John Locke's Social Contract and Why We Live By It

           All peoples who are born into any civil society have entered their social contract. This is not a voluntary action. Children are born into the observed obligations of their fathers and so are subject to any laws that the land they were naturalized. It is their fathers who comply with the standing power in order to preserve their rights and serve their interests. This is a state of existence that lies beyond the state of nature.

Within the state of nature men are indisputably free. Man is free to live his life and hold his property in any way he sees fit. Unfortunately, that freedom comes along with the freedom of others and others are not subject to the same perceptions that Locke’s theories on man in his natural state dictate. In this state, free men are subject to the brutalities of other free men who would assert their dominance over those who do not match them in might. And so, in order to create more equality in the world we live in, we leave the state of nature and we enter into a social contract and form civil societies.

This contract is, in essence, the writ of what we give away in freedoms that we would have in a lawless society to protect and preserve other freedoms that the majority have agreed are more important. We leave the state of nature, which we have the liberty to govern on our own and at our own risk, in order to live amongst each other. People are gregarious by nature and, even more primitively so, inclined to procreate.

Locke says that no one can be “subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent” (Locke § 95).  And it is this consent to live under the political power of another that we enter the social contract. Locke continues saying, “…by consenting with others to make a body politic under one government, puts himself under an obligation to every one of that society, to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it; or else this original compact, whereby he with others incorporates into one society, would signify nothing, and be no compact…” (Locke § 97). Locke is explaining that when we enter the social contract we become obligated to one another. This applies, for example, in the case of two neighbors doing the other no harm. If one neighbor has not imposed himself upon the other, then his neighbor, by implication, shall return him no foul. Because otherwise, the social contract has no meaning.

This is the reason people consent to be governed. We desire to live among one another and have the proximity to make ease of finding a suitable partner, so we give permission to a government to have power and create laws that a the majority find agreeable enough to live by and function in the society that develops under its umbrella.

In exchange for having entered the social contract, people have their freedoms better protected having entered civil society. They are entitled to their liberties and properties and have the right to defend it and to seek justice from the government that they’ve given tacit consent to. So, rather than living in the state of nature where the inconvenience of life is that your life, liberty, and property are not your own, we leave it in order to create a place where there is an appeal to law and we are able to have injustices weighed and see equity restored.

Seeing equity restored under the social contract means that there is an objective party to observe and weigh the evidence or the reported injustice. It allows the opportunity for those who would not have had the might in the natural state to have taken back their property to sit before a party who has no personal, vested interest and fight, without the need for might, to get back what is rightfully his.

In the social contract we have many choices about life in civil society. Laws are constructed to match the natural state as best they can through positive law. The people who live on the land governed by that civil society are subject to its laws and, whether they like them or not, they are obligated to comply. However, if someone does not like the law of the land, they are not obligated to stay and live under its rule, rather they have the freedom to seek out another civil society and adhere to their social contract if the law of another land suits them better. But as long as they are living under that civil law that they are subject to through the consent of the people by majority rule, then they are not only subject to its authority, but they are also protected by its laws.

Put simply: people leave the lawless state of nature because they desire to be protected, because they prefer not to be alone, and because they want to make more people. All these things, but more than anything people want to feel free and they get that feeling of freedom when they enter the social contract by having their rights to life, liberty, and property protected.