ABSTRACT
Whilst social contract theory never really fell into abeyance it is certainly true that it has enjoyed a renaissance of interest following the publication of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971. Since then, not only has it become a recurrent feature of contemporary political philosophy, but also there has been a renewed interest in the historical origins of social contract theory and the classic contractarians, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant. With this interest has come attempts to trace the social contract ‘tradition’ further back beyond Hobbes to the ancient Greeks, and to construct ‘models’ or definitions of the social contract which can incorporate all putative contractarian thinkers.1
