Chancellor in 1673 and had become one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Country Party. In 1679 the chief issue was the attempt by the Country Party leaders to exclude James, Duke of York from succeeding his brother Charles II to the throne. They wanted to do this because James was a Catholic, and England by this time was a firmly Protestant country. They had acquired a majority in the House of Commons through serious grass roots election campaigns, and passed an exclusion bill, but given the King’s unwillingness to see his brother excluded from the throne, the bill failed in the House of Lords. They tried a couple of more times without success. Having failed by parliamentary means, some of the Country Party leaders started plotting armed rebellion.

The Two Treatises of Government were published in 1689, long after the rebellion plotted by the Country party leaders had failed to materialize and after Shaftsbury had fled the country for Holland and died. The introduction of the Two Treatises was written after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and gave the impression that the book was written to justify the Glorious Revolution. We now know that the Two Treatises of Government were written during the Exclusion crisis in 1681 and may have been intended in part to justify the general armed rising which the Country Party leaders were planning.

There were serious obstacles to a rebellion to force James’ exclusion from the throne. The English Anglican gentry needed to support such an action. But the Anglican church from childhood on taught that: “…men’s political duties were exhaustively determined by their terrestrial superiors, that under grave conscientious scruples they might rightly decline to carry out those decrees of authority which were in direct breach of divine law, they could under no circumstances have a right to resist such authority”. (Dunn, 1968, 48) Since by 1679 it was abundantly clear that the King opposed excluding his brother from the throne, to favor exclusion implied “explicit and self-conscious resistance to the sovereign”. Passive resistance would simply not do. On the other hand, the royal policy “outraged their deepest religious prejudices and stimulated their most obscure emotional anxieties.” So, the gentry were deeply conflicted and neither of the choices available to them looked very palatable. John Dunn goes on to remark: “To exert influence upon their choice it was above all necessary to present a more coherent ordering of their values, to show that the political tradition within which the dissenters saw their conduct was not necessarily empirically absurd or socially subversive. The gentry had to be persuaded that there could be reason for rebellion which could make it neither blasphemous or suicidal.” (Dunn, 1968, 49) To achieve this goal Locke picked the most relevant and extreme of the supporters of the divine right of Kings to attack. Sir Robert Filmer (c 1588–1653), a man of the generation of Charles I and the English Civil War, who had defended the crown in various works. His most famous work, however, Patriarcha , was published posthumously in 1680 and represented the most complete and coherent exposition of the view Locke wished to deny. Filmer held that men were born into helpless servitude to an authoritarian family, a social hierarchy and a sovereign whose only constraint was his relationship with God. Under these circumstances, anything other than passive obedience would be “vicious, blasphemous and intellectually absurd.” So, Locke needed to refute Filmer and in Dunn’s words: “rescue the contractarian account of political obligation from the criticism of impiety and absurdity. Only in this way could he restore to the Anglican gentry a coherent basis for moral autonomy or a practical initiative in the field of politics.” (Dunn, 1968, 50)

The First Treatise of Government is a polemical work aimed at refuting the theological basis for the patriarchal version of the Divine Right of Kings doctrine put forth by Sir Robert Filmer. Locke singles out Filmer’s contention that men are not “naturally free” as the key issue, for that is the “ground” or premise on which Filmer erects his argument for the claim that all “legitimate” government is “absolute monarchy”—kings being descended from the first man, Adam, and their subjects being naturally slaves. Early in the First Treatise Locke denies that either scripture or reason supports Filmer’s premise or arguments. In what follows in the First Treatise , Locke minutely examines key Biblical passages.

While The Second Treatise of Government provides Locke’s positive theory of government, it also continues his argument against Sir Robert Filmer’s claims that monarchs legitimately hold absolute power over their subjects. Locke holds that Filmer’s view is sufficiently incoherent to lead to governments being established by force and violence. Thus, Locke claims he must provide an alternative account of the origin of government “lest men fall into the dangerous belief that all government in the world is merely the product of force and violence” ( Treatises II,1,4). Locke’s account involves several devices which were common in seventeenth and eighteenth century political philosophy—natural rights theory and the social contract. Natural rights are those rights which we are supposed to have as human beings before ever government comes into being. We might suppose, that like other animals, we have a natural right to struggle for our survival. Locke will argue that we have a right to the means to survive. When Locke comes to explain how government comes into being, he uses the idea that people agree that their condition in the state of nature is unsatisfactory, and so agree to transfer some of their rights to a central government, while retaining others. This is the theory of the social contract. There are many versions of natural rights theory and the social contract in seventeenth and eighteenth century European political philosophy, some conservative and some radical. Locke’s version belongs on the radical side of the spectrum. These radical natural right theories influenced the ideologies of the American and French revolutions.

Locke’s strategy for refuting Filmer’s claims that monarchs have absolute power over their subjects is to show that Filmer is conflating a whole variety of limited powers, all of which might be held by one man and thus give the false appearance that a king has absolute power over wives, children, servants and slaves as well as subjects of a commonwealth. When properly distinguished, however, and the limitations of each displayed, it becomes clear that monarchs have no legitimate absolute power over their subjects.

An important part of Locke’s project in the Second Treatise is to figure out what the role of legitimate government is, thus allowing him to distinguish the nature of illegitimate government. Once this is done, the basis for legitimate revolution becomes clear. Figuring out what the proper or legitimate role of civil government is would be a difficult task indeed if one were to examine the vast complexity of existing governments. How should one proceed? One strategy is to consider what life is like in the absence of civil government. Presumably this is a simpler state, one which may be easier to understand. Then one might see what role civil government ought to play. This is the strategy which Locke pursues, following Hobbes and others. So, in the first chapter of the Second Treatise Locke defines political power.

Political power , then, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the common-wealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good. ( Treatises, II, 1,3)

In the second chapter of The Second Treatise Locke describes the state in which there is no government with real political power. This is the state of nature. It is sometimes assumed that the state of nature is a state in which there is no government at all. This is only partially true. It is possible to have in the state of nature either no government, illegitimate government, or legitimate government with less than full political power. (See the section on the state of nature in the entry on Locke’s political philosophy.)

If we consider the state of nature before there was government, it is a state of political equality in which there is no natural superior or inferior. From this equality flows the obligation to mutual love and the duties that people owe one another, and the great maxims of justice and charity. Was there ever such a state? There has been considerable debate about this. Still, it is plain that both Hobbes and Locke would answer this question affirmatively. Whenever people have not agreed to establish a common political authority, they remain in the state of nature. It’s like saying that people are in the state of being naturally single until they are married. Locke clearly thinks one can find the state of nature in his time at least in the “inland, vacant places of America” ( Second Treatise V. 36) and in the relations between different peoples. Perhaps the historical development of states also went though the stages of a state of nature. An alternative possibility is that the state of nature is not a real historical state, but rather a theoretical construct, intended to help determine the proper function of government. If one rejects the historicity of states of nature, one may still find them a useful analytical device. For Locke, it is very likely both.

According to Locke, God created man and we are, in effect, God’s property. The chief end set us by our creator as a species and as individuals is survival. A wise and omnipotent God, having made people and sent them into this world:

…by his order and about his business, they are his property whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for our’s. ( Treatises II,2,6)

It follows immediately that “he has no liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, yet when some nobler use than its bare possession calls for it” ( Treatises II.2.6). So, murder and suicide violate the divine purpose.

If one takes survival as the end, then we may ask what are the means necessary to that end. On Locke’s account, these turn out to be life, liberty, health and property. Since the end is set by God, on Locke’s view we have a right to the means to that end. So we have rights to life, liberty, health and property. These are natural rights, that is they are rights that we have in a state of nature before the introduction of civil government, and all people have these rights equally.

There is also a law of nature. It is the Golden Rule, interpreted in terms of natural rights. Thus Locke writes:

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions…. ( Treatises II.2.6)

Locke tells us that the law of nature is revealed by reason. Locke makes the point about the law that it commands what is best for us. If it did not, he says, the law would vanish for it would not be obeyed. It is in this sense that Locke means that reason reveals the law. If you reflect on what is best for yourself and others, given the goal of survival and our natural equality, you will come to this conclusion. (See the section on the law of nature in the entry on Locke’s Political Philosophy.)

Locke does not intend his account of the state of nature as a sort of utopia. Rather it serves as an analytical device that explains why it becomes necessary to introduce civil government and what the legitimate function of civil government is. Thus, as Locke conceives it, there are problems with life in the state of nature. The law of nature, like civil laws can be violated. There are no police, prosecutors or judges in the state of nature as these are all representatives of a government with full political power. The victims, then, must enforce the law of nature in the state of nature. In addition to our other rights in the state of nature, we have the rights to enforce the law and to judge on our own behalf. We may, Locke tells us, help one another. We may intervene in cases where our own interests are not directly under threat to help enforce the law of nature. This right eventually serves as the justification for legitimate rebellion. Still, in the state of nature, the person who is most likely to enforce the law under these circumstances is the person who has been wronged. The basic principle of justice is that the punishment should be proportionate to the crime. But when the victims are judging the seriousness of the crime, they are more likely to judge it of greater severity than might an impartial judge. As a result, there will be regular miscarriages of justice. This is perhaps the most important problem with the state of nature.

In chapters 3 and 4, Locke defines the states of war and slavery. The state of war is a state in which someone has a sedate and settled intention of violating someone’s right to life (and thus all their other rights). Such a person puts themselves into a state of war with the person whose life they intend to take. In such a war the person who intends to violate someone’s right to life is an unjust aggressor. This is not the normal relationship between people enjoined by the law of nature in the state of nature. Locke is distancing himself from Hobbes who had made the state of nature and the state of war equivalent terms. For Locke, the state of nature is ordinarily one in which we follow the Golden Rule interpreted in terms of natural rights, and thus love our fellow human creatures. The state of war only comes about when someone proposes to violate someone else’s rights. Thus, on Locke’s theory of war, there will always be an innocent victim on one side and an unjust aggressor on the other.

