here, start by reading this and let the authorities appeal

Posted on: December 10, 2024 at 14:01:10 CT

https://cdn.mises.org/1_3_3_0.pdf

Social contract doctrine is no longer taken
seriously as an accurate historical account of the
origins of the state. But social contract
doctrine still survives as an account of political
obligation. For example, John Rawls' widelyacclaimed Theory of Justice is very much part
of the contractarian tradition.
Yet careful consideration of the social
contract theories of Socrates, Hobbes, Locke,
Rousseau, and Rand shows that they do not
survive close scrutiny. Socrates ultimately relies
on an analogy between citizens and children in a
SOCIAL CONTRACT A CRITIQUE 193
patriarchal family. In doing so, he is relying on a
concept of status-governed duty that is difficult
to rationally justify as a basis for political
obligation. Hobbes makes consent quite like
succumbing to force and relies heavily on cryptic
signs of tacit consent. Socrates, Locke, and
Rousseau rely somewhat more defitely on tacit
consent inferred from benefits received or from
residency. But this too is an overbroad
extension of consent that makes it meaningless
as a criterion of legitimacy.
Most importantly, all the social contract
theories appear to entail in practice a contract
of at least partial self-enslavement to
Socrates' Athenian regime, to Hobbes' sovereign,
to Locke's majority, to Rousseau's popular lawmaking assembly and administrative government, or to Rand's lawenforcement monopoly.
In the end, therefore, social contract theory is
incompatible with natural-rights liberal theory
since this latter theory derives rights from the
factual premise of the inalienability of the will
and hence rules out from the start legitimate
self-enslavement. Instead, we can recognize
that the duty of obedience to the rule of just law
can be explained, without any recourse to a
social contract, in terms of the duty of nonaggression which is the necessary correlative of
human

Edited by 90Tiger at 14:03:03 on 12/10/24