The Social Contract
It can be inferred from Passage 1 that the Age of Reason
During the Age of Reason, humanity was in a state of transition. The old superstitions were proven wrong by science. And so some thinkers wondered if the old ways of organizing societies and governments were wrong too. To that end, philosophers began to develop and later debate the very natures of society. And three men in particular argued that society was in fact formed by something called the social contract.
The social contract is an abstract agreement. No one technically signs it, but everyone agrees to it informally. It is an agreement among the people of a society to cooperate with each other because it is mutually beneficial to do so. That is, it is in everyone’s interests to work together.
Thomas Hobbes first proposed the theory in his Leviathan, from 1651. He argued that people were essentially evil in nature and entered society for mutual protection. To Hobbes, people gave power to a monarch or king because that person protected them.
Decades later, John Locke adapted the notion. He argued that people were free in nature and gave up political power in society. However, people joined the social contract to get protection for their natural rights of life, liberty, and property. He argued that the government’s power derives from the people and that people should form a new government if the existing one does not protect those natural rights.
Finally, just over 110 years after Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued in his The Social Contract that all the power of a just government comes from the people. That is, when one enters the social contract, he gives up his freedom but gets political power. Thus, in a little over a century, philosophers had switched. Where they once argued that people have little power in society, they were now arguing that the people had all of the power.
Passage 2
To the men who formed the United States, only one thing was agreed upon: the British had broken the social contract with them. They may have disagreed about what they should do about it or, later, about what the new country should look like. However, they were certain that the king had not done what he was supposed to do. Thus, the Thomas Jefferson-penned Declaration of Independence is primarily an explanation of how King George III had broken that contract.
The first section of the document expresses the colonists’ belief that man has three essential natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It also expresses the belief that government power comes from the governed. The second section lists the English government’s abuses on the colonists. They include keeping a standing army in a time of peace, disallowing representation in parliament, and suspending colonial assemblies. Finally, the third section explains that the Americans have taken less extreme measures in the past but that, finally, they were severing their bond, their social contract, with England.
