Social contracts can be explicit, like laws, or implicit, like . B raise your hand in class to speak. The U.S. Constitution is often cited as an explicit example of part of the American social contract. It determines what the government can and cannot do. People who choose to live in America accept to be governed by the moral and political obligations set forth in the social contract of the Constitution. The nature of government is less important to Locke (with the exception of absolute despotism): monarchy, aristocracy, and republic are all acceptable forms of government, as long as that government grants and protects people the fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property. Locke added that when a government no longer protects the right of every individual, revolution is not just a right, but an obligation. A social contract is an informal agreement shared by all in a society where they give up a certain freedom for security.

In 1649, a civil war broke out over who would rule England – Parliament or King Charles I. The war ended with the beheading of the king. Shortly after Charles` execution, an English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), wrote Leviathan, a defense of the absolute power of kings. The book`s title referred to a Leviathan, a mythological whale-like sea monster that devoured entire ships. Hobbes compared Leviathan to government, a powerful state created to create order. Legal scholar Randy Barnett has argued[22] that while a corporation`s presence in the territory may be required to obtain consent, this does not constitute consent to all the rules that the corporation might enact, regardless of its content. A second condition for consent is that the rules respect the underlying principles of justice and the protection of natural and social rights and that they put in place procedures to effectively protect those rights (or freedoms). This was also discussed by O.A. Brownson,[23] who argued that, in a sense, three « constitutions » are involved: first, the Constitution of Nature, which includes everything the founders called the « natural law »; second, the constitution of the company, a set of unwritten rules generally comprehensible to society, formed by a social contract before it established a government, thus establishing the third, a government constitution.

To agree, a necessary condition is that the rules to this effect be constitutional. Because of his rather strict view of humanity, Hobbes nevertheless succeeds in creating an argument that makes civil society possible with all its advantages. In the context of political events in his England, he also managed to argue for the maintenance of the traditional form of authority that his society had long enjoyed, while placing it on what he saw as a much more acceptable basis. In his 1986 book Morals by Agreement, David Gauthier set out to renew Hobbes` moral and political philosophy. In this book, he firmly argues that Hobbes was right: we can understand both politics and morality as being based on an agreement between exclusively selfish but rational people. However, it improves Hobbes` argument by showing that we can establish morality without the sovereign`s external enforcement mechanism. Hobbes argued that people`s passions are so strong that cooperation between them is always in danger of collapsing, and that a sovereign is therefore needed to enforce the law. However, Gauthier believes that rationality alone convinces people not only to accept cooperation, but also to abide by their agreements. Virginia Held argued that « contemporary Western society is plagued by contractual thinking » (193). Contract models shape a variety of relationships and interactions between people, from students and their teachers to authors and their readers.

Given this, it would be difficult to overestimate the effect that social contract theory has had both in philosophy and on culture at large. The theory of social contracts will undoubtedly accompany us in the foreseeable future. But also the critique of such a theory, which will continue to force us to think and rethink the nature of ourselves and our relationships with each other. Over time, however, humanity has faced some changes. As the population grew, the ways in which people could meet their needs had to change. People slowly began to live together in small families, and then in small communities. Divisions of labor were introduced, both within and between families, and discoveries and inventions made life easier and led to leisure. Such free time inevitably led people to make comparisons between themselves and others, leading to public values that led to shame and envy, pride and contempt. The most important, however, according to Rousseau, was the invention of private property, which represented the decisive moment in the development of humanity from a simple and pure state to a state marked by greed, competition, vanity, inequality and vice. .