Critical Evaluation of the Social Contract Theory

Social contract theory may be termed as the most influential political doctrine that came up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that could boast of a long line of supporters and sympathizers. Besides Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, various philosophers, jurists, political writers, poets, and religionists supported the social contract theory. These included ‘Hooker, Milton, Grotius, Pufendorf, Wolff, Suarez, Kant, Blackstone, Spinoza, Fichte, and many others’⁵³

However, equally impressive is the list of those who criticized and attacked the theory. Amongst them, we may count David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Edmund Burke, Austin, Lieber, Henry Maine, Thomas Hill Green, Bluntschli, Pollock and others. Further, as Andrew Vincent maintains, ‘the development of the historical school of law, legal positivism and sociological theories uniformly rejected contractual ideas.’⁵⁴ A critical evaluation of the social contract theory finds faults with its historical and sociological possibility, philosophical tenability and legal soundness. We may see the grounds that challenge the social contract theory.