Slavery is the state of being in the absolute or arbitrary power of another. On Locke’s definition of slavery, there is only one rather remarkable way to become a legitimate slave. In order to do so, one must be an unjust aggressor defeated in war. The just victor then has the option to either kill the aggressor or enslave them. Locke tells us that the state of slavery is the continuation of the state of war between a lawful conqueror and a captive, in which the conqueror delays taking the life of the captive, and instead makes use of him. This is a continued war because if conqueror and captive make some compact for obedience on the one side and limited power on the other, the state of slavery ceases and becomes a relation between a master and a servant in which the master only has limited power over his servant. The reason that slavery ceases with the compact is that “no man, can, by agreement pass over to another that which he hath not in himself, a power over his own life” ( Treatises II.4.24). Legitimate slavery is an important concept in Locke’s political philosophy largely because it tells us what the legitimate extent of despotic power is and defines and illuminates by contrast the nature of illegitimate slavery. Illegitimate slavery is that state in which someone possesses absolute or despotic power over someone else without just cause. Locke holds that it is this illegitimate state of slavery which absolute monarchs wish to impose upon their subjects. It is very likely for this reason that legitimate slavery is so narrowly defined. This shows that the chapter on slavery plays a crucial role in Locke’s argument against Sir Robert Filmer and thus could not have been easily dispensed with. Still, it is possible that Locke had an additional purpose or perhaps a quite different reason for writing about slavery.

There has been a steady stream of articles and books over the last sixty years arguing that given Locke’s involvement with trade and colonial government, the theory of slavery in the Second Treatise was intended to justify the institutions and practices of Afro-American slavery. If this were the case, Locke’s philosophy would not contradict his actions as an investor and colonial administrator. However, there are strong objections to this view. Had he intended to justify Afro-American slavery, Locke would have done much better with a vastly more inclusive definition of legitimate slavery than the one he gives. It is sometimes suggested that Locke’s account of “just war” is so vague that it could easily be twisted to justify the institutions and practices of Afro-American slavery. This, however, is also not the case. In the chapter “Of Conquest” Locke explicitly lists the limits of the legitimate power of conquerors. These limits on who can become a legitimate slave and what the powers of a just conqueror are ensure that this theory of conquest and slavery would condemn the institutions and practices of Afro-American slavery in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Nonetheless, the debate continues. One element of the debate has to do with Locke’s role in the writing of the Fundamental Constitutions of the Carolinas . David Armitage in his 2004 article “John Locke, Carolina and the Two Treatises of Government” argues that Locke was involved in a revision of the Fundamental Constitution of the Carolinas at the very time he was writing The Two Treatises of Government . The provision that “Every Freedman of the Carolinas has absolute power and authority over his negro slaves” remained in the document unchanged. In his 2016 book The Ashley Cooper Plan , Thomas Wilson gives a detailed account of Ashley Cooper’s intentions for the Carolina colony and how Cooper’s intent was thwarted by Barbadian slave owners who changed Carolina society from a society with slaves to a slave society. L. H. Roper, in his 2004 book Conceiving Carolina: Property, Planters and Plots 1662–1729 , offers a different account of what went wrong, focusing on conflicts over the trade in Indian slaves. James Farr’s article “Locke, Natural Law and New World Slavery” (2008) is one of the best statements of the position that Locke intended his theory of slavery to apply to English absolutism and not Afro-American slavery while noting that Locke’s involvement with slavery has ruined his reputation as the great champion of liberty Roger Woolhouse in his recent biography of Locke (Woolhouse 2007: 187) remarks that “Though there is no consensus on the whole question, there certainly seems to be ‘a glaring contradiction between his theories and Afro-American slavery’”.

Recently, there has been a debate over whose theory of slavery and absolutism Locke was attacking. Johan Olsthoorn and Laurens van Apeldoorn (2020) argue that Locke’s account of slavery and in particular, that no person can consensually establish absolute rule over themselves with all its consequences has little force against other classical contract theories, in particular those of Grotius and Puffendorf. Both Grotius and Puffendorf defended both absolutism and colonial slavery.

Felis Waldmann in “Slavery and Absolutism in Locke’s Two Treatises: A Response to Olsthoorn and van Apeldoorn” objects to a number of their claims finding others not relevant. Most notably, he objects to these claims: First, “Locke is working with an idiosyncratic conception of slavery and absolute rule repudiated by prominent early modern thinkers defending political absolutism.” Second: “Like Filmer, Locke maintains that absolute rulers may arbitrarily kill and maim their subjects at will, by dint of having a dominium in the latter’s lives.” Finally, he objects to the claim that: “Early modern natural lawyers, from Grotius onward, conceptualized slavery rather differently, insisting that enslaved people were not owned in the way we own things (which may be destroyed at will)” (Waldmann 7).

In brief, Waldmann’s response to the first claim is that Filmer accurately represented the Royalist position in the late 1670s and early 1680s and so Locke’s account is not a straw man. Thus, Locke is attacking Filmer’s account of slavery and not some weak and extreme version of the argument for absolutism that no one held. Waldmann suggests that the second claim magnifies this tendency of the two authors’ portrayal of Locke’s argument as not responding to the standard arguments for absolutism. Thus, Olsthoorn and van Apeldoorn attribute Filmer’s position to Locke. Waldmann concludes that the claims of Olsthoorn and van Apeldoorn that since Locke’s position on slavery was significantly different from those of Grotius and Puffendorf, it had little force against them is, in fact, the case. But he thinks this is of little importance since Locke was not arguing against them. One suggestion he considers plausible is that Locke is aiming his argument against the possibility of self-enslavement at Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was recognized by his contemporaries as asserting both that one could by contract enslave oneself and that the king had dominium, over his subjects.

William Uzgalis, in his 2017 chapter “John Locke, Slavery and Indian Lands,” holds that Locke has two theories of slavery, one of them of legitimate slavery and the other of illegitimate slavery. Note that the authors discussed above simply don’t make this distinction. If they had, it would be plain that while Locke shares with Filmer the dominium conception of slavery that allows a master to kill or maim a slave, neither theory belongs to Filmer, and if Locke is correct about royal absolutism and given the character of the practices of the slave trade and colonial slavery, both absolutism at home and the slave trade and colonial slavery fall under the theory of illegitimate slavery. Neither Grotius, Puffendorf or Hobbes has an explicit theory of illegitimate slavery. Uzgalis also notes that Grotius and Puffendorf provided claims that Locke could have adopted had he wished to justify the slave trade and slavery in the colonies. Still, he denies them all, and with good reason. He would have substantially weakened his argument against the kind of absolutism he attributed to Filmer and the Stuarts had he done so. This suggests that he was crafting an alternative theory and not arguing against its competitors, with the exception, perhaps, of Hobbes.

Holly Brewer in her 2017 article “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’, Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery” argues for a different approach to these questions. She presents evidence that the Stuart kings, and Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York, in particular, were not just interested in absolute government at home; they actively promoted the Royal Africa Company, the slave trade and slavery in the colonies as it provided considerable amounts of money to the royal coffers. James was the Governor (the President) of the Royal Africa Company and Admiral of the English fleet. Lord Shaftesbury, Locke’s patron, was the sub-governor, and Locke assisted him. Using the fleet, James attacked and captured Dutch forts on the coast of Africa to make bases for the Royal Africa Company and deprive the Dutch of them. The Stuarts minted guinea coins to celebrate these efforts. After becoming King, James continued as Governor of the Royal Africa Company. Thus Brewer underlines the similarities and connections between the absolutism Locke objected to at home and the slave trade and slavery in the colonies. She argues that the spread of slavery needs to be understood as an English imperial policy and not something that occurred in different times and places unconnected with one another. She also claims that while Locke was a member of King William III’s Board of Trade in the waning years of the seventeenth century, he sought to undo Stuart policies concerning slavery in the colonies.

Chapter 5 “Of Property” is one of the most famous, influential and important chapters in the Second Treatise of Government . Indeed, some of the most controversial issues about the Second Treatise come from varying interpretations of it. In this chapter Locke, in effect, describes the evolution of the state of nature to the point where it becomes expedient for those in it to found a civil government. So, it is not only an account of the nature and origin of private property but leads up to the explanation of why civil government replaces the state of nature (see the section on property in the entry on Locke’s political philosophy).

In discussing the origin of private property Locke begins by noting that God gave the earth to all men in common. Thus there is a question about how private property comes to be. Locke finds it a serious difficulty. He points out, however, that we are supposed to make use of the earth “for the best advantage of life and convenience” ( Treatises II.5.25). What then is the means to appropriate property from the common store? Locke argues that private property does not come about by universal consent. If one had to go about and ask everyone if one could eat these berries, one would starve to death before getting everyone’s agreement. Locke holds that we have property in our own person. And the labor of our body and the work of our hands properly belong to us. So, when one picks up acorns or berries, they thereby belong to the person who picked them up. There has been some controversy about what Locke means by “labor”. Daniel Russell claims that for Locke, labor is a goal-directed activity that converts materials that might meet our needs into resources that actually do (Russell 2004). This interpretation of what Locke means by “labor” connects nicely with his claim that we have a natural law obligation first to preserve ourselves and then to help in the preservation and flourishing of others.

One might think that one could then acquire as much as one wished, but this is not the case. Locke introduces at least two important qualifications on how much property can be acquired. The first qualification has to do with waste. Locke writes:

As much as anyone can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much by his labor he may fix a property in; whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others. ( Treatises II.5.31)

Since originally, populations were small and resources great, living within the bounds set by reason, there would be little quarrel or contention over property, for a single man could make use of only a very small part of what was available.

