People agree with their government by voting for representatives. The theory of social contracts also appears in Krito, another dialogue between Plato. Over time, the theory of social contracts spread after Epicurus (341-270 BC), the first philosopher to see justice as a social contract and not as existing in nature due to divine intervention (see below and also Epicurean ethics), decided to put theory at the forefront of his society. Over time, philosophers of traditional political and social thought such as Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau put forward their views on the social contract, which then led to the subject becoming much more common. [Citation needed] In modern moral and legal thought, real consent – express or implied – is of great importance in determining the power of moral obligations and the validity of treaties. In political thought, however, hypothetical consent has increasingly played a central role in justifying certain representations of justice and legitimacy. For example, theorists like John Rawls imagine idealized situations in which parties must choose binding terms of social cooperation; The legitimacy of these conditions is not based on the fact that anyone actually accepts them, but on the assertion that agents with certain characteristics would freely choose them under carefully defined conditions. With M as the deliberative framework; R rules, principles or institutions; I the (hypothetical) persons in their original position or in the state of nature which form the social contract; and I* am the individuals in the real world who follow the social contract. [6] Rousseau also analyses the statutes in terms of risk management[17], proposing the origins of the State as a form of mutual insurance. [The social contract] can be reduced to the following terms: Each of us puts his person and all his power together under the highest direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each limb as an indivisible part of the whole. [15] In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is a theory or model that emerged during the Enlightenment and generally concerns the legitimacy of state authority over the individual.
[1] Social contract arguments generally postulate that individuals have explicitly or tacitly agreed to give up some of their freedoms and submit to authority (of the ruler or the decision of a majority) in exchange for protecting their remaining rights or maintaining social order. [2] [3] The relationship between natural and legal rights is often a subject of social contract theory. The term takes its name from the Social Contract or Principles of Political Law (French, a book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau from 1762 that dealt with this concept. Although the precursors of social contract theory can be found in antiquity, in Greek and Stoic philosophy, and in Roman and canon law, the pinnacle of the social contract was from the mid-17th to early 19th centuries, when it emerged as the main doctrine of political legitimacy. Legal scholar Randy Barnett has argued[22] that while a corporation`s presence in the territory may be required for consent, it does not constitute consent to all the rules that the corporation might adopt, regardless of its content. A second condition of consent is that the rules respect the principles of justice and protection of natural and social rights and contain procedures for the effective protection of these rights (or freedoms). This was also discussed by O.A. Brownson,[23] who argued that, in a sense, three “constitutions” are at stake: first, the Constitution of Nature, which includes everything the founders called the “natural law”; second, the constitution of the company, a set of unwritten rules generally comprehensible to society, formed by a social contract before establishing a government with which it establishes the third, a government constitution. The prerequisite for approval is that the rules to this effect be constitutional. Around the world, absolute governments that are not even satisfied with the fiction of consent are more common than free governments, and their subjects rarely question their right unless tyranny becomes too oppressive.
[1]:603 “Consent of the Governed” is a phrase found in the United States Declaration of Independence. The characteristics and conditions of consent are important. Theories based on consent of legitimacy and obligation generally agree that consenting parties must be rational agents capable of understanding moral categories such as good and evil. Of course, people will often disagree on the substance, scope, and requirements of reason and morality, but it is always necessary to grasp at least such distinctions for consent to make sense. And for consent to confer any kind of obligation, it must meet certain conditions: the consenting parties must be sufficiently informed of the terms they accept and their consent must be given voluntarily. Rousseau`s striking sentence that man “must be forced to be free”[16] must be understood [according to whom?] as follows: Since indivisible and inalienable popular sovereignty decides what is good for the whole, then when an individual falls back into his ordinary egoism and despises the law, he will be forced to listen to what has been decided, when the people acted as a collective (as citizens). Thus, the law, to the extent that it is created by persons who act as a body, is not a restriction of individual freedom, but rather its expression. The central assertion that social contract theory is approaching is that law and political order are not natural, but human creations. The social contract and the political order it creates are only the means to an end – the benefit of the individuals involved – and are legitimate only to the extent that they fulfill their part of the agreement. Hobbes argued that the government is not a party to the original treaty and that citizens are not obliged to submit to the government if it is too weak to act effectively to suppress factionism and civil unrest.
According to other social contract theorists, if the government does not guarantee their natural rights (locke) or satisfy the best interests of society (called “general will” by Rousseau), citizens can withdraw their duty of obedience or change direction through elections or other means, including, if necessary, violence. Locke believed that natural rights were inalienable and that, therefore, God`s rule replaced governmental authority, while Rousseau believed that democracy (self-government) was the best way to ensure prosperity while maintaining individual freedom under the rule of law. Locke`s concept of social contract was cited in the United States Declaration of Independence. Social contract theories were eclipsed in favor of utilitarianism, Hegelianism, and Marxism in the 19th century; they were revived in the 20th century, especially in the form of a thought experiment by John Rawls. [5] The founders believed that the authority of the government should come from the people. During the reign of King George III, the colonists believed that they were deprived of their ability to accept to be governed by parliament by representatives, and therefore the British could not impose their laws on the colonies. The founders ensured that this right was respected in the U.S. Constitution. The people had to ratify the document through their representatives at the ratification conventions of the States so that it could become law. The consent of the governed, within T. H. Green`s social liberalism, was also described by Paul Harris: one of the first critics of the theory of the social contract was Rousseau`s friend, the philosopher David Hume, who published an essay “Of Civil Liberty” in 1742.
The second part of this essay, entitled “From the Original Contract”[21], points out that the concept of the “social contract” is a convenient fiction: what is really the social contract? An agreement between the citizen and the government? No, it would only mean the continuation of [Rousseau`s] idea. The social contract is an agreement between man and man; an agreement from which what we call society must result. In this is the concept of commutative justice, first put forward by the primitive fact of exchange. is replaced by that of distributive justice. If you translate these words, contract, commutative justice, which are the language of the law, into the language of business, and you have commerce, that is, in its highest sense, the act by which man and man declare themselves essentially producers and renounce any claim to govern each other. Their even greater hope was that we, the people, would exercise our popular sovereignty to elect virtuous leaders who believe in freedom and respect the Constitution. While they believed that the only just government is one based on the consent of citizens to be governed, they also believed that citizens should be worthy of such authority. .
