The Social Contract: Why Obey a State at All?

Follows: How Government Actually Works

In this deep dive
1. The question under every law
2. Hobbes: fear, and the way out of it
3. Locke: consent, property and the right to resist
4. Rousseau: the general will
5. Hume's objection: nobody signed anything
6. The modern contract: Rawls and his rivals
7. Who was left out of the contract?
8. What "consent of the governed" can and can't mean

How Government Actually Works explained the machinery: three branches, checks and balances, federal and unitary states, all of it built to stop power being abused. It took one thing for granted, which is that a government is entitled to rule in the first place. This piece goes underneath that assumption.

The question is old and simple to state. A state does things to you that would be crimes if anyone else did them. It takes part of your income whether or not you agree. It can lock you up, send you to war and tell you what you may build on your own land. Philosophers call this the problem of political obligation: is there a moral duty to obey the law because it is the law, and if so, where does that duty come from?

The most influential answer in modern history is the social contract: government is legitimate because, in some sense, the governed agreed to it. Below is that idea at its strongest, the serious objections to it, and the main alternatives. Several of these disagreements are still open, and the piece treats them as open.

Part 1 — The question under every law

In 399 BCE an Athenian jury condemned Socrates to death. His friend Crito arranged an escape. In Plato's dialogue Crito, Socrates refuses to go, and he explains why by imagining the Laws of Athens speaking to him.

The Laws make an argument that sounds strikingly modern. Athens let him leave whenever he liked; any citizen who disliked the city could emigrate and take his goods with him. Socrates instead stayed for seventy years, raised his children there and enjoyed its protection. In the words of Benjamin Jowett's translation, a man who has seen how the city is run "and still remains, has entered into an implied contract that he will do as we command him."

Socrates' Laws make the first recorded argument from tacit consent: you stayed, so you agreed.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out that this short passage holds, in seed form, nearly every theory of political obligation developed since:

In Plato's Republic, Glaucon offers a darker version. He argues that people would love to do wrong to others without consequence, but fear suffering wrong more, so the weak agree on a compact to do neither. On his telling, justice is a truce among people who cannot get away with injustice rather than a virtue. Plato wrote the rest of the Republic to refute him. Glaucon's challenge still sits at the root of one strand of contract thinking, the strand that grounds politics in self-interest rather than morality.

Three questions that get tangled

It helps to separate three questions that are often run together:

1. Legitimacy. Is this government entitled to make and enforce rules, as opposed to merely being able to?
2. Obligation. Do the people living under it have a moral duty to obey its laws, even laws they think are mistaken?
3. Justice. Are its laws and institutions actually good and fair?

They can come apart. A government might be legitimate and still pass an unjust law; most people think you should usually obey a law you consider unwise, which is what makes the duty interesting. A benevolent conqueror might rule fairly and still lack any right to rule. The social contract was designed mainly to answer the first two questions, and much of the argument below is about whether it can.

Not only a European question

The contract metaphor is European, but the question it answers is not. Rulers in ancient China's Zhou dynasty claimed a Mandate of Heaven, and the Confucian philosopher Mencius (4th century BCE) argued that government's first duty was to make sure the people were fed and free from fear of violence. Scholars still argue about how far Mencius made the people's will the source of authority, rather than a sign of Heaven's favour. Some read him as a resource for democracy, and others warn against reading modern ideas back into him. Many traditions have asked what makes rule rightful and what follows when rulers betray it, and they have answered without contracts. The answer this piece follows was worked out mostly in 17th- and 18th-century Europe. It then spread through revolutions, constitutions and, eventually, international human-rights law.

Part 2 — Hobbes: fear, and the way out of it

Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651. He had lived through the English Civil War, and it shows. His method was to imagine life with no government at all, the state of nature, and ask what rational people would do about it.

His starting point is equality. People in the state of nature are roughly equal, he argued, though not in any noble sense: "the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest," whether by trickery or by ganging up. Anyone can be killed by anyone, so no one is ever safe.

Hobbes then names "three principall causes of quarrel. First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory." People attack for gain, pre-emptively for safety (that is his "diffidence", meaning distrust), and for reputation. With no power able to "over-awe them all", the result is "warre ... of every man, against every man." He adds that war does not mean constant fighting, just as foul weather does not mean constant rain. It is the known readiness to fight, with "no assurance to the contrary."

