Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, lived in the early seventeenth century during a time of civil war in England and conflict throughout the continent of Europe. As a result, he was a first-hand witness to the damage that is caused by warfare and chaos. This had an impact on the political philosophy that Hobbes developed in his 1651 book Leviathan. As argued in the book, people are naturally inclined to fight against each other. In order to maintain social order, people need to be controlled by the power of a strong, authoritative ruler. However, Hobbes also argued that people must consent to be governed in order for a ruler's power to be legitimate. This consent is obtained through a concept that Hobbes called the social contract. The following paper will be concerned with the social contract and how it came into being. It will be argued that the social contract provides a justification for the power and authority of the modern state, even though Hobbes' emphasis on the need for an absolute sovereign is not justified.
In Part I, Chapter 14 of Leviathan, Hobbes defines a contract as an agreement that involves "the mutuall transferring of Right" (Hobbes, 1651, p. 192). A social contract comes into being when a group of people agree to give up the rights and freedoms that they had in a state of nature in order to form a civilized society among themselves. In Hobbes' theory, the desire for a social contract comes about because of the insecure conditions of life in the state of nature. Hobbes regards human beings as "creatures who will, if unchecked, inevitably behave violently toward one another" (Hampton, 1986, p. 5). Thus, people living in a state of nature are in constant war against each other. Hobbes claims that people in nature live in constant warfare, even when they are not actually fighting battles. According to Hobbes' definition, the inclination to hurt one another is a form of warfare as well. Thus, as stated in...