4. The Social Contract

The state has immense power over the lives of its citizens. Through legislation, the state creates and enforces laws which regulate countless aspects of our lives – what we are taught in schools, what ingredients can go into our food, what age we are allowed to drive a car or get married, through to deciding punishments for those who break the law. The state takes taxes from its citizens and redistributes peoples’ wealth; and if citizens do not follow the rules, the state can take away their money (through fines), their liberty (through imprisonment) and in extreme cases, their lives. Since the 1600s, political theorists have argued that although people do not want to pay taxes or obey rules, this is not as bad as living in a world of chaos, anarchy, and violence. The result is the “social contract”.

Philosophers and political scientists have formulated versions of the social contract since the days of Aristotle, but the concept is most associated with the English theorist Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Hobbes outlined the theory of “the war of all against all”; that a society without order and authority is a society of misery and violence, hence people create a state with rules, and obey these rules and restric- tions as good citizens. Rousseau built upon this to argue that citizens do not obey the state (the sovereign), but that citizens are the sovereign.