Social Contract Theory [Presentation Thursdays]

One of joys of teaching Political Thought was exposing students to the ideas of Hobbes, Locke and Rosseau. Much of our understanding of modern government owes to the philosophies of these three luminaries, whose ideas are often collectively referred to as Social Contract theories.

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Although it was Jean Jacques Rosseau who wrote explicitly about The Social Contract, it's always more interesting to begin discussions about Social Contract theories with Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, of course, famously opined that "Man is a wolf to his fellow man" and that life in the state of nature "is a state of war", "the war of all against all". For this reason, Hobbes argued that the state should be endowed with the greatest political power in order to curb man's violent tendencies, going so far as to call the state "Leviathan".

(Of course, when I taught this course I couldn't help but point out, as an aside, that Hobbes the stuffed tiger in Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes is named after Thomas Hobbes. And as a fan of the comic strip, it never failed to disappoint me to see how few people knew what I was talking about.)

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Hobbes' ideas contrasted with those of John Locke, who had a decidedly more optimistic view of human nature. As such, Locke submitted that the purpose of the state was to secure people's property, suggesting that only in the context of private property could civil society thrive. This germ of an idea has perhaps singlehandedly shaped property rights in modern society.

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Finally, there was Jean-Jacques Rosseau, who seemed to represent an intellectual middle ground between the two. It always fascinated me that Rosseau very clearly made the distinction between society as a collection of individuals and society/government as a corporate entity that must subordinate itself to the notion of the "General Will". Indeed, it's one of the more compelling expositions of how individual interests are sometimes different from that of a state's. Looking back at the slide deck, it amuses me how bad my mathematical notation was as I tried to express Rosseau's description of the General Will as "the sum of the differences of interests in society" as formula. There's no denying I failed utterly (mea culpa!) but it nonetheless got the message across to my students (or so I would like to think).

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If memory serves, it would take three weeks or up to five to six class sessions to go through this material. I even put together the above "by-way-of-summary" slide deck just for good measure.

But it didn't seem right to break up the slides across several posts, so I figured I'd just upload them here all at once.

I wonder if my students would have preferred it this way.

[For more about Presentation Thursdays, read the first in the series].