Social contract

In political philosophy, political science, sociology and legal theory, the social contract is an agreement made within a group by its members, such as the one acquired in a State in relation to their rights and duties and those of others. its citizens. It is part of the idea that all the members of the group agree, of their own free will, with the social contract, by virtue of which they admit the existence of an authority, moral norms and laws to which they submit. . The social pact is an explanatory hypothesis of political authority and social order.

The social contract, as a political theory, explains, among other things, the origin and purpose of the State and of human rights. The essence of the theory (whose best-known formulation is that proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau) is as follows: to live in society, human beings agree to an implicit social contract that grants them certain rights in exchange for giving up the freedom from which they live. would have in a state of nature. Thus, the rights and duties of individuals constitute the clauses of the social contract, while the State is the entity created to enforce the contract. Similarly, humans can change the terms of the contract if they wish; rights and duties are not immutable or natural. On the other hand, a greater number of rights implies greater duties, and fewer rights,

History

Background

The first known thinker to formulate such a theory of the social contract as the origin of legislation and social conventions, established for the purpose of protecting the weak from abuse by the stronger, was the sophist Protagoras of Abdera (  5th century  to In Plato's The Republic (circa 360 BC ), Glaucon suggests that justice is a pact between rational egoists. Later Epicurus (341-270 / 271 BC) says in his reflections on politics in the Maxima capitalsthat there is no natural law and that at the moment in which human beings, who previously lived in nature in a violent way and ignored the common good, establish a social pact not to harm each other or suffer it, the concept of Justice. Cicero (106-43 BC) posits a theory similar to that of The Republicof Plato at the end of the period of the Roman Republic. The first modern philosopher to articulate a detailed contractarian theory was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), with his view that men, in the state of nature, surrender their individual rights to a strong sovereign in exchange for protection. John Locke (1632-1704) also put forward a contract theory. Unlike Hobbes, Locke believed that each person made a contract with the others for a certain type of government, but with the possibility of modifying or even abolishing it.

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) wrote his masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), during a period of civil war in England. It discusses who should occupy sovereignty (the king or Parliament) and defines the need to create a social contract to establish peace between people.

Hobbes considers the figure of power, why it should exist and how it should be. The figure of the social contract is key to answering these questions. For Hobbes, if the ultimate basic and fundamental human nature can be reduced to is an instinct for self-preservation, and if human nature makes no social and political distinctions, then men are equal by nature. Human nature is a self-preservation instinct to which everyone is entitled, but the consequence of this is a confrontation between people, that is, wars.From this equality of capacities arises equality in the hope of achieving our ends. And therefore, if any two men desire the same social good which cannot be enjoyed by both, they become enemies, and on their way to the end (which is chiefly their own preservation, and sometimes only their delight) they strive mutually to destroy each other. or subjugate [...]. It is therefore manifest that, during the time that men live without a common power that obliges them all to respect, they are in that condition called war, and a war as of every man against every man.Hobbes, 

Leviathan , chapter XIII. Edition by C. Moya and A. Escotado, National Editor. Madrid, 1980.

Therefore, since there is no norm that regulates the coexistence between human beings, it is necessary to create an artificial order. To do this, no one can be left without any particle of freedom, understood as the possibility of doing whatever they want to preserve themselves, since they would return to the natural order.

The new social order is a contract by which individuals give up being naturally free. Thus, the power must be absolute to prevent the members of the community from confronting each other, not giving up their natural freedom and returning to human nature. Hobbes intends to create conditions that prevent this confrontation and that someone sends by force. In the state of nature there are no norms that indicate good and evil, which do exist in the artificial order, and to establish these norms there must be an authority that decides what is right and what is wrong.

What reason says to omit and what not to do is natural law . And reason says that peace must be sought since it is necessary, abandoning that way of organizing in the state of nature. When everyone is willing, there must be a pact between everyone to seek that peace. By accepting that artificial order that natural law establishes as necessary, there is a renunciation of natural law that marked the Christian tradition. For Hobbes, natural law is equivalent to the total freedom that each man has to use his power, typical of the state of nature, a fact that ultimately leads to war.And it is therefore a precept, or general rule of reason, that every man should strive for peace, so far as he hopes to obtain it, and that when he cannot obtain it, he may then seek and use all the help and advantages of peace. war, of whose rule the first branch contains the first and fundamental law of nature, which is to seek peace and follow it; the second, the sum of the natural right, which is to defend ourselves by all the means we can. From this fundamental law of nature, by which men are commanded to strive for peace, follows a second law: that a man be ready, when others are as ready as he is, to give up his right to all thing in favor of peace and self-defense that it considers necessary,Hobbes, 

Leviathan , chapter XIV. Edition by C. Moya and A. Escotado, National Editor. Madrid, 1980color

John Locke

John Locke (1632-1704) collects his view of the social contract in his major work, Two Essays on Civil Government (1690). The idea of ​​human nature in Locke is Christian: man is a creature of God, so man cannot destroy his life or that of other men because he does not belong to him, but belongs to God. Man has the right and the duty to preserve his life. Likewise, man is not subject to any other man, but he is free.

