Social Contract Theorists
There was a time when mankind lived in a “state of nature” without any ruling body governing them. There were no laws implemented thus the citizens either enjoyed unlimited freedom or lived in fear. As a result, these men entered into an agreement, a ‘social contract’, to form a political society for order to take place. There are five prominent philosophers who tackled about this social contract: Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume. Grotius anchored his principles on the idea that every individual had natural rights which enabled self-preservation and acted as a basis for moral consensus. But, there’s a delineation of those rights because everyone was entitled to try to preserve himself. He stated that with a natural law accepted by all, even if we were to concede what we cannot concede without the utmost wickedness, these laws would still hold. This proposed that power could go back to the individuals if the political society they build f...