Note that Locke has, thus far, been talking about hunting and gathering, and the kinds of limitations which reason imposes on the kind of property that hunters and gatherers hold. In the next section he turns to agriculture and the ownership of land and the kinds of limitations there are on that kind of property. In effect, we see the evolution of the state of nature from a hunter/gatherer kind of society to that of a farming and agricultural society. Once again it is labor which imposes limitations upon how much land can be enclosed. It is only as much as one can work. But there is an additional qualification. Locke says:

Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land , by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the as yet unprovided could use. So that, in effect, there was never the less for others because of his inclosure for himself: for he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. No body could consider himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left to quench his thirst: and the case of land and water, where there is enough, is perfectly the same. ( Treatises II.5.33)

The next stage in the evolution of the state of nature involves the introduction of money. Locke remarks that:

… before the desire of having more than one needed had altered the intrinsic value of things, which depends only on their usefulness to the life of man; or had agreed, that a little piece of yellow metal, which would keep without wasting or decay, should be worth a great piece of flesh, or a whole heap of corn; though men had a right to appropriate by their labor, each one of himself, as much of the things of nature, as he could use; yet this could not be much, nor to the prejudice of others, where the same plenty was left to those who would use the same industry. ( Treatises II.5.37)

So, before the introduction of money, there was a degree of economic equality imposed on mankind both by reason and the barter system. And men were largely confined to the satisfaction of their needs and conveniences. Most of the necessities of life are relatively short lived—berries, plums, venison and so forth. One could reasonably barter one’s berries for nuts which would last not weeks but perhaps a whole year. And says Locke:

…if he would give his nuts for a piece of metal, pleased with its color, or exchange his sheep for shells, or wool for a sparkling pebble or diamond, and keep those by him all his life, he invaded not the right of others, he might heap up as much of these durable things as he pleased; the exceeding of the bounds of his property not lying in the largeness of his possessions, but the perishing of anything uselessly in it. ( Treatises II.5.146)

The introduction of money is necessary for the differential increase in property, with resulting economic inequality. Without money there would be no point in going beyond the economic equality of the earlier stage. In a money economy, different degrees of industry could give men vastly different proportions.

This partage of things in an inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable out of the bounds of society, and without compact, only by putting a value on gold and silver, and tacitly agreeing to the use of money: for in governments, the laws regulate the rights of property, and the possession of land is determined by positive constitutions. ( Treatises II.5.50)

The implication is that it is the introduction of money, which causes inequality, which in turn multiplies the causes of quarrels and contentions and increased numbers of violations of the law of nature. This leads to the decision to create a civil government. Before turning to the institution of civil government, however, we should ask what happens to the qualifications on the acquisition of property after the advent of money? One answer proposed by C. B. Macpherson in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism is that the qualifications are completely set aside, and we now have a system for the unlimited acquisition of private property. This does not seem to be correct. It seems plain, rather, that at least the non-spoilage qualification is satisfied, because money does not spoil. The other qualifications may be rendered somewhat irrelevant by the advent of the conventions about property adopted in civil society. This leaves open the question of whether Locke approved of these changes. Macpherson, who takes Locke to be a spokesman for a proto-capitalist system, sees Locke as advocating the unlimited acquisition of wealth. James Tully, on the other side, in A Discourse of Property holds that Locke sees the new conditions, the change in values and the economic inequality which arise as a result of the advent of money, as the fall of man. Tully sees Locke as a persistent and powerful critic of self-interest. This remarkable difference in interpretation has been a significant topic for debates among scholars over the last forty years. Though the Second Treatise of Government may leave this question difficult to determine, one might consider Locke’s remark in Some Thoughts Concerning Education that

Covetousness and the desire to having in our possession and our dominion more than we have need of, being the root of all evil, should be early and carefully weeded out and the contrary quality of being ready to impart to others inculcated. (G&T 1996: 81)

Let us then turn to the institution of civil government.

Just as natural rights and natural law theory had a fluorescence in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, so did the social contract theory. Why is Locke a social contract theorist? Is it merely that this was one prevailing way of thinking about government at the time which Locke blindly adopted? The answer is that there is something about Locke’s project which pushes him strongly in the direction of the social contract. One might hold that governments were originally instituted by force, and that no agreement was involved. Were Locke to adopt this view, he would be forced to go back on many of the things which are at the heart of his project in the Second Treatise , though cases like the Norman conquest force him to admit that citizens may come to accept a government that was originally forced on them. Remember that the Second Treatise provides Locke’s positive theory of government, and that he explicitly says that he must provide an alternative to the view

that all government in the world is merely the product of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules than that of the beasts, where the strongest carries it … . ( Treatises II, 1, 4)

So, while Locke might admit that some governments come about through force or violence, he would be destroying the most central and vital distinction, that between legitimate and illegitimate civil government, if he admitted that legitimate government can come about in this way. So, for Locke, legitimate government is instituted by the explicit consent of those governed. (See the section on consent, political obligation, and the ends of government in the entry on Locke’s political philosophy.) Those who make this agreement transfer to the government their right of executing the law of nature and judging their own case. These are the powers which they give to the central government, and this is what makes the justice system of governments a legitimate function of such governments.

Ruth Grant has persuasively argued that the establishment of government is in effect a two step process. Universal consent is necessary to form a political community. Consent to join a community once given is binding and cannot be withdrawn. This makes political communities stable. Grant writes: “Having established that the membership in a community entails the obligation to abide by the will of the community, the question remains: Who rules?” (1987: 114–115). The answer to this question is determined by majority rule. The point is that universal consent is necessary to establish a political community, majority consent to answer the question who is to rule such a community. Universal consent and majority consent are thus different in kind, not just in degree. Grant writes:

Locke’s argument for the right of the majority is the theoretical ground for the distinction between duty to society and duty to government, the distinction that permits an argument for resistance without anarchy. When the designated government dissolves, men remain obligated to society acting through majority rule. (1987: 119)

It is entirely possible for the majority to confer the rule of the community on a king and his heirs, or a group of oligarchs or on a democratic assembly. Thus, the social contract is not inextricably linked to democracy. Still, a government of any kind must perform the legitimate function of a civil government.

Locke is now in a position to explain the function of a legitimate government and distinguish it from illegitimate government. The aim of such a legitimate government is to preserve, so far as possible, the rights to life, liberty, health and property of its citizens, and to prosecute and punish those of its citizens who violate the rights of others and to pursue the public good even where this may conflict with the rights of individuals. In doing this it provides something unavailable in the state of nature, an impartial judge to determine the severity of the crime, and to set a punishment proportionate to the crime. This is one of the main reasons why civil society is an improvement on the state of nature. An illegitimate government will fail to protect the rights to life, liberty, health and property of its subjects, and in the worst cases, such an illegitimate government will claim to be able to violate the rights of its subjects, that is it will claim to have despotic power over its subjects. Since Locke is arguing against the position of Sir Robert Filmer who held that patriarchal power and political power are the same, and that in effect these amount to despotic power, Locke is at pains to distinguish these three forms of power, and to show that they are not equivalent. Thus at the beginning of chapter 15 “Of Paternal, Political and Despotic Power Considered Together” he writes:

THOUGH I have had occasion to speak of these before, yet the great mistakes of late about government, having as I suppose arisen from confounding these distinct powers one with another, it may not be amiss, to consider them together.

Chapters 6 and 7 give Locke’s account of paternal and political power respectively. Paternal power is limited. It lasts only through the minority of children, and has other limitations. Political power, derived as it is from the transfer of the power of individuals to enforce the law of nature, has with it the right to kill in the interest of preserving the rights of the citizens or otherwise supporting the public good. Legitimate despotic power, by contrast, implies the right to take the life, liberty, health and at least some of the property of any person subject to such a power.

At the end of the Second Treatise we learn about the nature of illegitimate civil governments and the conditions under which rebellion and regicide are legitimate and appropriate. As noted above, scholars now hold that the book was written during the Exclusion Crisis, and may have been written to justify a general insurrection and the assassination of the king of England and his brother. The argument for legitimate revolution follows from making the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate civil government. A legitimate civil government seeks to preserve its subjects’ life, health, liberty, and property insofar as this is compatible with the public good. Because it does this, it deserves obedience. An illegitimate civil government seeks to systematically violate the natural rights of its subjects. It seeks to make them illegitimate slaves. Because an illegitimate civil government does this, it puts itself in a state of nature and a state of war with its subjects. The magistrate or king of such a state violates the law of nature and so makes himself into a dangerous beast of prey who operates on the principle that might makes right, or that the strongest carries it. In such circumstances, rebellion is legitimate, as is the killing of such a dangerous beast of prey. Thus Locke justifies rebellion and regicide under certain circumstances. Presumably, this justification was going to be offered for the killing of the King of England and his brother had the Rye House Plot succeeded. Even if this was not Locke’s intention, it still would have served that purpose admirably.

The issue of religious toleration was of widespread interest in Europe in the seventeenth century, largely because religious intolerance with accompanying violence was so pervasive. The Reformation had split Europe into competing religious camps, and this provoked civil wars and massive religious persecutions. John Marshall, in his massive study John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture notes that the 1680s were the climactic decade for this kind of persecution. The Dutch Republic, where Locke spent years in exile, had been founded as a secular state which would allow religious differences. This was a reaction to the Catholic persecution of Protestants. However, once the Calvinist Church gained power, they began persecuting other sects, such as the Remonstrants, who disagreed with them. Nonetheless, The Dutch Republic remained the most tolerant country in Europe. In France, religious conflict had been temporarily quieted by the edict of Nantes. But in 1685, the year in which Locke wrote the First Letter concerning religious toleration, Louis XIV had revoked the Edict of Nantes, and the Huguenots were being persecuted. Though prohibited from doing so, some 200,000 emigrated, while probably 700,000 were forced to convert to Catholicism. People in England were keenly aware of the events taking place in France.

