Social Contract Theory in Hobbes and Locke

Hello and welcome to the sixth episode of Theory of the Week. A weekly show from A Student’s Note where we explore a theory-esque concept each week.

For Christmas we took a little break, and hope you were able to do the same. In any case, we hope you had a fantastic Christmas.

This time I would like to explore social contract theory, but there are a lot of theorists who used this heuristic of natural state and society. To account for the different approaches, I chose to contrast the theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, two classical contractualists.

In my opinion, this comparison gives a good understanding of how different classical theorists came to surprisingly different results.

But I have already talked a lot without explaining what a social contract theory is. So let’s start from the beginning.

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