The Social Contract

The social contract is the idea that political authority rests on an agreement among individuals who consent to be governed. Conservatives accept that government draws its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, but they reject the abstract, ahistorical version of the contract advanced by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, in which isolated individuals reason their way out of a “state of nature.” In the conservative account associated with Edmund Burke and David Hume, society is not a bargain struck by the living for their convenience but an inherited partnership binding the dead, the living, and the unborn.

Where Enlightenment contractarians treat the contract as a hypothetical that can be revised or dissolved whenever it no longer serves present interests, conservatives insist that real political obligation grows from habit, allegiance, and the accumulated settlement of generations. The contract metaphor, taken literally, invites every age to remake its constitution from scratch. Conservatives answer that no generation owns the political order outright; each holds it in trust.

Key Takeaways

• Classical contract theory (Hobbes 1651, Locke 1689, Rousseau 1762) grounds the state in the consent of individuals exiting a hypothetical state of nature.
• Conservatives accept consent as a source of legitimacy but reject the abstract, ahistorical model of the lone rational contractor.
• Hume argued in 1748 that no actual founding contract is found in history and that “tacit consent” cannot be inferred from mere residence.
• Burke reconceived the contract as an intergenerational partnership rather than a dissolvable commercial agreement.
• The dispute is not over whether government needs legitimacy but over whether legitimacy is manufactured by reason or inherited through allegiance.

History And Context

The modern social contract begins with Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan (1651) argued that life without a sovereign is a “war of all against all,” and that self-interested individuals therefore covenant to surrender their natural liberty to an absolute authority that secures peace.¹ John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) softened the bargain: men leave the state of nature to protect life, liberty, and property, and they retain the right to dissolve a government that betrays this trust. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) pushed the logic furthest, locating sovereignty in the “general will” of the people and treating existing institutions as illegitimate unless they expressed that will.

The conservative response crystallized in two stages. David Hume’s essay “Of the Original Contract” (1748) delivered the philosophical critique: governments arise from conquest, settlement, and long usage, not from any recorded agreement, and the claim that subjects “tacitly consent” by remaining in their country mistakes necessity for choice.² Four decades later, Edmund Burke supplied the constructive alternative in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), written against the revolutionaries who invoked contractarian abstractions to demolish France’s inherited institutions.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives do not deny that legitimate government rests on consent; they deny that consent is best modeled as a contract among atomized individuals. Hume’s objection is empirical and moral at once. He observed that almost no state can point to a founding compact, and that the emigrant analogy fails: a peasant who cannot speak a foreign tongue and lives on daily wages has no real freedom to leave, so his staying signals nothing like agreement.² Allegiance, for Hume, rests on utility and habit rather than on a promise nobody remembers making.

Burke transformed this critique into a positive doctrine. He refused to treat the state as a contract that could be torn up when one party found it inconvenient. The state, he argued, is not a partnership in trade to be dissolved at the pleasure of the parties; it is a partnership in all science, all art, every virtue and perfection, and because such ends cannot be attained in many generations, it becomes a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.³ On this view the present generation are trustees, not proprietors. They inherit a constitution refined by experience and owe it to their descendants to hand it on improved, not demolished. Roger Scruton, restating the argument in the twentieth century, held that the bonds of society are pre-contractual: we are born into obligations of family, place, and nation that we never chose and could not have chosen, and these obligations make contract itself possible.⁴ The lesson conservatives draw is practical. Reform should proceed by amendment within an inherited order, as in the English settlement of 1688, not by the wholesale reconstruction the French attempted after 1789.

Differing Positions

The contractarian tradition answers that the conservative reverence for inheritance risks sanctifying injustice. If obligation flows merely from what we are born into, then the subject of a tyranny owes obedience simply because his ancestors submitted, and the slave owes deference to the master whose property he was made. Locke’s point was precisely that no inheritance can bind a person without his consent, and that a government violating life, liberty, and property forfeits its claim to obedience. Rousseau pressed further: legitimate authority can only come from the people’s own will, so any order resting on mere custom is suspect until it can be justified to those it governs. The modern heir to this tradition, John Rawls, recast the contract as a thought experiment in A Theory of Justice (1971), asking what principles free and equal persons would choose behind a “veil of ignorance” that hides their station. Defenders of this approach argue that the test is essential for criticizing existing arrangements: without a standard above inherited practice, the conservative has no way to condemn a settled injustice except by appealing, inconsistently, to principles his own theory disowns.

Conservatives reply that the abstraction proves too much. A standard that can in principle indict any institution, measured against an imagined original choice no one ever made, supplies a license for permanent revolution rather than a guide to just government. The burden of proof, they argue, belongs on those who would uproot a working order, not on the order itself.

References

1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Penguin Classics, 1985), p. 186.
2. David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (Liberty Fund, 1987), p. 475.
3. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Penguin Classics, 1986), p. 194.
4. Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (St. Augustine’s Press, 2002), p. 32.