Social Contract Theories: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau
The concept of social contract of Thomas Hobbes / wrote his masterpiece, Leviathan in a period of civil war in England where they discussed who should hold the sovereignty, the King or Parliament. It defines the need to create a social contract to establish peace between hombres. / Hobbes raises the figure of power, why there should be and how it should be. To answer these questions the figure of the social contract is key. If for Aristotle, the political order is a continuation of the natural order, for Hobbes the political order is the result of a contract based on the power bases. For Hobbes, if the latest basic and fundamental to what we can reduce human nature is an instinct of conservation and human nature does not make social and political distinctions, therefore, men are equal by nature. Thehuman nature is a survival instinct that everyone is entitled to retain, but the consequence of that right was a showdown between the men, ie, war.
Therefore, since there is no rule governing the coexistence of men, need to create an artificial order. To do this, nobody can stay without any particle of freedom since it would become the natural order.
The new social order is a contract by which individuals refuse to be naturally free. Thus, power must be absolute to prevent community members face and not give up their natural liberty and human nature again. Hobbes aims to create conditions to avoid this confrontation and send someone by force. / Whatever the reason says to omit and what to do is not natural law.
And reason says you have to seek peace as it is needed, thus abandoning organized in the state of nature.
When all are prepared should be a pact among all to find that peace. By accepting this order establishes the necessary artificial natural law, there is aresignation to natural law that marked the Christian tradition For Hobbes, natural law is equivalent to the total freedom that every man has to use their power, their state of nature, a fact that eventually leads to war. / / The social contract the work of John Locke.
reflects his vision of the social contract in his major work, Two Treatises on Civil Government.
The idea of human nature in Locke‘s Christian man is a creature of God, so that man can not destroy your life or that of other men because he did not belong, but it belongs to God. Man has the right and duty to preserve his life. Likewise, man is not subject to any other man, but is libre. / For Locke can give anyone the right and fulfill the duty to preserve his life, and in case of conflict in their fulfillment of human nature has not the existence of an authority that rid, so that the community tries to meet these shortcomings of the state of nature. It is thus make acontract that merges social and civil order that serves only to fill those gaps in the state of nature, ie, apply a law or an authority that says, in a crash between two individuals, what to hacer. / The social contract is itself quite limited, seeking the establishment of a judge to undo the controversies that come from the natural law itself.
The rules that dictate whether the continuity of natural laws which will include recognition of the natural ends of free and equal, to ensure the rights of freedom, equality, life and property.
Only a civil or political society will be when each of the individual renounces power to enforce the natural law. I run the community and community bodies. / In the state of nature is the individual who judges the laws of nature. In civil society, by contrast, is an authority, a judge who judges them and who dictates who skipped the laws. And that authority should be aparliament representing the whole. As Hobbes main criticism, if I had absolute power over the community, for Locke, it really would not have left the state of nature, as in the absolute monarchy, to confuse the authorities, there is no impartiality on his part and not There is no way to appeal or challenge their sentence, so that its existence is incompatible with the existence of a civil society. For civil society there must be a separate judge of the executive (when considering all people as equal, be construed as the power to execute each of the individuals, being regarded as absolute monarch over to another performer) who is impartial to the mitigation. / / The Social Contract by Rousseau.
Rn his influential treatise The Social Contract, published in 1762 drew a versiion different from contract theory.
Rousseau‘s theory has much in common with the individualist tradition of Locke, but also differs from that in many respects. The postulate of Rousseau, which gives its name to this theory, uses the proper legal language of private relations between men. This thinker, from his observation of society, formed at the time by people who endured the King, runs about the link between sovereign and subjects. Discard the bond is in force or submission, but on the contrary, men voluntarily relinquish a state of natural innocence to submit to the rules of society, in exchange for greater benefits inherent to social exchange. This voluntary agreement is being implemented through a contract, “the social contract” in this caso. / For Rousseau, the primordial man (who was in the state of nature)
is a being without malice, in the two dominant basic feelings : theself-love, that is the instinct of self, and pity (disgust at the suffering of others), but as the population grows groups are coming together, this union creates false needs, to cover the man invented agriculture and livestock, but the more does the man most desires, and some people accumulate wealth, they suffer for their lives and their wealth because of the misgivings created promote a pact, the pact will be the first legal code.