Then comes the most quoted passage in political philosophy (Leviathan, ch. 13, in Hobbes's spelling):

"no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

The covenant

The way out is a covenant. Everyone agrees with everyone else to hand their right of self-government to a single sovereign, which can be one person or an assembly, on condition that all the others do the same. Hobbes even scripts the words: "I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him." The result is "that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speake more reverently) of that Mortall God."

Why must the sovereign be so powerful? Because "Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words" (ch. 17). A promise that nobody enforces is worthless when breaking it pays. That makes Hobbes's sovereign close to absolute. Dividing power, in his view, invites the very civil war the contract exists to prevent.

The strongest case for Hobbes

Hobbes is easy to caricature as a defender of tyranny. His defenders point to three things.

1. He was among the first great theorists to base authority on the interests of ordinary people rather than on divine right or inherited rank. The sovereign exists to serve the subjects' safety, and has no other justification.
2. He left the subject a core of liberty the sovereign cannot cancel. If the sovereign commands a man, "though justly condemned," to kill or wound himself or not to resist an attacker, "yet hath that man the Liberty to disobey" (ch. 21).
3. Obedience ends when protection ends. "The Obligation of Subjects to the Soveraign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them... The end of Obedience is Protection."

The objections are just as old. Hobbes counted submission to a conqueror as consent too, so a promise made at the point of a sword binds you. Few people today accept that. And a sovereign strong enough to keep everyone else in line is also strong enough to become the greatest threat of all. Hobbes's answer was that even a bad sovereign beats civil war. That answer looks very different depending on whether you are living through a civil war or living under a tyrant.

Part 3 — Locke: consent, property and the right to resist

John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1690) uses the same tools as Hobbes and reaches very different conclusions. Its arguments went on to shape revolutions.

A gentler state of nature

For Locke the state of nature is "a state of perfect freedom" (§4), but not a free-for-all. It already has a moral law, knowable by reason: "being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions" (§6). The trouble is enforcement. Everyone judges their own case, and people are biased judges. Government is a remedy for these "inconveniencies", and Locke did not think of it as an escape from hell.

Property

Locke's most famous move concerns property. Each person owns themselves, and therefore their labour. When you take something from the common store of nature and work on it, you have "mixed his labour with" it, and it becomes yours (§27), at least "where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others." Locke uses "property" broadly. People join society for "the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property" (§123).

Consent, express and tacit

Locke is the great theorist of consent. Because people are "by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent" (§95). But almost nobody ever signs a social contract. Locke's answer is tacit consent. Anyone who owns land, or even takes "a lodging only for a week," or travels "freely on the highway," gives tacit consent. Locke concedes that in effect "it reaches as far as the very being of any one within the territories of that government" (§119).

If merely being in a country counts as consent, then consent has stopped being a choice and become a fact about where you happen to stand.

Critics have pressed this point ever since. If simply being present counts as consent, it is hard to see what consent is still doing in the argument.

The right of revolution

Here Locke parts company with Hobbes. Government holds power on trust, to protect lives, liberties and estates. People will put up with "great mistakes in the ruling part" and "all the slips of human frailty," but "if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way" reveals a design against them, they may "put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected" (§225).

Who decides when that point has come? "The people shall be judge" (§240). And when there is no judge on earth, the only remedy left is what Locke calls "an appeal to heaven", which is a polite way of saying armed resistance.

Locke can allow this, and Hobbes cannot, because his contract has two stages: people first agree to form a society, and then that society sets up a government. Overthrowing the government therefore does not throw everyone back into the state of nature. The society survives and can try again.

The strongest case, and the hardest questions

Locke's defenders say he gave the world its working vocabulary of legitimate government: natural rights, limited power, rule by consent, the right to resist tyranny. Much of that vocabulary reached the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, with its governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

The hard questions are about who counted. Historians such as James Tully and Barbara Arneil have argued that Locke's labour theory of property was convenient for colonists. Hunting peoples gained rights over the animals they caught, not the land they hunted on, which Locke treated as vacant. Locke wrote that "in the beginning all the world was America" (§49), meaning nature's empty common. The historian David Armitage argues that Locke was revising the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina at the same time he was drafting his chapter on property. Other scholars, such as Mark Goldie, caution that English politics, not America, was Locke's main concern. Both readings are live, and Part 7 returns to them.

