ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most perplexing problem raised by the doctrine of the social contract that emerged and flourished in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is that it produced political prescriptions that were profoundly at variance with one another. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the three classical expositors of the doctrine, developed concepts of the state that were scarcely compatible. The first endorsed the absolute state, the second the provisional state, and the third the moral state, or the state-as-church. Are we to conclude that the notion of the social contract is like an empty bottle, capable of being filled with any content? Does it have any meaning in itself, underlying the different concepts of the state that it served to justify? Should we remain neutral between the different usages, or should we take sides in favour of the ‘real’ or ‘true’ doctrine of the social contract against its distorted or false forms? In the discussion that follows I shall focus on Hobbes’s doctrine of the contract, but endeavour, in doing so, to answer these broader questions.