In England itself, religious conflict dominated the seventeenth century, contributing in important respects to the coming of the English Civil War, and the abolishing of the Anglican Church during the Protectorate. After the Restoration of Charles II, Anglicans in parliament passed laws that repressed both Catholics and Protestant sects such as Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers and Unitarians who did not agree with the doctrines or practices of the state Church. Of these various dissenting sects, some were closer to the Anglicans, others more remote. One reason, among others, why King Charles may have found Shaftesbury useful was that they were both concerned about religious toleration. They parted when it became clear that the King was mainly interested in toleration for Catholics, and Shaftesbury for Protestant dissenters.

One widely discussed strategy for reducing religious conflict in England was called comprehension. The idea was to reduce the doctrines and practices of the Anglican church to a minimum so that most, if not all, of the dissenting sects would be included in the state church. For those which even this measure would not serve, there was to be toleration. Toleration we may define as a lack of state persecution. Neither of these strategies made much progress during the course of the Restoration.

When Locke fled to Holland after the discovery of the Rye house plot, he became involved with a group of scholars advocating religious toleration. This group included Benjamin Furly, a quaker with whom Locke lived for a while, the noted philosopher Pierre Bayle, several Dutch theologians, and many others. This group read all the arguments for religious intolerance and discussed them in book and conversation clubs. Members of the group considered toleration not only for Protestants and Protestant dissenters but Jews, Moslems, and Catholics. A recent discovery of a page of Locke’s reflections on toleration of Catholics shows that Locke considered even the pros and cons of toleration for Catholics (Walmsley and Waldmann 2019). Some members of the group also wrote tolerationist articles and books. They helped each other get jobs. Some of their members founded journals that reviewed books and articles on religious, scientific, and other topics. The group took the notion of free speech, civility, and politeness in discourse seriously. They called themselves the ‘the Republic of Letters’ or in Locke’s phrase ‘the commonwealth of learning.’

What were Locke’s religious views and where did he fit into the debates about religious toleration? This is a quite difficult question to answer. Religion and Christianity in particular, is perhaps the most important influence on the shape of Locke’s philosophy. But what kind of Christian was Locke? Locke’s family were Puritans. At Oxford, Locke avoided becoming an Anglican priest. Still, Locke himself claimed to be an Anglican until he died and Locke’s nineteenth-century biographer Fox Bourne thought that Locke was an Anglican. Others have identified him with the Latitudinarians—a movement among Anglicans to argue for a reasonable Christianity that dissenters ought to accept. Still, there are some reasons to think that Locke was neither an orthodox Anglican or a Latitudinarian. Locke got Isaac Newton to write Newton’s most powerful anti-Trinitarian tract. Locke arranged to have the work published anonymously in Holland though in the end, Newton decided not to publish (McLachlan 1941). This strongly suggests that Locke too was by this time an Arian or unitarian. (Arius, c. 250–336, asserted the primacy of the Father over the Son and thus rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and was condemned as a heretic at the Council of Nicaea in 325. Newton held that the Church had gone in the wrong direction in condemning Arius.) Given that one main theme of Locke’s Letter on Toleration is that there should be a separation between Church and State, this does not seem like the view of a man devoted to a state religion. It might appear that Locke’s writing The Reasonableness of Christianity in which he argues that the basic doctrines of Christianity are few and compatible with reason make him a Latitudinarian. Yet Richard Ashcraft has argued that comprehension for the Anglicans meant conforming to the existing practices of the Anglican Church; that is, the abandonment of religious dissent. Ashcraft also suggests that Latitudinarians were thus not a moderate middle ground between contending extremes but part of one of the extremes—“the acceptable face of the persecution of religious dissent” (Ashcraft 1992: 155). Ashcraft holds that while the Latitudinarians may have represented the “rational theology” of the Anglican church, there was a competing dissenting “rational theology”. Thus, while it is true that Locke had Latitudinarian friends, given Ashcraft’s distinction between Anglican and dissenting “rational theologies”, it is entirely possible that The Reasonableness of Christianity is a work of dissenting “rational theology”.

Locke had been thinking, talking and writing about religious toleration since 1659. His views evolved. In the early 1660s he very likely was an orthodox Anglican. He and Shaftesbury had instituted religious toleration in the Fundamental Constitutions of the Carolinas (1669). He wrote the Epistola de Tolerantia in Latin in 1685 while in exile in Holland. He very likely was seeing Protestant refugees pouring over the borders from France where Louis XIV had just revoked the Edict of Nantes. Holland itself was a Calvinist theocracy with significant problems with religious toleration. But Locke’s Letter does not confine itself to the issues of the time. Locke gives a principled account of religious toleration, though this is mixed in with arguments which apply only to Christians, and perhaps in some cases only to Protestants. He excluded both Catholics and atheists from religious toleration. In the case of Catholics it was because he regarded them as agents of a foreign power. Because they do not believe in God, atheists, on Locke’s account: “Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist” (Mendus 1991: 47). He gives his general defense of religious toleration while continuing the anti-Papist rhetoric of the Country party which sought to exclude James II from the throne.

Locke’s arguments for religious toleration connect nicely to his account of civil government. Locke defines life, liberty, health and property as our civil interests. These are the proper concern of a magistrate or civil government. The magistrate can use force and violence where this is necessary to preserve civil interests against attack. This is the central function of the state. One’s religious concerns with salvation, however, are not within the domain of civil interests, and so lie outside of the legitimate concern of the magistrate or the civil government. In effect, Locke adds an additional right to the natural rights of life, liberty, health and property—the right of freedom to choose one’s own road to salvation. (See the section on Toleration in the entry on Locke’s Political Philosophy.)

Locke holds that the use of force by the state to get people to hold certain beliefs or engage in certain ceremonies or practices is illegitimate. The chief means which the magistrate has at her disposal is force, but force is not an effective means for changing or maintaining belief. Suppose then, that the magistrate uses force so as to make people profess that they believe. Locke writes:

A sweet religion, indeed, that obliges men to dissemble, and tell lies to both God and man, for the salvation of their souls! If the magistrate thinks to save men thus, he seems to understand little of the way of salvation; and if he does it not in order to save them, why is he so solicitous of the articles of faith as to enact them by a law? (Mendus 1991: 41)

So, religious persecution by the state is inappropriate. Locke holds that “Whatever is lawful in the commonwealth cannot be prohibited by the magistrate in the church”. This means that the use of bread and wine, or even the sacrificing of a calf could not be prohibited by the magistrate.

If there are competing churches, one might ask which one should have the power? The answer is clearly that power should go to the true church and not to the heretical church. But Locke claims this amounts to saying nothing. For every church believes itself to be the true church, and there is no judge but God who can determine which of these claims is correct. Thus, skepticism about the possibility of religious knowledge is central to Locke’s argument for religious toleration.

Finally, for an account of the influence of Locke’s works, see the supplementary document: Supplement on the Influence of Locke’s Works

Locke’s Works

Oxford University Press is in the process of producing a new edition of all of Locke’s works. This will supersede The Works of John Locke of which the 1823 edition is probably the most standard. The new Clarendon editions began with Peter Nidditch’s edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1975. The Oxford Clarendon editions contain much of the material of the Lovelace collection, purchased and donated to Oxford by Paul Mellon. This treasure trove of Locke’s works and letters, which includes early drafts of the Essay and much other material, comes down from Peter King, Locke’s nephew, who inherited Locke’s papers. Access to these papers has given scholars in the twentieth century a much better view of Locke’s philosophical development and provided a window into the details of his activities which is truly remarkable. Hence the new edition of Locke’s works will very likely be definitive.

• [N] An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , Peter H. Nidditch (ed.), 1975. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198243861.book.1/actrade-9780198243861-book-1
• Some Thoughts Concerning Education , John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton (eds.), 1989. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198245827.book.1/actrade-9780198245827-book-1
• Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Other Philosophical Writings: In Three Volumes , Vol. 1: Drafts A and B, Peter H. Nidditch and G. A. J. Rogers (eds.), 1990. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198245452.book.1/actrade-9780198245452-book-1
• The Reasonableness of Christianity: As Delivered in the Scriptures , John C. Higgins-Biddle (ed.), 2000. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198245254.book.1/actrade-9780198245254-book-1
• An Essay Concerning Toleration: And Other Writings on Law and Politics, 1667–1683 , J. R. Milton and Philip Milton (eds.), 2006. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780199575732.book.1/actrade-9780199575732-book-1
• Vindications of the Reasonableness of Christianity , Victor Nuovo (ed.), 2012. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780199286553.book.1/actrade-9780199286553-book-1
• volume 1, 1987. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198248019.book.1/actrade-9780198248019-book-1
• volume 2, 1987. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198248064.book.1/actrade-9780198248064-book-1
• Volume 1, 1991. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198245469.book.1/actrade-9780198245469-book-1
• Volume 2, 1991,. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198248378.book.1/actrade-9780198248378-book-1
• Vol. 1: Introduction; Letters Nos. 1–461 , 2010. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780199573615.book.1/actrade-9780199573615-book-1
• Vol. 2: Letters Nos. 462–848 , 1976. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198245599.book.1/actrade-9780198245599-book-1
• Vol. 3: Letters Nos. 849–1241 , 1978. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198245605.book.1/actrade-9780198245605-book-1
• Vol. 4: Letters Nos. 1242–1701 , 1978. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198245612.book.1/actrade-9780198245612-book-1.
• Vol. 5: Letters Nos. 1702–2198 , 1979. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198245629.book.1/actrade-9780198245629-book-1
• Vol. 6: Letters Nos. 2199–2664 , 1980. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198245636.book.1/actrade-9780198245636-book-1
• Vol. 7: Letters Nos. 2665–3286 , 1981. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198245643.book.1/actrade-9780198245643-book-1
• Vol. 8: Letters Nos. 3287–3648 , 1989. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198245650.book.1/actrade-9780198245650-book-1

In addition to the Oxford Press edition, there are a few editions of some of Locke’s works which are worth noting.