Part 4 — Rousseau: the general will

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a citizen of Geneva, opened The Social Contract (1762) with the line everyone remembers: "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains."

Rousseau did not think the existing chains were justified by any contract worth the name. In his earlier Discourse on Inequality (1755) he had told the story of how the first political society arose: the rich, feeling insecure, "conceived at length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of man", which was to persuade the poor to accept institutions that protected the rich. In The Social Contract he wanted to describe the contract that would make political authority legitimate, and he set himself a demanding problem (Book I, ch. 6, in G. D. H. Cole's translation):

"to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before."

Obeying the law and remaining as free as before sounds impossible. Rousseau's solution is that each person gives themselves entirely to the community, "under the supreme direction of the general will." Since everyone gives everything, the terms are the same for all, and no one has an interest in making them burdensome. When you obey a law that expresses the general will, you are obeying a will that is partly your own.

The general will is not the majority

Rousseau draws a sharp line between the will of all, which is "no more than a sum of particular wills," everyone voting for their private advantage, and the general will, which "considers only the common interest" (Book II, ch. 3). A vote can get the general will wrong when people vote for private advantage, or when factions form and swamp it. The question a citizen should ask of a law is whether it serves the common good, not whether it suits them personally.

He was also scathing about representation. The English think themselves free, he wrote, but are "free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it" (Book III, ch. 15). For Rousseau, real self-government had to be exercised in person.

"Forced to be free"

The most troubling line in the book comes in Book I, ch. 7: whoever refuses to obey the general will "shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free."

Rousseau's defenders reply that he insisted on small, egalitarian republics, with laws that bind everyone equally and that citizens make themselves. On this view he is closer to a radical democrat than a totalitarian. His influence runs in both directions, through the democratic and participatory tradition (Part 8 and the piece that follows on democratic experiments) and through the worry about leaders who claim to speak for "the people" as a whole.

Part 5 — Hume's objection: nobody signed anything

The Scottish philosopher David Hume published "Of the Original Contract" in 1748. It remains the most damaging attack on the whole enterprise.

Hume's first point is historical. "Almost all the governments, which exist at present... have been founded originally, either on usurpation or conquest, or both." Nobody's great-great-grandparents sat down and agreed to a constitution. Even if they had, the consent of ancestors does not bind their descendants.

His second point is about ordinary belief. Try telling people in most of the world that their rulers hold power by their voluntary consent, Hume says, and "the magistrate would soon imprison you, as seditious." Most people have no idea that they have supposedly agreed to anything.

His third point demolishes Locke's tacit consent. Staying in your country, he argued, is not a free choice for most people:

"Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires?"

Then the image that has stuck: we may as well say that a man consents to the authority of a ship's captain because he stays on board, "though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her."

Hume's alternative

Hume was no anarchist. He thought we should obey governments, but for a different reason. Allegiance rests on usefulness: we obey "because society could not otherwise subsist." He also observed that governments founded by violence gain authority over time: "Time, by degrees, removes all these difficulties, and accustoms the nation to regard, as their lawful or native princes" a family that began as usurpers. On this view, obedience is justified by the benefits government delivers, and no promise is needed.

The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that Hume's objection is still taken as decisive against any theory built on a historical contract. Its observation about modern philosophers is telling: most people who think they have a duty to obey the law probably believe it rests on their consent, while most philosophers have been persuaded by Hume and his successors that actual consent is too rare to carry the weight.

The weakness in Hume's alternative

Hume's answer has a difficulty of its own, and the philosophers who followed him felt it. If the only reason to obey is that obedience is useful, then whenever disobeying would do more good, you should disobey. That turns the "duty" to obey into a running calculation, one that each person makes for themselves. Utilitarians in Hume's line, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, said surprisingly little about political obligation. The Stanford Encyclopedia reports a broad view among philosophers that the most careful attempts to build a general duty of obedience on utility have not succeeded.

