العقد الاجتماعي social contract، هومبحث أساسي في الفلسفة الاجتماعية والفلسفة السياسية والفلسفة الأخلاقية. وهونظرية تفسر نشأة الاجتماع السياسي وبقاءه واستمراره، متخذة من العقد أوالميثاق أوالاتفاق الاجتماعي الذي يقره الناس طواعية فيما بينهم، أساساً للحقوق والواجبات التي تنظم شؤون الحياة المشهجرة، وقاعدة للتوفيق بين الإرادة العامة للجماعة والإرادات الفردية أوالجزئية المنضوية تحتها، ووسيلة لإزالة التناقض بين ميول الانسان الفردية وواجباته الاجتماعية، وأداة تحول دون تصعيد التنافس على المصالح والمراتب إلى الحد الذي يجعل منه صراعاً تناحرياً يهدد الناس في حياتهم وحقوقهم وحرياتهم. Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order. The relation between natural and legal rights is often a topic of social contract theory. The term takes its name from The Social Contract (French: Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique), a 1762 book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that discussed this concept. Although the antecedents of social contract theory are found in antiquity, in Greek and Stoic philosophy and Roman and Canon Law, the heyday of the social contract was the mid-17th to early 19th centuries, when it emerged as the leading doctrine of political legitimacy.

The starting point for most social contract theories is an examination of the human condition absent of any political order (termed the "state of nature" by Thomas Hobbes). In this condition, individuals' actions are bound only by their personal power and conscience. From this shared starting point, social contract theorists seek to demonstrate why a rational individual would voluntarily consent to give up their natural freedom to obtain the benefits of political order. Prominent of 17th- and 18th-century theorists of social contract and natural rights include Hugo Grotius (1625), Thomas Hobbes (1651), Samuel von Pufendorf (1673), John Locke (1689), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) and Immanuel Kant (1797), each approaching the concept of political authority differently. Grotius posited that individual humans had natural rights. Thomas Hobbes famously said that in a "state of nature", human life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". In the absence of political order and law, everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the "right to all things" and thus the freedom to plunder, rape and murder; there would be an endless "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes). To avoid this, free men contract with each other to establish political community (civil society) through a social contract in which they all gain security in return for subjecting themselves to an absolute sovereign, one man or an assembly of men. Though the sovereign's edicts may well be arbitrary and tyrannical, Hobbes saw absolute government as the only alternative to the terrifying anarchy of a state of nature. Hobbes asserted that humans consent to abdicate their rights in favor of the absolute authority of government (whether monarchical or parliamentary). Pufendorf disputed Hobbes's equation of a state of nature with war. Alternatively, Locke and Rousseau argued that we gain civil rights in return for accepting the obligation to respect and defend the rights of others, giving up some freedoms to do so.

The central assertion that social contract theory approaches is that law and political order are not natural, but human creations. The social contract and the political order it creates are simply the means towards an end—the benefit of the individuals involved—and legitimate only to the extent that they fulfill their part of the agreement. Hobbes argued that government is not a party to the original contract and citizens are not obligated to submit to the government when it is too weak to act effectively to suppress factionalism and civil unrest. According to other social contract theorists, when the government fails to secure their natural rights (Locke) or satisfy the best interests of society (called the "general will" by Rousseau), citizens can withdraw their obligation to obey, or change the leadership through elections or other means including, when necessary, violence. Locke believed that natural rights were inalienable, and therefore the rule of God superseded government authority, while Rousseau believed that democracy (self-rule) was the best way to ensure welfare while maintaining individual freedom under the rule of law. The Lockean concept of the social contract was invoked in the United States Declaration of Independence. Social contract theories were eclipsed in the 19th century in favor of utilitarianism, Hegelianism and Marxism; they were revived in the 20th century, notably in the form of a thought experiment by John Rawls.

وقد تبنّت كثير من حركات الإصلاح الاجتماعي والسياسي، وخاصة في العصور الحديثة والمعاصرة، نظرية العقد الاجتماعي بوصفها عقيدة مناهضة لأنواع الحكم المطلق أوالاستبدادي.

