Social Contract Theory Quotes

To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.

Immanuel Kant famously claimed that 'he who wills the ends wills the means,' but he never spent much time in Washington.

With men, the state of nature is not a state of peace, but war.

America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.

At the root of the Noble Savage myth is this basic truth: the savage is good, but he's also violent. This is why Rousseau propounded the need for contracts between the savage and society. The savage also shows that in order to understand the need for civilization and culture, mankind needs to see barbarism. One could not exist without the other.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

[Rousseau] has not had the precaution to throw any veil over his sentiments; and as he scorns to dissemble his contempt of established opinions, he could not wonder that all the zealots were in arms against him.

America's revolutionary deists saw themselves as - and they were - participants in an international movement that drew on most of the same literary sources across the civilized world.

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is a practical document for the use of practical men. It is not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; it is not a theory of government but a program of action.

Violence becomes imperative when an attempt is made to assert rights without any reference to duties.

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.

Also, an area that interests me - and it will probably take years to state what I mean - is the period of the rise of democracy, with Tom Paine, which is around the turn of the 18th century into the 19th.

Even if we are all doomed to live under the state, it doesn't follow that there is, or even can be, such a thing as a good state.

The liberals of the eighteenth century, guided by the ideas of natural law and of the Enlightenment, demanded for everyone equality of political and civil rights... Nothing, however, is as ill-founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.

The myth that the founding of American Republic was based on the philosophy of John Locke could only have been maintained, because the history of Leibniz's influence was suppressed.

I think Tom Paine is one of the greatest men that's ever lived. He lived in the 18th century; as you all know, he was an Englishman who was involved in the writing of American Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, the French Constitution, wrote the great book called 'The Rights of Man' - commercial over.

I'm still a communist in the sense that I don't believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer - I think that the pressures will get so tremendous that the social contract will just come apart.

Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure - but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature.

The American Revolution was, in fact, a battle against the philosophy of Locke and the English utilitarians.

The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke's philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson, for example.

If we Americans are too concerned about freedom and liberty, it is because we have read too much of John Locke and Adam Smith.

Peoples did not in the first instance originate from rulers, but whatever peoples desired to be ruled by a single monarch or by chief men elected by them were anterior to their rulers. Hence it follows that peoples were not created for the sake of rulers, but on the contrary the rulers for the sake of the people.

The masses are the material of democracy, but its form-that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility-can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.

I am not going to claim that modern anarchism has any direct relation to Roman jurisprudence; but I do claim that it has its basis in the laws of nature rather than in the state of nature.

It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.