So Hume left the contract theorists with a dilemma. An actual contract would bind people, but almost nobody has made one. A theory without any contract, built on usefulness alone, struggles to explain why the law deserves obedience when breaking it would do more good. The next generation of contract theorists tried to find a way between the two.

Part 6 — The modern contract: Rawls and his rivals

If nobody actually signed, can the contract still help? Immanuel Kant suggested it could. He argued that the original contract is not a historical event but "the Idea of this act, in terms of which alone we can think of the legitimacy of a state." The question becomes whether a free and equal people could have agreed to a law, rather than whether they did.

Rawls and the veil of ignorance

John Rawls revived the tradition in A Theory of Justice (1971). His contract is openly hypothetical. Imagine choosing the basic rules of your society from behind a veil of ignorance: you do not know whether you will be rich or poor, which religion or none you will hold, what talents you will have, or your sex or ethnicity. You know general facts about how societies work, but nothing about your own place in one.

Rawls argued that people choosing under those conditions would pick two principles:

1. Equal basic liberties. Each person has the same claim to a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties (speech, conscience, political participation, and so on), compatible with the same for everyone.
2. Fair inequality only. Social and economic inequalities are allowed only if positions are open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and only if they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged (the difference principle).

Rawls's contract does not ask what people agreed to. It asks what they would agree to if no one could rig the rules in their own favour.

Rival thinkers accepted the device and rejected the result. The economist John Harsanyi argued that rational people behind the veil would maximise average welfare instead, a utilitarian conclusion. Robert Nozick rejected the whole approach of designing distributions (see the next piece on political traditions).

Later, in Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls shifted to a question closer to this piece's. How can a society of people with deeply different religions and philosophies legitimately coerce one another? His liberal principle of legitimacy holds that political power is "fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse."

Two families of contract theory

Contract thinking today has split into two lines, which the Stanford Encyclopedia names this way:

Scanlon's version tests a principle by asking whether it is one "that no one could reasonably reject."

The objection that will not go away

Ronald Dworkin put it in one line: a hypothetical contract "is no contract at all." If I would have agreed to sell you my house for a fair price yesterday, that does not give you my house today. Contract theorists reply that the hypothetical contract was never meant to bind people the way a signature does. It is a thought experiment for working out what fairness requires, and the authority comes from the fairness itself.

The non-contract answers

Because of this, many philosophers now ground political obligation in something other than consent:

• Fair play. H. L. A. Hart argued in 1955 that when people cooperate under rules that restrict their liberty, those who benefit owe a similar submission. Rawls adopted the idea in 1964. Nozick replied with an example. If your neighbours set up a public address system and assign you a day to run it, does enjoying the broadcasts oblige you to take your turn? Surely not. A. John Simmons added that there is a difference between receiving benefits like national defence, which you cannot refuse, and accepting them.
• Natural duty. Rawls also argued that we have a natural duty to support just institutions that apply to us, whether or not we agreed to them.
• Membership. Some philosophers argue that, as with families, belonging to a political community creates obligations nobody chose.
• Broader consent. Some argue that voting, or using public services like the police or a public library, counts as consent after all. Harry Beran proposed that states should simply ask citizens, giving dissenters the option to leave, secede, or live in a reserved territory.

Each of these approaches has serious defenders and serious critics. None has won.

Part 7 — Who was left out of the contract?

The contract tradition says all are free and equal. Three families of critics ask whether the "all" ever meant everyone, or whether any state can meet the tradition's own standard.

The anarchist critique

Anarchists take consent theory more seriously than its authors did and conclude that no state passes the test. William Godwin argued in 1793 that government was at best a temporary evil. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote in 1840 that "the government of man by man (under whatever name it be disguised) is oppression."

The American Lysander Spooner made the argument with a lawyer's precision in No Treason (1870): "The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man." Nobody now living signed it. He also dismissed voting as consent. A man surrounded by a government he cannot resist uses the ballot in self-defence, "a mere substitute for a bullet," just as a soldier forced into battle fights to stay alive. Fighting does not mean he chose the battle.

