So maybe I can block this out into four different questions: What is the social contract? What does
it do? How does it do what it does? And why does it do what it does, why does what it
does need doing? Let's talk first about what it does.
The social contract in Hobbes is the
result of [results in] creating a sovereign, a sovereign power.
Why does it do this?
In order to end the war of all against all which characterizes the state of nature according to
Hobbes. The trouble in the state of nature is that I have infinite freedom and virtually zero
security. The only security I have is what I can provide from my own personal strength and personal
power. And that even is limited by the period, periods of time when I have to be asleep or
otherwise vulnerable. So in the war of all against all (we talked about this in class) everyone has
a right to everything, even the body of other people. Provided you can take it it's yours. So
this is the law of the jungle, this is the law of strength. Strength rules and there is no right.
There's no... nothing for the weak to appeal to against the strong.
In the state of nature strength rules above all. But that means everybody's equally vulnerable and
so there's no civilization and no culture. How does the social contract create a sovereign?
I'll continue here. Each individual renounces his right to all things. So a bunch of us get together
and all of us together say, "Each one of us will give up our right to all things.
I will give up my right to your body, you give up your right to my body,
I'll give up my right to all that stuff and all the stuff I can see." That's my natural right:
naturally I can... anything that I can take belongs to me. I will surrender that
infinite freedom that I have because it's not useful to me. It's only useful to me
to the extent that I'm more powerful than everybody around me, which is not that often.
I'll renounce that right and I'll assign my rights to the sovereign. I'm going to say "I'm delegating
to the sovereign my power of control over all things, my strength." Now what the sovereign gets
then, the sovereign receives this grant of power from every individual. Every individual's infinite
freedom is now sort of combined in the sovereign. So the sovereign is kind of super-person
that is created, this is what the government, what the state is according to Hobbes. It's
this gigantic artificial entity that we've all created by assigning and transferring our power
to it. Now because it has all of our power it is vastly more powerful than any single one of us.
Important: the sovereign is vastly more powerful than any single individual.
What Hobbes noted about the state of nature is that it's caused because there is no common power
to "overawe" every individual, to make the weak as well as the strong obey. But now there is.
Now we've just created out of our combined powers one super-powerful artificial person, which is the
sovereign, which is the government, which is the king. And this government has the power to destroy
any one of us. It is so... it's orders of magnitude more powerful than even the most
powerful individual, and so it can keep us all in line. It can end the war of all against all
by being that one individual, that one being, that is so powerful that it would be folly, it would be
insanity to try to take it on head to head and overpower it. So this is the power...
The power to overawe every individual. When you even contemplate taking on the power of the
state using your own personal power the thought should terrify you. It's like trying to trying
to drink up the ocean, it's like trying to leap over the moon. It's beyond, not just beyond but
vastly beyond, the power of any individual even to dream of doing. And Hobbes says: "Now...
now we have peace." Because nobody's going to challenge the sovereign.
Nobody has any rational expectation that they can defeat the sovereign
and therefore the sovereign creates an area in which there can be right and not just power,
in which the weak can appeal to the sovereign: say, "Hey this guy took my stuff!" And the
sovereign can come along and say, "You can't... Give his stuff back. And also you go to prison."
Why? The sovereign is enforcing order. No one of us could do that. I couldn't. I mean I can with my
kids but I can't in real life force somebody to give you back your stuff. In the law of nature,
the state of nature, if they've got your stuff it's their stuff.
Okay so that's what the social contract is.
So the social contract in Hobbes is a method for creating the state, for creating the sovereign,
for creating political society. It is this next stage of human social evolution
after the state of nature. It is the thing that rational human beings come up with in order to
advance, to benefit themselves by creating a government.