If human nature carries with it the right and duty to preserve life, why do we need a community? For Locke it can happen that no one fulfilled that right and that duty, and in case of conflict in its fulfillment, human nature does not have the existence of an authority that would resolve it, so the community tries to fill those deficiencies of the state of nature. : the existence of an authority that judges in case of conflict. It is therefore a question of making a contract that establishes a social or civil order that attends exclusively to supply those deficiencies of the state of nature, that is, to apply a justice or an authority that says, in the event of a clash between two individuals, what should be done. .Therefore, whenever a certain number of men unite in a society, each of them renouncing the executive power granted to him by natural law in favor of the community, there and only there will there be a political or civil society.Locke, 

Second Essay on Civil Government , in JL, 

Two Essays on Civil Government . Spanish translation of Espasa-Calpe. Madrid, 1991. Page 266 color

The social pact is in itself quite limited, trying to achieve the establishment of a judge who settles the controversies that come from the natural law itself. Rules are dictated that are the continuity of natural laws and that will consist of the recognition of the ends of the nature of free and equal men, to ensure the rights of freedom, equality, life and property.

Only a society will be civil or political when each one of the individuals renounces the power to execute the natural law. It will be executed by the community and the organs of the community. In the state of nature it is each individual who judges the laws of nature. In civil society, on the contrary, it is an authority, a judge, who judges them and who decides who has broken the laws. And that authority must be a parliamentthat represents the whole (parliament is not understood in its modern sense, but as a group of representatives of the community). As the main criticism of Hobbes, if there were an absolute power above the community, for Locke, it would not really have left the state of nature, because in the absolute monarchy, when the powers are confused, there is no impartiality on the part of it and no there is no way to appeal or appeal his sentence, so its existence is incompatible with the existence of a civil society. For there to be civil society, there must be a judge separate from the executive power (as all men are considered equal, it is understood as the power to execute of each one of the individuals, considering the absolute monarch as another executor of power) who is impartial with respect to mitigants.From which it can be deduced that the absolute monarchy, which some consider to be the only possible form of government, is, in fact, incompatible with civil society, and, therefore, that it is not a form of absolute civil government. The purpose of civil society is to avoid and remedy the inconveniences of the state of nature that follow precisely when each man is judge and party in his own affairs, and that remedy is sought in the establishment of a recognized authority, to which anyone can resort when he suffers an injury, or is involved in a dispute, and to which all members of society must respect. Wherever there are people who have no authority to call upon to decide any differences that may arise between them, we are still in the state of nature. And that is preciselyOp cit. (1991)color

In turn, Locke distinguishes between two processes in the formation of the social contract:1st Contract for the formation of society, where the community that overcomes the state of nature is created;2nd Government formation contract, where the relationship between ruler and ruled is created.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), in his influential treatise The Social Contract , published in 1762, drew a very different version of contract theory. Rousseau's theory has many points in common with Locke's individualist tradition, although it also differs from it in many respects. Rousseau's postulate, which gives its name to this theory, uses the legal language of private relationships between men. This thinker, from his observation of society, constituted at that time by masses subject to the King, discusses the link that exists between the sovereign and the subjects. "Man is born free, and yet everywhere he finds himself in chains."He rules out that the bond is found in force or submission, but on the contrary, men voluntarily give up a state of natural innocence to submit to the rules of society, in exchange for greater benefits inherent in social exchange. This voluntary consent is materialized through a contract, "the social contract" in this case.

For Rousseau, the primitive man (the one who was in the State of nature) is a being without evil, in which two basic feelings predominate: self-love , that is, the instinct of self-protection, and pity ( disgust for suffering ). alien ), but as the population grows, groups come together, that union creates false needs, to cover them man invents agriculture and livestock, but the more man has the more he wants, and certain people accumulate wealth, these fearing for their lives and for their riches due to the suspicions created they promote a pact, this pact will be the first code.

Neocontractualism

John Rawls

John Rawls (1921-2002), in an influential book entitled A Theory of Justice , proposed a contractarian theory with Kantian reminiscences according to which, from a hypothetical original position, and leaving aside their individual capacities and preferences, rational beings situated under a veil of ignorance would agree to establish general principles of justice.