التاريخ

The concept of the social contract was originally posed by Glaucon, as described by Plato in The Republic, Book II.

They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but that the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice;—it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did. Such is the received account, Socrates, of the nature and origin of justice.

The social contract theory also appears in Crito, another dialogue from Plato. Over time, the social contract theory became more widespread after Epicurus (341-270 BC), the first philosopher who saw justice as a social contract, and not as existing in Nature due to divine intervention (see below and also Epicurean ethics), decided to bring the theory to the forefront of his society. As time went on, philosophers of traditional political and social thought, such as Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau put forward their opinions on social contract, which then caused the topic to become much more mainstream.^[]

الفكر الكلاسيكي

عهدت فكرة العقد الاجتماعي عند بعض مفكري حضارات اليونان والرومان والعصر الوسيط، وقد وصلت أوج ازدهارها في القرن السابع عشر لدى مفكري عصر النهضة والتنوير في أوربا، وخاصة لدى الإنگليزيين: توماس هوبز وجون لوك والفرنسي جان جاك روسو، ثم تراجعت أهميتها ابتداءًً من القرن الثامن عشر، إثر نقد الفيلسوف الإنگليزي دڤيد هيوم لها. وقد شهدت فكرة العقد الاجتماعي تطوراً مستمراً، وأخذت إحدى صياغاتها الأولى صورة تقييد الحاكم بالقانون الإلهي، جاعلة طاعة الشعب للحاكم مشروطة بطاعته لله، ثم حلت مكانها فكرة تقييد الحاكم بالقانون الوضعي الذي تمليه الإرادة العامة (الدستور والقوانين). وتختلف أطراف العقد من نظرية إلى أخرى، فقد تكون أطرافه الله والشعب، أوالشعب والحاكم، أوالفرد مع أي فرد في المجتمع.

تطورات عصر النهضة

Quentin Skinner has argued that several critical modern innovations in contract theory are found in the writings from French Calvinists and Huguenots, whose work in turn was invoked by writers in the Low Countries who objected to their subjection to Spain and, later still, by Catholics in England.Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), from the School of Salamanca, might be considered an early theorist of the social contract, theorizing natural law in an attempt to limit the divine right of absolute monarchy. All of these groups were led to articulate notions of popular sovereignty by means of a social covenant or contract, and all of these arguments began with proto-"state of nature" arguments, to the effect that the basis of politics is that everyone is by nature free of subjection to any government.

These arguments, however, relied on a corporatist theory found in Roman law, according to which "a populus" can exist as a distinct legal entity. Thus, these arguments held that a group of people can join a government because it has the capacity to exercise a single will and make decisions with a single voice in the absence of sovereign authority—a notion rejected by Hobbes and later contract theorists.

عصر التنوير

تمضى الصيغة الأكثر عمومية لنظرية العقد الاجتماعي، حسبما أقرها مفكروالتنوير، إلى القول: إذا الناس المتعاقدين يتراضون فيما بينهم، فرادى أومجتمعين، على ميثاق اجتماعي، صريح أوضمني، علني أوصامت، يتعهدون فيه بالتنازل عن حقوقهم (كلها أوبعضها) لصالح هيئة اجتماعية عامة، ذات إرادة كلية، تملك سيادة تامة على الجميع، يعبر عنها مجموعة الأعراف والقواعد والقوانين التي تضعها أوتسنها بنفسها، والتي توزع الحقوق والواجبات على أعضائها.

ويرى مفكروالتنوير هؤلاء، حتى العقد الاجتماعي هوثمرة التفكر العقلاني، والرغبة في السلام، والتعاون على لقاءة الأخطار في الحال الطبيعية، وأنه ينقل الإنسان من الحال الطبيعية إلى الحال الاصطناعية؛ أي حال المجتمع المدني ذي الكيان السياسي، الذي تحلّ فيه الحقوق الاجتماعية محل الحقوق الطبيعية، وتحل «الملكية بالحق» التي تحظى باعتراف المجتمع وحمايته القانونية، محل الملكية «بوضع اليد» القائمة على الأمر الواقع، التي هي موضع نزاع وصراع.