• An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay, Together with Excerpts from his Journal , Richard I. Aaron and Jocelyn Gibb (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936.
• John Locke, Two Tracts of Government , Phillip Abrams (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
• Locke’s The Two Treatises of Civil Government , Richard Ashcraft (ed.), London: Routledge, 1987.
• [Axtell 1968], The Educational Writings of John Locke: A Critical Edition , James L. Axtell (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• [Gay 1964], John Locke on Education , Peter Gay (ed.), New York: Bureau of Publications, Columbia Teachers College, 1964.
• Epistola de Tolerantia: A Letter on Toleration , Latin text edited with a preface by Raymond Klibansky; English translation with an introduction and notes by J. W. Gough, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.
• [G&T 1996] “Some Thoughts Concerning Education” and “The Conduct of the Understanding” , Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (eds), Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1996.
• [Laslett 1960] Locke’s Two Treatises of Government , Peter Laslett (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.
• [Woozley 1964], An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , abridged, A.D. Woozley (ed.), London: Fontana Library, 1964.

Other Primary Sources

• Boyle, Robert, 1675 [1979], “Some Physico-Theological Considerations About the Possibility of the Resurrection”, in Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle , M.A. Stewart (ed.), New York: Manchester University Press.
• Mill, John Stuart, 1843, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive , London: John W. Parker.

Biographies

• King, Lord Peter, 1991, The Life of John Locke: with extracts from his correspondence, journals, and common-place books , Bristol: Thoemmes.
• Fox Bourne, H.R., 1876, Life of John Locke , 2 volumes, New York: Harper & Brothers. Reprinted Scientia Aalen, 1969.
• Cranston, Maurice, 1957, John Locke, A Biography , reprinted Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
• Woolhouse, Roger, 2007, Locke: A Biography , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Books and Articles

• Aaron, Richard, 1937, John Locke , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Aarsleff, Hans, 1982, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• –––, 1994 “Locke’s Influence”, in Vere Chappell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Locke , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 252–289. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521383714.011
• Alexander, Peter, 1985, Ideas Qualities and Corpuscles: Locke and Boyle on the External World , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Alston, William and Jonathan Bennett, 1988, “Locke on People and Substances”, The Philosophical Review , 97(1): 25–46. doi:10.2307/2185098
• Anstey, Peter R., 2011, John Locke and Natural Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199589777.001.0001
• Armitage, David, 2004, “John Locke, Carolina and the Two Treatises of Government ”, Political Theory , 32(5): 602–27. doi:10.1177/0090591704267122
• Arneil, Barbara, 1996, John Locke and America , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Ashcraft, Richard, 1986, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1992, “Latitudinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth versus Political History”, in Kroll, Ashcraft, and Zagorin 1992: 151–177. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511896231.008
• Ayers, Michael, 1991, Locke: Epistemology and Ontology , 2 volumes, London: Routledge.
• Barresi, John, and Raymond Martin, 2000, Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the 18th Century , London: Routledge.
• Bennett, Jonathan, 1971, Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Bolton, Martha Brandt, 2004, “Locke on the Semantic and Epistemic Role of Simple Ideas of Sensation”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 85(3): 301–321. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0114.2004.00200.x
• Brandt, Reinhard (ed.), 1981, John Locke: Symposium Wolfenbuttel 1979 , Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Brewer, Holly, 2017, “Slavery, Sovereignty, and ‘Inheritable Blood’: Reconsidering John Locke and the Origins of American Slavery”, The American Historical Review , 122(4): 1038–1078. doi:10.1093/ahr/122.4.1038
• Chappell, Vere, 1992, Essays on Early Modern Philosophy, John Locke—Theory of Knowledge , London: Garland Publishing, Inc.
• –––, 1994, The Cambridge Companion to Locke , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2004a, “Symposium: Locke and the Veil of Perception: Preface”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 85(3): 243–244. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0114.2004.00196.x
• –––, 2004b, “Comments”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 85(3): 338–355. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0114.2004.00202.x
• Chomsky, Noam, 1966, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought , New York: Harper & Row.
• Dunn, John, 1969, The Political Thought of John Locke , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Farr, James, 2008, “Locke, Natural Law and New World Slavery”, Political Theory , 36(4): 495–522. doi:10.1177/0090591708317899
• Fox, Christopher, 1988, Locke and the Scriblerians , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Garrett, Don, 2003, “Locke on Personal Identity, Consciousness and ‘Fatal Errors’”, Philosophical Topics , 31: 95–125. doi:10.5840/philtopics2003311/214
• Geach, Peter, 1967, “Identity”, The Review of Metaphysics , 21(1): 3–12.
• Gibson, James, 1968, Locke’s Theory of Knowledge and its Historical Relations , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gordon-Roth, Jessica, 2015, “Locke’s Place-Time-Kind Principle”, Philosophy Compass , 10(4): 264–274. doi:10.1111/phc3.12217
• Grant, Ruth, 1987, John Locke’s Liberalism , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Gaukroger, Stephen, 2010, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1680–1760 , Oxford, Clarendon Press.
• Kretzmann, Norman, 1968, “The Main Thesis of Locke’s Semantic Theory”, The Philosophical Review , 77(2): 175–196. Reprinted in Tipton 1977: 123–140. doi:10.2307/2183319
• Kroll, Peter, Richard Ashcraft, and Peter Zagorin (eds), 1992, Philosophy, Science and Religion in England 1640–1700 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511896231
• Jolley, Nicholas, 1984, Leibniz and Locke , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1999, Locke, His Philosophical Thought , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2015, Locke’s Touchy Subjects: Materialism and Immortality , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198737094.001.0001
• Laslett, Peter, 1954 [1990], “John Locke as Founder of the Board of Trade”, The Listener , 52(1342): 856–857. Reprinted in J.S. Yolton 1990: 127–136.
• Lennon, Thomas M., 2004, “Through a Glass Darkly: More on Locke’s Logic of Ideas”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 85(3): 322–337. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0114.2004.00203.x
• LoLordo, Antonia, 2010, “Person, Substance, Mode and ‘the moral Man’ in Locke’s Philosophy”, Canadian Journal Of Philosophy , 40(4); 643–668. doi:10.1080/00455091.2010.10716738
• Lott, Tommy, 1998, Subjugation and Bondage: Critical Essays on Slavery and Social Philosophy , New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.
• Lovejoy, Arthur O., 1936, The Great Chain of Being; a Study of the History of an Idea , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Lowe, E.J., 1995, Locke on Human Understanding , London: Routledge Publishing Co.
• Mackie, J. L. 1976, Problems from Locke , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Macpherson, C.B., 1962, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Mandelbaum, Maurice, 1966, Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception: Historical and Critical Studies , Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
• Marshall, John, 2006, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture , Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press.
• Martin, C. B. and D. M. Armstrong (eds.), 1968, Locke and Berkeley: A Collection of Critical Essays , New York: Anchor Books.
• Mattern, Ruth, 1980, “Moral Science and the Concept of Persons in Locke”, The Philosophical Review , 89(1): 24–45. doi:10.2307/2184862
• McCann, Edwin, 1987, “Locke on Identity, Life, Matter and Consciousness” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , 69(1): 54–77. doi:10.1515/agph.1987.69.1.54
• McLachlan, Hugh, 1941, Religious Opinions of Milton, Locke and Newton , Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Mendus, Susan, 1991, Locke on Toleration in Focus , London: Routledge.
• Newman, Lex, 2004, “Locke on Sensitive Knowledge and the Veil of Perception—Four Misconceptions”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 85(3): 273–300. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0114.2004.00199.x
• Olsthoorn, Johan and Laurens van Apeldoorn, 2020, “‘This man is my property’: Slavery and political absolutism in Locke and the classical social contract tradition”, European Journal of Political Theory , 21(2): 253–275. doi:10.1177/1474885120911309
• Rogers, G.A. John, 2004, “Locke and the Objects of Perception”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 85(3): 245–254. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0114.2004.00197.x
• Roper, John, April 2004, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters and Plots 1662–1729 , New York, Palgrave/Macmillan.
• Russell, Daniel, 2004, “Locke on Land and Labor”, Philosophical Studies , 117(1–2): 303–325. doi:10.1023/B:PHIL.0000014529.01097.20
• Schouls, Peter, 1992, Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and the Enlightenment , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Simmons, A. John, 1992, The Lockean Theory of Rights , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Soles, David, 1999, “Is Locke an Imagist?” The Locke Newsletter , 30: 17–66.
• Strawson, Galen, 2011, Locke on Personal Identity , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Stuart, Matthew, 2013, Locke’s Metaphysics , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199645114.001.0001
• Thiel, Udo, 2011, The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199542499.001.0001
• Tarcov, Nathan, 1984, Locke’s Education for Liberty , Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Tipton, I.C. (ed.), 1977, Locke on Human Understanding: Selected Essays , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Tully, James, 1980, A Discourse on Property , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1993, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Uzgalis, William L., 1988, “The Anti-Essential Locke and Natural Kinds”, The Philosophical Quarterly , 38(152): 330–339. doi:10.2307/2220132
• –––, 1990, “Relative Identity and Locke’s Principle of Individuation”, History of Philosophy Quarterly , 7(3): 283–297.
• –––, 2007, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding—A Reader’s Guide , London: Continuum.
• –––, 2017, “John Locke, Racism, Slavery and Indian Lands”, in Naomi Zack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to Philosophy and Race , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Walmsley, Jonathan and Waldman Felix, 2019 “John Locke and Toleration of Catholics: A New Manuscript”, Historical Journal , 62: 1093–1115. [Includes transcription of “Reasons for tolerating papists with others” St. Johns College, Annapolis, Maryland, Greenfield Library.]
• Wilson, Margaret Dauler, 1999, Ideas and Mechanism: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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• Woolhouse, R.S., 1971, Locke’s Philosophy of Science and Knowledge , New York: Barnes and Noble.
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• “John Locke” , entry on Locke, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• Images of Locke , National Portrait Gallery, Great Britain.

