Social Contract Essay

The Social Contract The purpose of the social contract is to bring people together in a society, and then to decide the positions of people in their society. They do this by transferring their rights to another person through a social contract. Once a person leaves the state of nature and is brought into a society, a social contract is the only way for the individual to benefit from what a commonwealth and partnership can bring but also have some sort of obligation to contribute to that society as well. Although a society cannot form without a Social Contract, the terms of the social contract and the way it is to be entered into needs to be changed, because it simply doesn’t work for the world we live in today. A person is brought into a …show more content…
The one of the biggest flaws is brought by this question: Can a person be born into a social contract? Naturally one would say that a person cannot be born into a contract, because the moment a person is born they are not conscious in themselves enough to agree to a contract, and a contract must have a conscious signer. Many argue that the way it can be done is a person agrees to the contract when they come of age, but by that point they had already been living within a sovereign that they had never agreed to for so long. Hobbes argues in his book Leviathan that sometimes, rights can be transferred by inference, not just by express. Express is when a person signs their rights to the sovereign, using language such as “I agree, I consent,” but joining the sovereign by inference, Hobbes argues, can be done through words or actions. Actions can simply include using the sovereign’s resources and safety for yourself, and by doing that you have automatically consented to the social contract. So if a child uses the protection and resources of the sovereign, Hobbes argues he already has signed himself into the …show more content…
In the United States, women have come very far in making our positions in society equal to men, brining us closer to absolute equality. Although there are some things women still face in America, there are many other parts of the world where women have little to no rights at all. Carole Pateman claims that the social contract is sexual as well as social, and that is because men have a political right over women, giving them orderly access over women’s bodies. This can still be seen in the world we live in today, an example being the practice of Female Genital Cutting still seen in many parts of Africa as common practice. Although an ancient tradition, it is still something seen on an everyday basis in many countries, and it is continued because of the social contract of those countries placing women as an inferior subordinate to men, giving men the right to dictate what is done to a woman’s