In 1970 the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff argued that if we have a duty to act on our own best judgement, a duty to obey someone because they command it is impossible. The concept of a legitimate state, he concluded, "would appear to be vacuous." A. John Simmons (1979) and later Michael Huemer (2013) developed a more modest philosophical anarchism. On this view no existing state has proved a general duty of obedience, yet there may still be excellent moral reasons to follow most laws, such as not harming others. As Simmons puts it, philosophical anarchists "do not take the illegitimacy of states to entail a strong moral imperative to oppose or eliminate states." They say only that the state's claim to authority has not been proven.

The feminist critique: Pateman's Sexual Contract

In The Sexual Contract (1988), the political theorist Carole Pateman argued that the famous story is half a story. Alongside the social contract among free and equal men, she argued, sits a hidden sexual contract among men establishing their authority over women. The famous story tells of the first contract and stays silent about the second. Pateman called her approach a "conjectural history", a way of illuminating both the actual history of patriarchy and the ideology of contract.

A related feminist point concerns the line contract theory draws between public and private. If the family counts as private, outside the state's concern, then much of what happened to women and children there was kept away from political scrutiny.

The racial contract: Charles Mills

The philosopher Charles W. Mills applied a similar method in The Racial Contract (1997). He argued that the modern world was shaped by an actual, historical and often implicit agreement among white people to treat non-white people as less than full persons, an agreement visible in conquest, slavery and colonial rule. As the Stanford Encyclopedia summarises it, the contract had moral terms (valuing one group's lives more highly), political terms (denying the other group power) and epistemological terms (the dominant group seeing itself as intellectually superior).

Read with that question in mind, the classic texts take on a different look. Hobbes, needing an example of the state of nature, pointed to "the savage people in many places of America" who "have no government at all." Locke's "all the world was America" treated lands that were in fact inhabited as empty.

Pateman and Mills later wrote Contract and Domination (2007) together, and their disagreement is instructive. Pateman holds that the contract idea is itself bound up with domination; she extends her critique to what she calls the "settler contract," the taking of Indigenous lands. Mills thought contract theory could be saved, if it started from the world as it actually is, injustices included, and asked how rational people would agree to repair them.

How defenders respond

Contract theorists have answers. Many accept the historical charge in full: the classic authors excluded women, the colonised and the enslaved, and that was a betrayal of their own premise of natural equality. The fix, they argue, is to apply the premise consistently, and Rawls's veil of ignorance, which hides your sex and race from you, was designed to do exactly that. David Gauthier argued that his self-interest contractarianism actually condemns exploitative relationships, because they are not mutually advantageous. The critics reply that a theory which kept "forgetting" most of humanity for three centuries may have a deeper flaw than inconsistency. That debate continues.

Part 8 — What "consent of the governed" can and can't mean

The phrase is everywhere. It appears in the American Declaration of Independence, and Article 21 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that "the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government," expressed in periodic and genuine elections. After four centuries of argument, here is what the phrase can reasonably carry, and what it can't.

What it can't mean

• That each of us personally agreed. Hume's point stands. Almost nobody gives express consent, and the alternatives open to most people (emigrate, or else) make "tacit consent" a stretch.
• That whatever a majority wants is legitimate. Locke's natural rights, Rousseau's line between the general will and the will of all, and Rawls's basic liberties all limit what even an agreed government may do. Rights, Constitutions & the Rule of Law covers the institutional side of this.
• That a regime is legitimate because people put up with it. Hobbes's submission to a conqueror is the case almost everyone now rejects. Going along with power out of fear is not consent.

What it can mean

• A standard for judging governments. Kant's version survives. Ask whether free and equal citizens could reasonably accept a law, and you have a test that works whether or not anyone signed.
• Real, repeated chances to say no. Free elections, a free press, the right to organise, protest and stand for office let the governed withdraw support in practice. Spooner's scepticism about voting is a reminder that a ballot proves participation rather than agreement. Still, a system in which a government can actually be removed by its citizens differs sharply from one in which it cannot.
• Inclusion. Pateman's and Mills's critiques turned "consent of the governed" from a description into a demand. Part of the history of democracy is the history of groups claiming the standing the contract promised and had withheld.
• A burden of proof. The anarchists pressed a real point even for people who reject their conclusion. Coercion needs justifying, and the state should not be exempt.