Berkeley, George | Hume, David | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm | liberalism | Locke, John: moral philosophy | Locke, John: on freedom | Locke, John: on personal identity | Locke, John: philosophy of science | Locke, John: political philosophy | Masham, Lady Damaris | personal identity | substance | tropes

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The Social Contract

by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The social contract essay questions.

Opponents of Rousseau have criticized his chapter on civil religion as being unnecessary to The Social Contract as a whole, and as specifically threatening to individual freedom. Why does Rousseau include a passage on civil religion? Is it a threat to personal liberty, or a necessary requirement for the survival of the state?

Rousseau writes, "whoever refuses to obey the general will be forced to do so by the entire body...he will be forced to be free" (150). Explain the logic behind this statement. Does it conflict with his ideas about personal liberty?

Rousseau begins The Social Contract with the claim that "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." What are these restrictions on man's liberty? How are they affected by the social contract?

Rousseau criticizes a hereditary aristocracy as being "the worst of any form of government," yet his complaints against monarchies are far more numerous than his ones against hereditary aristocracy. Which form of government does Rousseau believe is worse, and why?

Although Rousseau gives legislative power to the people, he insists that they need a legislator to help them make the laws. What are the qualities that the legislator must possess? Does Rousseau's emphasis on the legislator reflect a lack of confidence in the people?

Rousseau argues that laws transform man by substituting an amoral, independent existence in a state of nature for a cooperative one in a civil society. However, he also claims that only certain people are ready for laws. Discuss this tension in the context of The Social Contract .

What is Rousseau's idea of a "right"? How does it differ from Grotius'? How does it affect his political theory?

Discuss Rousseau's theory of how climate affects a country's form of government. Do his claims hold true for modern nations?

Why does Rousseau believe that all states will eventually fall? Given that he supports this view, why has he written The Social Contract ?

Discuss Rousseau's opinions on finance and representation. What would Rousseau think of modern democracies such as France, the United Kingdom, and the United States? Can his political recommendations be followed in a large, modern democracy?

The Social Contract Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Social Contract is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What are the claims made in the Social Contract theory?

The Social Contract Theory asserts that law and political order have been created by people to benefit all.... but that the contract can only be fulfilled if the people and politicians fulfill their parts of the contract. The Contract also asserts...

Social Contract

The oldest and only natural society is the family.

• hereditary

Study Guide for The Social Contract

The Social Contract study guide contains a biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Social Contract
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Topic: Government , Sociology , Politics , Contract , Society , Theory , Ethics , Morality

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Introduction

Social Contract Theory according to Erckel (2009) is the view that an individual’s ethical or political responsibilities depends on an agreement or a contract among them to form the society in which they dwell. Social Contract Theory in reference to Erckel (2009) is rightly associated with the modern moral theory and it has been given full description and justification by Thomas Hobbes. Arguably, Hobbes, Jean-Jacques and John Locke are the best acknowledged proponents of this extremely influential theory that has been one of the dominant theories within ethical, moral and political theory all through the history of the modern west. Contemporarily, philosophers from diverse perspectives have offered criticisms of Social Contract Theory. This essay explains main features of Social Contract Theory defining weakness and strengths associated with the theory. Social contract theories according to White (2009) are theories founded on morality and the legitimacy of political authority. White (2009) argues that morality consists in the set of rules that people who are rational and self interested accept as basic conditions of social livelihood under the condition that other people in the society like them. Erckel (2009) further indicates that implementation of these rules entails giving up some liberties to a common power (government).

Types of social contracts

According to White (2009) there two types of social contracts i.e. explicit and implicit social contract where by an actual consent required and hypothetical social contract is where by even though there is no tangible agreement for a social contract, a person agrees in various ultimate circumstances. In keeping with Erckel (2009) Locke thinks that there was an explicit agreement in the beginning of many states a fact that was objected by David Hume by stating that the origin of most actual government is either through conquest or usurpation. White (2009) states that, in implicit social contract individuals agree to the contract through actions and not necessarily words. As such, citizens implicitly assent through habitation, through political participation and through acceptance of benefits.

Fundamentals of the Social Contract theory

Social contract theory has two principal elements (Bottomley, 2007). The initial element is pre-political situation also referred to by modern philosophers as “state of nature”, and the later “Original Position” by Rawls which is the most noteworthy contemporary proponent of Social Contract theory. In the first “state of nature” all people are equal and are all situated symmetrically relative to each other (White, 2009). White (2009) further indicates that all people have some incentive to leave the first situation in favor of some relative progress that is achieved through entry to the civil society. According to Bottomley (2007) the other element is normative characterization of individuals to the contract.

Evaluation of SCT

Arguably, one strength of social contract theory as stated by Erckel (2009) is that it gives us a conceivable answer to why individual must obey moral rules. In keeping with Bottomley (2007) people should obey moral rules because doing so assists harmonious social living. Arguably, moral rules prohibit assault, murder, theft, sexual promiscuity among others. Critics of Social Contract theory object on the theory on the bases that we do not implicitly agree or sign a contract setting out of the societal moral values. White (2009) indicates that a major problem with social contract theorist like Hobbes is the whole notion that more obligations are reciprocated. As such Hobbes theory has been challenged by John Locke who argues that morality is not necessarily based on law and government or even social contract. According to Locke, there would still be need to set up some governing body where individuals are morally equal and would be in a –position to enforce punishment for wrongs done. One criticism here would be that people could have a predisposition of being biased. Bottomley (2007) indicates that another criticism observed is the Locke’s state of nature highly depends on various religious connotations. Social contract theory seeks to elaborate on the formation of societies (Bottomley, 2007). Despite enormous variations on some points, the theory mainly focuses on voluntary consent that individuals give to the formation of government. In addition, the social contract theory denotes an implicit agreement within a state about the responsibilities and rights of the state that is the government and the citizens (Erckel, 2009). Erckel (2009) indicates that it is an implicit or explicit agreement and it lay emphasizes on the rights of the citizens in relation the government. Social contract theory posits that citizens’ rights are prior to and more elementary than the societal organization under a government. Conclusively, Bottomley (2007) indicates that the ruled in fundamental nature should be the rulers. A political order offering chances to participate in the alignment of the public affairs must not be just a state; Bottomley (2007) indicates that information on the type of society where the affairs are integrated in the affairs of the citizens.

Bottomley, S. (2007). The constitutional corporation rethinking corporate governance. Aldershot, England Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Erckel, S. (2009). Classical Social Contract Theory The Classical Social Contract Theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau Compared. München: GRIN Verlag GmbH. White, J. (2009). Contemporary moral problems. Australia United States: Thomson Wadsworth.

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Social Contract Theory Essays (Examples)

916+ documents containing “social contract theory” .

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Bill of rights and the criminal justice system social contract theory.

Social Contract Theory The social contract model is based on the underlying premise that society, in pursuit of the protection of people's lives and property, enters into a compact agreement with the government - where the latter guarantees the society protection, and the society in turn pledge to live in peace and harmony (Dooley & Paten, 2014). John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, the two main proponents of the social contract model, agree on this premise but differ significantly in regard to the principles under which the contract ought to operate (Dooley & Paten, 2014). Hobbes' versus Locke's View Through his political work Leviathan, Hobbes states that the government and the society both exist within the confines of the stipulated contractual agreement, but the former is the higher one of the two parties, and enjoys absolute sovereignty to use its power and political right to ensure that general order prevails in the society. In….

Constitution Society. (2007). The Social Contract and Constitutional Republics. Constitution Society. Retrieved 17 September 2014 from  http://www.constitution.org/soclcont.htm 

Dooley, K. & Paten, J. (2014). Why Politics Matters: An Introduction to Political Science. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.

Elahi, M. (2014). Social Contract Theory by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Academia. Retrieved 18 September 2014 from  http://www.academia.edu/3138759/Social_Contract_Theory_by_Hobbes_Locke_and_Rousseau

Rousseau's Social Contract Theory Man

" This voice allows a civilized person to put aside his or her self-interest, in order to uphold an abstract "general good." A person who has accepted the social contract therefore puts aside the anti-social natural inclinations described by Hobbes. In their place, a person agrees to abide by the rules of society and the social order. In a sense, the acceptance of the social contract makes society possible. At first, it may seem that people lose a significant amount of their natural liberties when they enter into the social contract. However, how much liberty can there be in the bleak state of nature, where one constantly fears attack from other humans? Rousseau-based analysis would locate more important freedoms in the fact that a cooperative society would ensure greater personal freedoms for all. There is much to be gained by voluntarily chaining one's natural freedoms, in order to gain the advantages of….

Works Cited

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. New York: Penguin Books, 1982

Rousseau, Jean Jacques. The Social Contract. New York: Penguin Books, 1982

Rousseau, Jean Jacques. The Social Contract. New York: Penguin Books, 1982, p. 49

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. New York: Penguin Books, 1982, p. 81

Rousseau Social Contract Theory

Introduction Several theorists have used social contract theory to understand the government’s role in taking care of the public and addressing the public’s needs. Current political issues offer further examination of social contract theory and how it may help with understanding government obligation and public participation. Rousseau's social contract theory is best and most relevant for understanding and offering solutions to contemporary political issues like mandatory vaccination, taxation, and universal healthcare because it offers a foundation from which to explain the perceived obligations of both the government and the public. Rousseau’s version of social contract theory contrasted against other theorists like Hobbes's and Locke's social contact theories demonstrates how one interpretation of a theory may be better suited for modern political issues over others. According to social contract theory via Locke’s interpretation, when the government remains unsuccessful in securing natural rights or fulfilling society’s best interest often recognized as the "general will"….

