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Although similar ideas can be traced to the Greek Sophists, social-contract theories had their greatest currency in the 17th and 18th centuries and are associated with the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
John Locke’s political theory directly influenced the U.S. Declaration of Independence in its assertion of natural individual rights and its grounding of political authority in the consent of the governed.
After Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are the best known proponents of this enormously influential theory, which has been one of the most dominant theories within moral and political theory throughout the history of the modern West.
His arguments concerning liberty and the social contract later influenced the written works of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers of the United States. Locke’s political theory was founded on social contract theory.
John Locke's conception of the social contract differed from Hobbes' in several fundamental ways, retaining only the central notion that persons in a state of nature would willingly come together to form a state. Locke believed that individuals in a state of nature would be bound morally, by the Law of Nature, in which man has the "power... to ...
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers, and commonly known as the “Father of Liberalism.”. His writings were immensely influential for the development of social contract theory. Two Treatises of Government, Locke’s most important work on political ...
Political philosophy - Locke, Natural Rights, Social Contract: It was John Locke, politically the most influential English philosopher, who further developed this doctrine. His Two Treatises of Government (1690) were written to justify the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, and his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) was written with a plain and ...
The concept of the right of revolution was also taken up by John Locke in Two Treatises of Government as part of his social contract theory. Locke declared that under natural law, all people have the right to life, liberty, and estate; under the social contract, the people could instigate a revolution against the government when it acted ...
John Locke's theory of natural rights is that people had certain rights like liberty, property, and happiness before societies and state governments were formed. Therefore, governments must protect these rights since that is why they were created in the first place.
Locke's Social Contract. The English philosopher John Locke published Two Treatises on Government in 1689. Locke here presented the idea that in the state of nature, humans were capable of working together by following the universal law that "no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions" (quoted in Popkin, 77).