الفلاسفة

هوگوگروتيوس (1625)

في مطلع القرن السابع عشر، قدّم گروتيوس (1583–1645) الفكرة الحديثة حتى الأفراد لهم حقوق طبيعية تمكـّنهم من الحفاظ على النفس، ووظـَّف هذه الفكرة كأساس لإجماع أخلاقي في وجه التتوع الديني وبزوغ العلوم الطبيعية. وسعى لإيجاد أساس مقتصد لبداية أخلاقية للمجتمع، وهونوع من القانون الطبيعي يمكن للجميع قبوله. وقد مضى إلى حد القول في كتابه حول قانون الحرب والسلام أنه حتى لوكنا سنتنازل عما لا يمكننا التنازل عنه إلا تحت أقصى شر، أي حين لا يوجد إله، فإن تلك القوانين ستظل سارية.

اِعتُبِرت الفكرة مهيجة للجماهير لأنها تقترح حتى السلطة يمكن حتى تعود، في نهاية المطاف، إلى الأفراد إذا كان المجتمع السياسي الذي أنشأوه يصادر الغرض الذي أقيم من أجله في الأصل، وهوالحفاظ على النفس. وبعبارة أخرى، الأفراد هم ذووسيادة. ويقول گروتيوس حتى الناس هم sui juris (تحت الولاية القضائية لأنفسهم، أو"وَكُلَّ إِنسَانٍ أَلْزَمْنَاهُ طَائِرَهُ فِي عُنُقِهِ" (الإسراء، 13). للناس حقوق كبشر، ولكن هناك تحديد لهذه الحقوق بسبب ما يمكن للجميع قبوله أخلاقياً؛ على جميع إنسان حتى يتقبل حق جميع إنسان كفرد في محاولة الحفاظ على نفسه. لذا، يجب على جميع إنسان حتى يتجنب إلحاق الضرر بشخص آخر أوالتدخل في شئونه، ويجب معاقبة أي انتهاك لهذه الحقوق.

توماس هبز - لڤياثان (1651)

لكن ثمة فروق جوهرية بين أصحاب نظرية العقد الاجتماعي، ففي حين يرى توماس هوبز حتى العقد الاجتماعي يقضي بتنازل الأفراد عن حقوقهم المطلقة وحرياتهم وملكياتهم لصالح الحاكم ذي السيادة التامة والسلطة المطلقة الذي تجتمع فيه جميع السلطات (التشريعية والتطبيقية والقضائية)، والذي يحدد لرعاياه حقوقهم من خلال القوانين المعبرة عن إرادته السامية، يمضي جون لوك إلى القول: أنَّ العقد لايتضمن أي تنازل عن الحقوق الطبيعية، بل إنه مجرد اعتراف متبادل بها، اعتراف جميع فرد لكل فرد، بما يضمن حفظ الحياة وتحقيق المساواة وحماية الحريات والممتلكات للجميع. ويرى حتى الناس في العقد الاجتماعي يعهدون أمر حماية العقد ومقرراته إلى الدولة ذات السلطات التشريعية والتطبيقية والقضائية المنفصلة. أما الحاكم (أوالحكومة) صاحبة السلطة التطبيقية فهومستخدم ينتدبه الشعب لأداء المهمة، ويحاسبه عند التقصير أوالإساءة.

وفي محاولة لدراسة نشوء المجتمعات الإنسانية ، إنطلق هوبز من السؤال التالي: لماذا يجب علينا حتى نخضع للسلطة؟