Social Contract Rousseau Argues That We Are

Social Contract, Rousseau argues that we are all born free and equal, yet do not live either freely or equally. Rousseau then goes on to argue that the construction of the General Will is the means by which people can achieve freedom. The General Will is the social contract where all members of society agree to obey the General Will to be part of society. Rousseau argues that by this General Will, the separate wills of each member of society converge into one. Freedom is achieved because every citizen is equal, each being a single unit of the General Will and having the same amount of influence over it. Rousseau argues that this General Will is the way individuals in society retain their equality and find freedom. Further consideration of the implications of the General Will and the social contract will show that Rousseau's version of freedom and equality may….

Bibliography

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Trans. Maurice Cranston. New York: Penguin, 1987.

The Social Contract and Racial

Namely, the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow that were used to constrain the growth and advancement of African Americans are today disregarded as being directly relevant to the fortunes and opportunities of blacks in America. This is both unrealistic and unethical, with the denial of its lasting impact casting American racism in an historical light rather than one which is still present and problematic. It is thus that the social contract today serves the interests of dominance even as it feigns to have disavowed these aspects of itself. A true resolution to the failures of the social contract may only really occur when the discourse on America's racialist past and the lasting effects of this on the current fortunes of African Americans is resolved. In that regard, Mills regards it as largely a fiction that racial discrimination ended in any meaningful way after the Emancipation Proclamation; rather, racial prejudice and systematic subjugation continued overtly well into the 20th century, continuing still today albeit….

Social Contract Would Observe the Law as

social contract would observe the law as well as the institution to enforce that law. y the enforcement of that law, those covered could expect justice to be done to them and everybody else. In times of trouble, such as when burglars or other criminals attack, one could call the police for help. Those covered by the contract need neither to fear such unjust attacks nor to take the law into their own hands. The weak need not fear the strong. The deal for those covered by the social contract is that they join individual forces and resources with others who also want peace and equality, so that their own goods may not be taken from them unjustly, either. And because there are more people who want their goods and other rights protected than those who want a free-for-all all the time, there would be more people who would join….

Locke, John. (2003). Two Treatises of Government. Lonang Library: Lonang Institute.  http://www.lonang.com/exlibris/locke 

Rawls, John. (1999). A Theory of Justice. Revised. Cambridge: Bellknap Press

Taylor, Bobby. (1987). Rosseau's "Social Contract:" a Critical Response. The Freeman: The Foundation for Economic Education, volume 37, number 1

Wikipedia. (2001). Jean Jacques Rosseau. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.utm.edu/rsearch/iep/r/rousseau.htm

Social Contracts Media Articulation of the Rites

Social Contracts: Media Articulation Of The ites Of HETEOSEXUAL vs. HOMOSEXUAL MAIAGE IGHTS In the Land of the Free where the Bill of ights is supreme, all marital unions between consenting adults should be accorded the same level of societal respect and legality under federal and state laws. It was just a few decades ago when the Gay ights Movement was born in a raucous Greenwich Village bar, but homosexuals have become increasingly accepted in mainstream American society in the years since and a growing number of states are legalizing same-sex marriage in response to this trend. Unfortunately, the path to equal rights for all American citizens has been hampered by negative media coverage of homosexuals in the United States in recent years in ways that are frequently subtle but which are discernible through careful analysis. This type of analysis is important because prejudicial public information or notice of the sexual orientation….

Black's law dictionary. (1999). St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co.

14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (2011). Library of Congress. Retrieved from http://

www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/14thamendment.html.

Gallagher, M. (2006, May 15). Banned in Boston. The Weekly Standard, 11(33), 3.

Contract Offer

Contract Offer COMING TO A HEAD Legal and Ethical Issues in usiness Ethics in usiness Three normative ethical theories were developed in Western capitalist societies in guiding the ethical conduct of business (Fort, 2014). The stockholder theory considers the maximizing of profits as the sole objective of business and above all considerations. It does not recognize social responsibility. It is completely utilitarian and one-sided. The stakeholder theory considers the welfare and needs of customers, suppliers, owners and employees along with maximizing profit. When called for, it believes that the interests of stockholders should be sacrificed in order to insure its survival. It developed from Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which respects the dignity and participation of all people. And the social contract theory is the most widely used business theory. It draws from the 18th-century philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Their philosophies argued that business should be dedicated and committed to the interests of….

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dobson, J. (1994). Virtue ethics as a foundation for business ethics: a "MacIntyre-Based

Critique. Center for Catholic Studies: University of St. Thomas. Retrieved on January

25, 2014 from https://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/cst/conferences/antwerp/papers/dobson.pdf

Fort, T. (2014). Ethical theories in business. eHow: Demand Media, Inc. Retrieved

Theories of Ethics and Morality Ethics and Morality

Ethics and Morality: The Theories of Ethics and Morality The subject in this case faces an ethical dilemma, where she has to choose between reporting an ethical concern and just playing along or doing nothing at all. Both choices have serious consequences -- reporting would mean that i) she loses her job and livelihood because of a confidentiality breach, and ii) she stops her organization from producing the environmentally-friendly hovercraft, and consequently, becomes the reason why the world will never enjoy clean unpolluted air. Playing along, on the other hand, would mean that she watches as 200,000 innocent lives are lost as a result of the hovercraft's incompatibility with existing models. The subject has a duty to uphold confidentiality in all dealings that have to do with the company. Disclosing such information to the press would amount to breach of this duty. However, as a member of a corporate body, she also….

Fedler, K.D. (2006). Exploring Christian Ethics: Biblical Foundations for Morality. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Tully, P.A. (2006). Refined Consequentialism: The Moral Theory of Richard A. McCormick. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.

U K Government Social Policy Theory & Practice

U.K. Government: Social Policy Theory & Practice The objective of this study is to answer all four questions stated as follows: (1) What is the social administrative tradition? (2) What is meant by liberal welfarism? (3) Explain the parliamentary policy- making process? In addition (4) Detail the New Right critique of the welfare state? Social Administrative Tradition Grover Starling, administration scholar is reported to have described six characteristics of government's public administrative responsibility: (1) responsiveness; (2) flexibility; (3) competence; (4) due process; (5) accountability; and (6) honestly. (Shiguang, nd) Traditional government responsibility is noted to be that of maintaining public order. (Shiguang, nd) The World Bank identifies four primary administrative traditions as being those of: (1) Anglo Saxon (minimal state); (2) Continental European: Germanic (organicist); (3) Continental European: French (Napoleonic); and (4) Scandanavian: (mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic). The most fundamental difference is reported to be "between the Anglo-Saxon and the Continental European….

Social Theories of Crime Social

ational choice theory can in fact encompass the other two previously mentioned theories of criminal behavior due to the fact that acting rational may include conflicting with common culture or joining the neighborhood gang to eventually escape the ghetto. Conclusions Of all the theories of criminal behavior studied so far, rational choice theory is the most applicable to the current state of society in my opinion. Much too often criminals are often dismissed for their faults, when in actuality they are truly acting rational and within their known boundaries of experience. Blanket laws do little good when examining them under this theory. Followers of rational choice theory would agree that changes within the criminal justice system should be made to expose the relative circumstances surrounding each case and not assuming that common punishments meet the required solution for the problem. Warner tended to agree: "building stronger communities will require not only….

Kurbin (nd). "Sociological Theories of Criminal Behavior II."

Warner, B. (2003). The role of attenuated culture in social disorganization theory. Criminology, 41(1), 73 -- 98.

Social Philosophy

Social Philosophy Concluding in Political moderation, in "A Theory of Justice," and in later works, John awls explains a comprehensive, as well as influential theory, which is on the subject of, presenting a theory of justice in concurrence with the liberal-democratic passion that relates to the rights and freedoms of individuals in society. It entails that the rights of the individuals ought to be moderated by various types of clauses, making certain that no social or natural eventualities are overlooked. The theory declares that no inborn benefits of political authority, substance riches or natural capability should irreversibly or overpoweringly establish life chances. Furthermore, more distinctively, these morally subjective issues should not establish the value of political liberties to moral persons (1). In 1971, awls's explains his first articulation of his theory of justice which highlights on individual abilities that he entitles the "Original Position" and in addition, a model of social life.….

1). Macedo, Stephen. April 1995. Liberal Civic Education and Religious Fundamentalism: the Case of God v. John Rawls. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp.468 -496.

2). Carter, Stephen. 1987. Evolutionism and Treating Religion as a Hobby. Duke Law Journal.

3). Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

4). Kenneth Baynes. 1992. The Normative Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, Habermas, Albany. Suny Press.

Racial Contract Charles Mill Summary

An objective glance at history tells us that the social contract was a real and actual covenant. The first people who banded into communities formed some overt and covert covenant with their neighbors, replete with trappings, that later became known as 'legal', in order to ensure their survival within this band of fellow strangers. The racial contract, though real, did not displace the social contract. Although the social contract, as per the French revolutionists terms of liberty, equality and fraternity never existed - even amongst Whites, it was always a myth and more symptomatic of Utopia - practical forms of the social contract, albeit with variations amongst gender and race, persisted. Integrated with the social contract, however, was a racial form of contract where male supremacism characterized by Christians of the white race gained sufficient power to dominate others who did not belong to their gender or race. acial category,….

Mills, C. (1997). The Racial Contract, Cornell University Press, Ithaca & London

John Rawls the Theory of

Liberal equality is another principle that was propagated by awls and focuses on the removal of artificial obstacles or man made obstacles as opposed to the natural liberty principles. awls here argues for the removal of inequalities which act as disadvantages to some people and this can be achieved trough giving them a just share of the primary goods the society has to offer. This principle neglects the natural endowments natural disadvantages. Another philosopher, onald Dworkin therefore argues that even if these social primary goods are assembled yet the people with natural disabilities are not given some form of insurance, then they would still be disadvantaged (Matthew Clayton, n.d:8). The concept of democratic equality deals with liberty and equality. It brings into perspective the basic freedoms and rights like those of speech and assembly among the others. It states that each individual should be accorded these in order to ensure the….

