The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Ritchie - Contributions to the History of the Social Contract Theory
The social contract theory did not originate with the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had its roots in the popular consciousness of mediæval society, and had been anticipated by the Greek Sophists. In the popular consciousness of the middle ages, and among writers on the ecclesiastical side, there grew up that particular form of the contract theory which has fixed itself most prominently in the minds of ordinary men — the idea of a contract between government and people. Locke published his Treatise of Civil Government in defence of the principles of the revolution of 1688, and it is commonly believed that he maintained this theory of a contract between king and people; but the original compact on which he bases civil government is, just as with Hobbes and with Rousseau, a compact between individual and individual, not between government (of whatever sort) and people. If the person or persons entrusted with the government fail to give satisfaction, they may be dismissed and others put in their place. This is identical with what is most essential in Rousseau's theory. The latter says explicitly that the institution of government is not a contract: the social contract by which the sovereign people is constituted excludes every other. Rousseau has this advantage over Locke that he does not attempt to make out an historical justification for the social contract. The philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who held this theory, did not borrow it directly from the Greeks. Hooker implicitly united the two distinct theories that political society is based upon contract and that the people is sovereign — the theories held later by Locke and Rousseau. Locke purposely based his political thinking upon Hooker, because Hooker was an authority acceptable to the Anglican Tories with whom he had to argue. But historical events were making the idea of compact between individual and individual familiar to many in the early seventeenth century. Such were the Scottish Covenant and the covenant made by the emigrants on board the Mayflower when they found themselves off "the northern parts of Virginia," where there was no existing government under whose authority they would come. For the purposes of political philosophy, the history of the social contract theory ends with Rousseau. Kant and Fichte only repeat the theory in Rousseau's form, with a rather more complete consciousness of what it implies. History does not refute a theory which is unhistorical, but the growth of the historical spirit makes such a theory less and less attractive. The idea of organic growth has become a commonplace. But a merely historical account of what has been in the past is no sufficient philosophical explanation of a political society. Fouillée has endeavored to express the truth of both ways of regarding society by saying that the highest form of it must be an "organisme contractuel" The time has come when we can be just to Montesquieu and Burke without being unjust to Locke and Rousseau.