وللإجابة على هذا السؤال ، قام هوبز بوضع نفسه في فترة (ما قبل المجتمع) الإفتراضية ومن ثمّ قارن بينها وبين الحالة ( المجتمعية)، ليستنتج بعدها الأسباب التي دعت لنشوء تلك المجتمعات والمكاسب التي تحققت منها وجد هوبز أنّ الإنسان في فترة ما قبل المجتمع (الحالة الأصلية State of Nature) يهجرز أهتمامه في "المصلحة الذاتية", ومع وجود مصادر محدودة وغياب سلطة تجبر الأفراد على التعاون ، أستنتج حتى الحياة في مثل هذه البيئة ستكون (صعبة التحمّل) وقاسية جدا, بحيث يخشى كلّ فرد على حياته من الآخر, ولا يستطيع أحدهم ضمان تلبية حاجاته ورغباته لمدّة زمنية طويلة,وعليه أستنتج حتى فترة (ماقبل المجتمع) الهمجية, تحوى أسوأ ظروف يمكن حتى يعيشها الإنسان, مما يطرح وبقوة ضرورة تكون التجمعات البشرية والقوانين التي تحكمها. رأى هوبز حتى الطريق للخروج من الحالة السابقة هوعن طريق الإتفاق على العيش تحت (قوانين مشهجرة) والأتفاق على إيجاد (آلية لفرض القوانين) عن طريق سلطة حاكمة ،ويرى هوبز بضرورة وجود "سلطة مطلقة وإن ظهرت لديها إنحرافات بسبب (غلبة العاطفة على المنطق) ولكنه تقبل ذلك ، معللا رأيه بأن (السّلطة هي الشيء الوحيد الذي يقف بيننا وبين العودة للهمجية).

جون لوك (1689)

أستخدم لوك نفس المنهجية السابقة لهوبز، إلاّ أنه أختلف معه في كون (الحالة الأصلية State of Nature) مع انعدام القوانين فيها فأنها تحتوى على أسس أخلاقية، وبالتالي فهي (ممكنة التحمّل) ولها أمثلة واقعية ، وليست "إفتراضية" كما هوالحال عند هوبز كما أختلف لوك مع هوبز في معارضته لمبدأ "السّلطة المطلقة"، ورأى حتى ّ الفرد له حقّ مقاومة السّلطة "الغاشمة", إنطلاقا من مبدأ الدفاع عن النفس.

إيمانويل كانت (1721)

وللفيلسوف الألماني كَنت وجهة نظر خاصة، حيث يرى حتى العقد الاجتماعي أداة لاغنى عنها لتوحيد الناس في الوقت الذي تكون فيه حرية الفرد منافسة لحرية أي فرد آخر، والعقد عنده هوميثاق ينظم بين الحاكم والمحكوم، يقران فيه الشروط التي يعتمدانها لبناء الحياة الصالحة في المجتمع المدني.

جان جاك روسو(1762)

وللفيلسوف الألماني كَنت وجهة نظر خاصة، حيث يرى حتى العقد الاجتماعي أداة لاغنى عنها لتوحيد الناس في الوقت الذي تكون فيه حرية الفرد منافسة لحرية أي فرد آخر، والعقد عنده هوميثاق ينظم بين الحاكم والمحكوم، يقران فيه الشروط التي يعتمدانها لبناء الحياة الصالحة في المجتمع المدني. وتتوافق رؤية جان جاك روسوفي العقد مع رؤية جون لوك الآنف ذكرها بملامحها العامة، إذ يشير إلى حتى التنازل عن الحقوق الطبيعية ليس حقيقياً بل وهمياً، وأنه مجرد تحويل للحق من الحال الطبيعية إلى الحال الاجتماعية، ثم يتحدث عن هيئة كلية، هي الشعب بكليته (وليس بجزء ممثل له) تمارس السيادة المطلقة من خلال القوانين والقواعد التي تعبر عن إرادته. وما الحكومة غير وكلاء يكلفهم الشعب تطبيق أوامره وقوانينه.

وينظر روسوإلى المساواة الاجتماعية القائمة على وحدة الشروط والمعايير والحقوق والواجبات بوصفها شرطاً لحماية الميثاق وضماناً لاحترام الجميع له. ويعوّل روسوعلى دور الجمعيات الأهلية في كبح طغيان الحكام، أوأعضاء الحكومة الذين يسعون إلى تغليب إرادتهم الجزئية ومصالحهم الشخصية على الإرادة العامة والمصلحة العامة.