Robert Cavalier et.al. (2012). John Rawls: A Theory of Justice (1971). Drury College. Retrieved October 10, 2012 from  http://caae.phil.cmu.edu/cavalier/Forum/meta/background/Rawls.html 

Leif Wenar, (2012). John Rawls. Retrieved October 10, 2012 from  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/ 

Matthew Clayton, (n.d). Liberal Equality and Ethics. Retrieved October 10, 2012 from  http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/clayton/research/liberalequality/liberalequality.pdf

Theory of Punishment

Locke's Theory Of Punishment John Locke was an English philosopher, who is undoubtedly the philosopher of modern times and the originator of concepts like self and identity, human nature and understanding, theory of mind and several other concepts regarding political philosophy and ethics. orn in 1632 and died in 1704, Locke is unanimously termed as the Father of Classical Liberalism since during the enlightenment era; he was amongst the most influential and widely followed scholars. Many of his works regarding liberalism and republicanism have been included into the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, due to their authenticity and practicality in real terms. Locke also performed as a government official who was authorized to collect information regarding to trade with the entire colonies. This experience allowed him to be in close contact with the political activities and eventually led him to write upon the authorization and legislation customs for the government. His….

Locke, J. (1924). Of civil government: Two treatises. London: J.M. Dent & Sons.

I\'m looking for a unique and fresh essay topic on debates in political theory module. Any ideas that stand out?

Title: Navigating the Crossroads of Authority: Exploring the Legitimacy and Limits of Power in Political Theory Introduction: At the crux of political theory lies the intricate interplay between authority and power, a dynamic relationship that has sparked debates and shaped paradigms for centuries. This essay delves into the multifaceted concept of legitimacy, interrogating the foundations of authority and the boundaries of power. Through a comprehensive analysis of historical and contemporary perspectives, we will explore the challenges and complexities of legitimizing power, the tensions between various sources of authority, and the implications for political practice and social justice. 1. The Sources and Foundations of....

Can you provide essay topic ideas related to political theory?

1. The Concept of Justice in Rawls and Nozick's Political Theory: - Analyze and compare John Rawls' and Robert Nozick's theories of justice. - Discuss the implications of their views on social and economic equality. - Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their respective arguments. 2. Utilitarianism vs. Deontology: A Comparative Analysis: - Compare and contrast the ethical theories of utilitarianism and deontology. - Explore the strengths and weaknesses of each theory in terms of their application to political decision-making. - Discuss the relevance of these theories in contemporary political debates. 3. The Legitimacy of Political Authority: - Examine different theories of....

Social Contract Theory The social contract model is based on the underlying premise that society, in pursuit of the protection of people's lives and property, enters into a compact agreement…

" This voice allows a civilized person to put aside his or her self-interest, in order to uphold an abstract "general good." A person who has accepted the social…

Introduction Several theorists have used social contract theory to understand the government’s role in taking care of the public and addressing the public’s needs. Current political issues offer further examination…

Social Contract, Rousseau argues that we are all born free and equal, yet do not live either freely or equally. Rousseau then goes on to argue that the construction…

Research Proposal

Namely, the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow that were used to constrain the growth and advancement of African Americans are today disregarded as being directly relevant to the fortunes and…

social contract would observe the law as well as the institution to enforce that law. y the enforcement of that law, those covered could expect justice to be…

Annotated Bibliography

Women's Issues - Sexuality

Social Contracts: Media Articulation Of The ites Of HETEOSEXUAL vs. HOMOSEXUAL MAIAGE IGHTS In the Land of the Free where the Bill of ights is supreme, all marital unions between consenting…

Contract Offer COMING TO A HEAD Legal and Ethical Issues in usiness Ethics in usiness Three normative ethical theories were developed in Western capitalist societies in guiding the ethical conduct of business (Fort,…

Family and Marriage

Ethics and Morality: The Theories of Ethics and Morality The subject in this case faces an ethical dilemma, where she has to choose between reporting an ethical concern and just…

U.K. Government: Social Policy Theory & Practice The objective of this study is to answer all four questions stated as follows: (1) What is the social administrative tradition? (2) What…

Criminal Justice

ational choice theory can in fact encompass the other two previously mentioned theories of criminal behavior due to the fact that acting rational may include conflicting with common…

Business - Ethics

Social Philosophy Concluding in Political moderation, in "A Theory of Justice," and in later works, John awls explains a comprehensive, as well as influential theory, which is on the subject…

An objective glance at history tells us that the social contract was a real and actual covenant. The first people who banded into communities formed some overt and covert…

Liberal equality is another principle that was propagated by awls and focuses on the removal of artificial obstacles or man made obstacles as opposed to the natural liberty principles.…

Locke's Theory Of Punishment John Locke was an English philosopher, who is undoubtedly the philosopher of modern times and the originator of concepts like self and identity, human nature and…

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A critique of the Social contract theory and its relevance in the South African Political Scene

This paper examines social contract and its relevance in the south African Political scene. While appreciating the European historical origins of the concept of social contract this paper discusses social contract and its relevance in the modern South Africa. It draws a special attention to the role of social contract as a tool of political conflict resolution. It assesses if whether these ideas - consent model; natural rights; the contract according to Hobbes; and the rational will – are still in line with their nexus, the social contract. Moreover, this essay gives an overview critique of the social contract ideas of Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke.

Related Papers

geetanjali raani

This paper evaluates the social contract theory from the view point of Jean Jacques Rousseau and applies the relevance to contemporary society. It is found that the social contract theorists traced the origin of the state to a social contract by individuals after an experience from the state of nature. Rousseau's state of nature initially guaranteed freedom and good life for the individuals until the institution of private property ushered injustices that called for an organized or civil society mainly to protect lives and property. He considered property as the root cause of moral corruption and injustice which made the individual to loose his freedom. Rousseau argues that property had to be controlled by the General Will which was the universal law that regained man's freedom and liberty in the civil society. Incidentally, Rousseau's ideas have been found relevant such that this paper recommends for its application to governance or administration of modern states. There should be willingness of the leaders, who are involved in this kind of contract with citizens, to ensure adequate provision of the basic needs and security for the citizens.

Lart Angela Montenegro

Aqilah Shepherd

During the enlightenment period many philosophers presented commentaries on the political realm of their society. Such writings have encouraged revolutions such as: the English, American and French revolution. One observes that Enlightenment philosophers operated on the notion that the existing social and political orders could not withstand critical scrutiny and were rooted in religious myth and mystery and founded on vague cultures. This negative analysis and critique of existing institutions had positive overtones in the area of theory construction and in delineating models of ideal institutions. A notable philosopher of this period was Thomas Hobbes. Bearing in mind the above succinct introductory discourse this essay sets out on a path to identify and discuss the critical tenets outlined by Thomas Hobbes’ Contract theory and subsequently assess their relevance in explaining human conduct in contemporary societies.

Arjun Singh

Akungba Journal of Applied Philosophy

Most states in Africa have been faced with crisis of democratic legitimacy. This has affected development in the continent. Studies have shown that the absence of legitimate democratic systems which is evident in crisis, political upheavals, institutionalized corruption and the likes etc. have retarded progress and development in Africa. This paper argues for the fact that there exist an inseparable link between a legitimate democratic system which translates in ideal situations and climes into good leadership and governance geared towards the actualization of the common good and sustainable development. Rousseau"s social contract theory which confers sovereignty on the people, with the people reserving the exclusive right to withdraw their consent when the rules of engagement are perceived to have been violated presents a prototype of all legitimate governments. It is believed that the above, when instituted possesses the tendency of situating Africa on the path of sustainable development. It is against this backdrop that this paper engages the expository and analytic method of philosophical research to expose Rousseau"s social contract theory and bring to the fore, its attendant implications for Africa in the search for democratic legitimacy and sustainable development. This paper concludes in the final session that for African to realize herself, move in the path of development and sustainable development, legitimate democratic regimes along the lines of the prototype as advanced by Rousseau must be institutionalized and sustained.

Elisabeth Ellis

clement wiafe

Christopher Allsobrook

The chapter addresses a long-standing conflict in African political philosophy over rights and custom, such as the relative standing of the bill of rights and customary law in South Africa. In its transition from colonialism and apartheid, South Africa successfully secured an independent, democratic framework of formal, negative legal rights for citizens. However, there has been relatively less successful democratic deepening, in terms of securing effective citizenship, substantive social rights and broad-based economic development. Part of the problem is that government is mired in maladministration caused by corrupt factional politics. The country faces a typical predicament for many developing nations: the post-colonial state is deeply “bifurcated” (Mamdani 1996). While citizens’ civil rights are protected by judicial authorities in urban areas, rural subjects continue to abide by customary law under traditional authorities. High inequality heightens division between “citizens and subjects” yet the two systems are also intermeshed. Whether networks of corruption and patronage are tolerated or minor bureaucratic infractions punished depends on contexts of relative power. Depending on various political and economic factors, one system may be substituted for the other, whichever proves more or less convenient. Traditionalists and nationalists argue that such corruption follows the imposition of institutionalised western civil liberties that do not suit deliberative and communitarian African customary norms. Modernists and liberal democrats argue that neo-patrimonial African customary practices foster the corruption which undermines universal public welfare and social rights. Both sides agree on the cause: incompatibility between the African and Western ethical frameworks. I argue that conflict between rights and custom, which fosters corruption and hinders sustainable, equitable, democratic socio-economic development in Africa, is poorly conceived in terms of incongruity between western liberal and autochthonous communitarian ontologies of personhood. More so, tension between rights and custom follows an internal conflict in African communitarian political philosophy between an essentialist conception and a recognition theory of social rights. In the end I advance the latter.

Michael Davis

This books defends at least three related theses: 1) that social contract originates in medieval practice, not in philosophy ancient or modern; 2) that its original form was actual contract, not hypothetical, and that its actual practice retains actual consent as the basis of political obligation; and 3) that most theorists of social contract before Rousseau can best be read as concerned with actual consent.

Henry Nii-Kwao

A brief discussion of The Social Contract Theory of the emergence of the state according to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

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