John Locke: Social contract versus political anthropology

Abstract

In the Second Treatise , John Locke presents two stories about the development of political society: (1) the dramatic story of the state of nature and social contract; and (2) a more gradualist account of the evolution of political society “by an insensible change” out of the family group. The relation between these two accounts is analyzed in order to deal with familiar objections about the historical truth and internal consistency of contract theory. It is argued that Locke regarded story (2) as the historically accurate one, but that he believed historical events needed moral interpretation. Story (1) represents a moral framework or template to be used as a basis for understanding the implications — for political obligation and political legitimacy — of story (2). Even if the whole course of the evolution of political institutions out of prepolitical society cannot be seen as a single intentional or consensual process, still individual steps in that process can be analyzed and evaluated in contractualist terms. The task of political judgment is to infer the rights and obligations of politics from this representation of political development as an overlapping series of consensual events.