Starting from a mechanistic understanding of man and passions, Hobbes postulates what life without government would be, a state he calls the state of nature. In this state, every person would have a right or license for everything in the world. This, according to Hobbes, would lead to a “war of all against all.” In such a state, people fear death and lack both the necessities for a comfortable life and the hope of struggling to support them. To avoid this, people adhere to a social contract and create a civil society. According to Hobbes, society is a population under sovereign authority to which all individuals in that society cede certain rights of protection. Any power exercised by this authority cannot be contradicted because the sovereign power of the protector results from the surrender by individuals of their own sovereign power of protection. Individuals are therefore the authors of all the decisions of the sovereign. There is no doctrine of separation of powers in Hobbes` discussion. According to Hobbes, the sovereign must control the civil, military, judicial and ecclesiastical powers.
The theory of an implicit social contract states that by remaining in territory controlled by a society that normally has a government, people give their consent to join that society and be governed by its government, if any. It is this consent that gives legitimacy to such a government. Virginia Held argued that “contemporary Western society is in the grip of contractual thinking” (193). Contract models have shaped a variety of relationships and interactions between people, from students and their teachers to writers and their readers. Given this, it would be difficult to overestimate the impact of social contract theory, both within philosophy and on culture in general. Social contract theory is undoubtedly with us for the foreseeable future. But also the criticism of such a theory, which will continue to force us to rethink and rethink the nature of ourselves and our relationships with each other. However, these arguments were based on a corporatist theory of Roman law, according to which “a populus” can exist as a separate legal person. Therefore, these arguments held that a group of people can join a government because they have the ability to exercise a single will and make decisions with one voice when there is no sovereign authority – an idea rejected by the Hobbes and later treaty theorists. Hobbes` political theory is best understood when viewed in two parts: his theory of human motivation, psychological egoism, and his theory of the social contract, which is based on the hypothetical state of nature. Hobbes mainly has a certain theory of human nature that leads to a certain view of morality and politics, as developed in his philosophical masterpiece Leviathan, published in 1651. The scientific revolution, with its important new discoveries that the universe can be both described and predicted in accordance with the universal laws of nature, greatly influenced Hobbes.
He tried to provide a theory of human nature that would correspond to the discoveries made in the sciences of the inanimate universe. His psychological theory is therefore based on mechanism, the general view that everything in the universe is created only by moving matter. According to Hobbes, this also extends to human behavior. Macro human behavior can be rightly described as the effect of certain types of microbehavior, although some of the latter behavior is invisible to us. Behaviors such as walking, talking, and the like are themselves caused by other actions in us. And these other actions are themselves caused by the interaction of our body with other bodies, human or otherwise, that create certain chains of cause and effect in us and end up producing human behavior that we can clearly observe. We, including all our actions and decisions, are then, according to this point of view, explainable in terms of the universal laws of nature as well as the movements of the celestial bodies. The progressive decomposition of memory can be explained, for example, by inertia. As more and more sensory information is presented to us, the residue of previous impressions “slows down” over time. From Hobbes` point of view, we are essentially very complicated organic machines that respond to the stimuli of the world mechanically and in accordance with the universal laws of human nature.
Thus, from Mills` perspective, racism is not just an unfortunate coincidence of Western democratic and political ideals. It is not that we have a perfectly designed and, unfortunately, poorly implemented political system. One of the reasons we continue to think that the problem of race in the West is relatively superficial, that it does not go all the way, is the influence that the idealized social contract has on our imagination. We continue to believe, according to Mills, in the myths that social contract theory tells us – that all are equal, that all are treated equally before the law, that the Founding Fathers championed equality and freedom for all, etc. Thus, one of the real goals of social contract theory is to hide the real political reality from view – some people are granted the rights and freedoms of full persons, and others are treated as sub-persons. The racial contract shapes the structure of our political systems and lays the foundation for the ongoing racial oppression of non-whites. So we can`t respond by simply including more non-whites in the mix of our political institutions, representation, etc. Instead, we need to review our policies in general from the point of view of the race contract and start where we are, knowing full well how our society has been affected by the systematic exclusion of certain individuals from the realm of politics and treaty. This “naturalized” feature of the race contract, that is, it tells a story about who we really are and what`s in our history, is better, according to Mills, because it promises to allow us to one day live up to the norms and values that are at the heart of Western political traditions. Legal scholar Randy Barnett has argued[21] that while presence in the territory of a corporation may be required to obtain consent, this does not constitute consent to all the rules that the corporation may enact, regardless of their content.
A second condition of consent is that the rules are compatible with the underlying principles of justice and protection of natural and social rights and provide procedures for the effective protection of these rights (or freedoms). This was also supported by O. A. Brownson argues,[22] who has argued that, in a sense, there are three “constitutions”: first, the constitution of nature, which encompasses all that the founders called “natural law”; Second, the constitution of society, an unwritten and generally understandable set of rules for society formed by a social contract before it establishes a government by which it establishes the third, a constitution of government. The prerequisite for approval is that the rules be constitutional in this sense. Following Pateman`s argument, a number of feminists have also questioned the nature of the person at the heart of contract theory. The liberal individual, the entrepreneur, is represented by the Hobbesian man, the owner of Locke, the “Noble Savage” of Rousseau, the person of Rawls in the original position, and the Robinson Crusoe of Gauthier. The liberal individual is supposed to be universal: raceless, genderless, classless, disembodied, and is seen as an abstract, generalized model of humanity that is capitalized. However, many philosophers have argued that if we take a closer look at the characteristics of the liberal individual, we do not find a representation of universal humanity, but a historically localized and specific type of person. C.B. Macpherson, for example, argued that Hobbesian man is in particular a bourgeois man, with the qualities we would expect from a person during the nascent capitalism that characterized modern Europe. Feminists have also argued that the liberal individual is a special, historical, embodied person.
(As well as race-conscious philosophers like Charles Mills, discussed below.) Specifically, they argued that the person at the heart of liberal theory and the social contract is gendered. Christine Di Stefano, in her 1991 book Configurations of Masculinity, shows that a number of historically important modern philosophers can be understood to develop their theories from the perspective of masculinity as conceived in modernity. She argues that Hobbes` concept of the liberal individual, which laid the foundation for the dominant modern conception of the person, is particularly masculine, because it is conceived as atomistic and solitary and owes none of its qualities or even its mere existence to another person, especially its mother. Hobbes` man is therefore radically individual, in a way that is specifically due to the character of modern masculinity. Virginia Held argues in her 1993 book Feminist Morality that social contract theory is implicitly based on a conception of the person who can be described as an “economic man.” The “economic man” is mainly concerned with maximizing his own interests considered individually, and he concludes contracts to achieve this objective. However, the “economic man” does not represent all people at all times and in all places. In particular, children and those who provide them with the care they need, who have always been women, are not adequately represented.