پيير-جوزيف پرودون: العقد الاجتماعي الفردي (1851)

While Rousseau's social contract is based on popular sovereignty and not on individual sovereignty, there are other theories espoused by individualists, libertarians, and anarchists that do not involve agreeing to anything more than negative rights and creates only a limited state, if any.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) advocated a conception of social contract that did not involve an individual surrendering sovereignty to others. According to him, the social contract was not between individuals and the state, but rather among individuals who refrain from coercing or governing each other, each one maintaining complete sovereignty upon him- or herself:

What really is the Social Contract? An agreement of the citizen with the government? No, that would mean but the continuation of [Rousseau's] idea. The social contract is an agreement of man with man; an agreement from which must result what we call society. In this, the notion of commutative justice, first brought forward by the primitive fact of exchange, ... is substituted for that of distributive justice ... Translating these words, contract, commutative justice, which are the language of the law, into the language of business, and you have commerce, that is to say, in its highest significance, the act by which man and man declare themselves essentially producers, and abdicate all pretension to govern each other.

—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851)

جون رولز: نظرية العدالة (1971)

Building on the work of Immanuel Kant with its presumption of limits on the state,John Rawls (1921–2002), in A Theory of Justice (1971), proposed a contractarian approach whereby rational people in a hypothetical "original position" would set aside their individual preferences and capacities under a "veil of ignorance" and agree to certain general principles of justice and legal organization. This idea is also used as a game-theoretical formalization of the notion of fairness.

داڤيد گوتييه: أخلاق بالاتفاق (1986)

David Gauthier "neo-Hobbesian" theory argues that cooperation between two independent and self-interested parties is indeed possible, especially when it comes to understanding morality and politics. Gauthier notably points out the advantages of cooperation between two parties when it comes to the challenge of the prisoner's dilemma. He proposes that, if two parties were to stick to the original agreed-upon arrangement and morals outlined by the contract, they would both experience an optimal result. In his model for the social contract, factors including trust, rationality, and self-interest keep each party honest and dissuade them from breaking the rules.

فيليپ پتيت: الممضى الجمهوري (1997)

Philip Pettit (b. 1945) has argued, in Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), that the theory of social contract, classically based on the consent of the governed, should be modified. Instead of arguing for explicit consent, which can always be manufactured, Pettit argues that the absence of an effective rebellion against it is a contract's only legitimacy.

العصر الحديث

وتُرى اليوم نظرية العقد الاجتماعي في النظريات السياسية التي توصف بالليبرالية الدستورية أوالديمقراطية، كما تُرى في النظريات الأخلاقية التي تبني الأخلاق على المنفعة والتوجه العقلاني، ولاتخلوالنظريات الاجتماعية التي تؤكد مفهوم التضامن من أساس تعاقدي.

نظريات نقدية

موافقة المحكومين

An early critic of social contract theory was Rousseau's friend, the philosopher David Hume, who in 1742 published an essay "Of Civil Liberty". The second part of this essay, entitled "Of the Original Contract", stresses that the concept of a "social contract" is a convenient fiction:

As no party, in the present age can well support itself without a philosophical or speculative system of principles annexed to its political or practical one; we accordingly find that each of the factions into which this nation is divided has reared up a fabric of the former kind, in order to protect and cover that scheme of actions which it pursues. ... The one party [defenders of the absolute and divine right of kings, or Tories], by tracing up government to the DEITY, endeavor to render it so sacred and inviolate that it must be little less than sacrilege, however tyrannical it may become, to touch or invade it in the smallest article. The other party [the Whigs, or believers in constitutional monarchy], by founding government altogether on the consent of the PEOPLE suppose that there is a kind of original contract by which the subjects have tacitly reserved the power of resisting their sovereign, whenever they find themselves aggrieved by that authority with which they have for certain purposes voluntarily entrusted him.

—David Hume, "On Civil Liberty" [II.XII.1]

Hume argued that consent of the governed was the ideal foundation on which a government should rest, but that it had not actually occurred this way in general.

My intention here is not to exclude the consent of the people from being one just foundation of government where it has place. It is surely the best and most sacred of any. I only contend that it has very seldom had place in any degree and never almost in its full extent. And that therefore some other foundation of government must also be admitted.

