20 Facts About Social contract

In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is a theory or model that originated during the Age of Enlightenment and usually concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual.

From this shared starting point, social contract theorists seek to demonstrate why rational individuals would voluntarily consent to give up their natural freedom to obtain the benefits of political order.

The Lockean concept of the social contract was invoked in the United States Declaration of Independence.

Social contract theories were eclipsed in the 19thcentury in favor of utilitarianism, Hegelianism and Marxism; they were revived in the 20thcentury, notably in the form of a thought experiment by John Rawls.

Concept of the social contract was originally posed by Glaucon, as described by Plato in The Republic, BookII.

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Social contract theory appears in Crito, another dialogue from Plato.

Over time, the social contract theory became more widespread after Epicurus, the first philosopher who saw justice as a social contract, and not as existing in Nature due to divine intervention, decided to bring the theory to the forefront of his society.

Social contract formulations are preserved in many of the world's oldest records.

Social contract was called "the Great Chosen One", and he received the title of raja because he pleased the people.

Quentin Skinner has argued that several critical modern innovations in Social contract theory are found in the writings from French Calvinists and Huguenots, whose work in turn was invoked by writers in the Low Countries who objected to their subjection to Spain and, later still, by Catholics in England.

Social contract was seen as an "occurrence" during which individuals came together and ceded some of their individual rights so that others would cede theirs.

John Locke's conception of the social contract differed from Hobbes' in several fundamental ways, retaining only the central notion that persons in a state of nature would willingly come together to form a state.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his influential 1762 treatise The Social Contract, outlined a different version of social-contract theory, as the foundations of society based on the sovereignty of the 'general will'.

Social contract stated that the individual must accept “the total alienation to the whole community of each associate with all his rights”.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon advocated a conception of social contract that did not involve an individual surrendering sovereignty to others.

The social contract is an agreement of man with man; an agreement from which must result what we call society.

Social contract proposes that, if two parties were to stick to the original agreed-upon arrangement and morals outlined by the contract, they would both experience an optimal result.

An early critic of social contract theory was Rousseau's friend, the philosopher David Hume, who in 1742 published an essay "Of Civil Liberty".

Theory of an implicit social contract holds that by remaining in the territory controlled by some society, which usually has a government, people give consent to join that society and be governed by its government if any.

Accordingly, it has been argued that social contract theory is more consistent with the contract law of the time of Hobbes and Locke than with the contract law of our time, and that certain features in the social contract which seem anomalous to us, such as the belief that we are bound by a contract formulated by our distant ancestors, would not have seemed as strange to Hobbes' contemporaries as they do to us.