s, of course, why Americans tend to regard criminals as having failed to agree to the social contract, as therefore being not members of the human society thus defined, and as therefore not entitled to the rights and privileges deserved by members of the society.)
What Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls have done, of course, is not propose a theory about ancient history, but instead propose a simplified hypothetical model of social behavior. The paradigm of all such models is a simple piece of wood: the slightly inclined plane down which Galileo could roll balls slowly enough that he could time their acceleration accurately with the simple equipment of that time. By then gradually increasing the degree of inclination, he was able to extrapolate to the final condition of vertical free fall and generate the mathematical formula for the acceleration of gravity. That is, by starting from an unrealistic but comprehensible simple model, one can gradually extrapolate toward the complexities of real life. This general sort of methodology has been used by other social thinkers as well.
For example, Adam Smith conceived of proposing a wooden stick figure, his ôeconomic man,ö who would make economic decisions solely for economic reasons and without any other considerations affecting him, as a model for attempting to rationalize economic decisions and behavior. To criticize ôeconomic man,ö even now, as being an unrealistic model of human behavior is itself unrealistic and fails to grasp the reason for creating the model. Similarly, a simplified model of human behavior was introduced in sociology, by Talcott Parsons. Parsons created a model of what one might call ôsociological man,ö for whom decisions
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