Social Contract Theory in Seventeenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Throughout the seventeenth century the peace of Europe continued to be disturbed by religious quarrels stemming from the Reformation, as well as the habitual struggles for power between kings and their enemies; and in the arguments provoked by these disturbances the theory of social contract provided a widely accepted idiom, perhaps more widely accepted than ever before or since. At any rate this was so in Britain, where the century was not only the ‘century of genius’, but also the century of Civil War and ‘Glorious’ Revolution. Not that the social contract theory was universally accepted — by and large, it was found much more congenial by the enemies of established authority than by its friends. But to that generalisation there stands a towering exception — Thomas Hobbes.