—Ibid II.XII.20

القانون الطبيعي والدستورية

Legal scholar Randy Barnett has argued that, while presence in the territory of a society may be necessary for consent, this does not constitute consent to all rules the society might make regardless of their content. A second condition of consent is that the rules be consistent with underlying principles of justice and the protection of natural and social rights, and have procedures for effective protection of those rights (or liberties). This has also been discussed by O. A. Brownson, who argued that, in a sense, three "constitutions" are involved: first, the constitution of nature that includes all of what the Founders called "natural law"; second, the constitution of society, an unwritten and commonly understood set of rules for the society formed by a social contract before it establishes a government, by which it does establish the third, a constitution of government. To consent, a necessary condition is that the rules be constitutional in that sense.

الموافقة الضمنية

The theory of an implicit social contract holds that by remaining in the territory controlled by some society, which usually has a government, people give consent to join that society and be governed by its government if any. This consent is what gives legitimacy to such a government.

Other writers have argued that consent to join the society is not necessarily consent to its government. For that, the government must be set up according to a constitution of government that is consistent with the superior unwritten constitutions of nature and society.

الموافقة الصريحة

The theory of an implicit social contract also goes under the principles of explicit consent. The main difference between tacit consent and explicit consent is that explicit consent is meant to leave no room for misinterpretation. Moreover, you should directly state what it is that you want and the person has to respond in a concise manner that either confirms or denies the proposition.

الطواعية

According to the will theory of contract, a contract is not presumed valid unless all parties voluntarily agree to it, either tacitly or explicitly, without coercion. Lysander Spooner, a 19th-century lawyer and staunch supporter of a right of contract between individuals, argued in his essay No Treason that a supposed social contract cannot be used to justify governmental actions such as taxation because government will initiate force against anyone who does not wish to enter into such a contract. As a result, he maintains that such an agreement is not voluntary and therefore cannot be considered a legitimate contract at all.

Modern Anglo-American law, like European civil law, is based on a will theory of contract, according to which all terms of a contract are binding on the parties because they chose those terms for themselves. This was less true when Hobbes wrote Leviathan; at that time more importance was attached to consideration, meaning a mutual exchange of benefits necessary to the formation of a valid contract, and most contracts had implicit terms that arose from the nature of the contractual relationship rather than from the choices made by the parties. Accordingly, it has been argued that social contract theory is more consistent with the contract law of the time of Hobbes and Locke than with the contract law of our time, and that certain features in the social contract which seem anomalous to us, such as the belief that we are bound by a contract formulated by our distant ancestors, would not have seemed as strange to Hobbes' contemporaries as they do to us.

انظر أيضا

• Classical republicanism
• عقد
• Epicurean ethics
• Federalism
• انتداب (سياسة)
• Mayflower Compact
• Monarchomachs
• حق التمرد
• School of Salamanca
• رأس المال الاجتماعي
• Social cohesion
• Social disintegration
• العدالة الاجتماعية في الدولة الليبرالية
• Social solidarity
• Societal collapse
• Consent theory

المصادر

قراءات إضافية

• Ankerl, Guy. Toward a Social Contract on a Worldwide Scale. Geneva: ILO, 1980, ISBN 92-9014-165-4.
• Dworkin, Ronald. Law's Empire, Fontana Press, 1986,
• Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan^[] (1651)
• Locke, John. Second Treatise on Government (1689)
• Pettit, Philip. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, NY: Oxford U.P., 1997, ISBN 0-19-829083-7, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997
• Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice (1971)
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (1762)
• Hardin, Garrett. The Tragedy of the Commons (1968)

وصلات خارجية

• Contractarianism entry by Ann Cudd in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Contemporary Approaches to the Social Contract entry by Fred D'Agostino in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• نطقب:IEP
• The Contractarian Theory of Morals:FAQ
• An example social contract for the United States from the Libertarian Party
• Social Contract: A Basic Contradiction in Western Liberal Democracy, Eric Engle. (A critique of social contract theory).
• Contains "The Social Contract", slightly modified for easier reading