Perhaps the honest summary is this: consent rarely explains why a particular state exists, but it remains our best test of whether it deserves to.

Different readers will finish with different conclusions, and serious philosophers hold each of them. Some will find Hume's answer enough, since order and its benefits justify obedience. Some will side with Rawls, for whom what fair-minded people could accept is what matters. Some will agree with the philosophical anarchists that there is no general duty to obey but many good reasons to do so. And some will hold, with Pateman and Mills, that the contract story has mostly served to dignify domination. The next deep dives look at the traditions that grew from these starting points and at the experiments democracies are running to make consent more than a word.

The takeaway

The social contract tries to explain why anyone should obey a state. Hobbes said rational people would accept almost any sovereign to escape a war of all against all. Locke said government holds power on trust, by consent, to protect life, liberty and property, and can be overthrown when it betrays that trust. Rousseau said legitimate law expresses a general will aimed at the common good, not a sum of private interests. Hume replied that almost no one ever consented and that we obey because society needs order. Rawls turned the contract into a test of fairness: what would people agree to behind a veil of ignorance? Anarchists argue no state passes the consent test. Pateman and Mills argue that the contract excluded women and non-white peoples from the start. "Consent of the governed" can't describe how real states began, but it can still serve as a demanding standard for judging them.

Try this: write down one law you obey that you would never choose for yourself. Then try each justification in turn: Did I consent? Do I benefit, so fair play applies? Is it what fair-minded people could reasonably accept? Is it simply that society needs order? Notice which answer actually persuades you. That tells you which political philosopher you already are.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Plato, Crito (Socrates and the Laws; "implied contract") and Republic Book II (Glaucon's compact), Jowett translations, Project Gutenberg.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Political Obligation" (Crito's four arguments; Hobbes and conquest; Locke's two-stage contract; Hume; Kant's "Idea" of the contract; consent, fair play, natural duty and membership theories; Hart 1955, Rawls 1964, Nozick 1974, Simmons 1979, Beran, Steinberger, Estlund), "Contractarianism" (contractarian vs contractualist strains; Hume's objection; Dworkin; Pateman 1988 and Mills 1997; Gauthier), "Contractualism" (Scanlon 1998), "Rawls" and "Original Position" (veil of ignorance, two principles, Harsanyi, the liberal principle of legitimacy), "Anarchism" (Godwin, Proudhon, Wolff), "Locke's Political Philosophy" (Tully, Arneil, Armitage, Goldie), "Rousseau", "Hobbes's Moral and Political Philosophy", "Mencius", "Feminist Political Philosophy".
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chs. 13, 17 and 21, Project Gutenberg (original spelling).
- John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690 text), §§4, 6, 27, 49, 95, 119, 123, 225, 240, Project Gutenberg.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), G. D. H. Cole translation, Book I chs. 1, 6, 7; Book II ch. 3; Book III ch. 15, Project Gutenberg.
- David Hume, "Of the Original Contract" (1748), Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, Liberty Fund edition (Econlib).
- Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority (1870), Project Gutenberg.
- Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Polity, 1988); Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997); Pateman & Mills, Contract and Domination (Polity, 2007).
- US Declaration of Independence (1776); Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Art. 21(3).

Go deeper
- 🌐 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Political Obligation (the best single map of every argument in this piece, free and regularly revised)
- 📘 Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (read chapter 13 first: ten pages that set the terms for everything after)
- 📘 Second Treatise of Government, John Locke (short, readable; chapters 2, 5, 8 and 19 cover the state of nature, property, consent and revolution)
- 📘 The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Book I is under 30 pages and contains nearly all the famous lines)
- 🌐 David Hume, "Of the Original Contract" (the essay-length demolition, still the objection every contract theorist must answer)
- 📘 The Racial Contract, Charles W. Mills (short and deliberately provocative; the clearest way into the critique from outside the contract)
- 📘 The Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman (denser, and the foundational feminist reading of the tradition)
- 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: How Government Actually Works and Rights, Constitutions & the Rule of Law