Since the State is a result of contract, it is an artificial construct. So is the post-contract civil society, except for Rousseau. As such, one of the challenges is to achieve unity and stability in the civil society. Hobbes sought to achieve this by assigning unity to the Leviathan, the sovereign; Locke did that by retaining most of the rights with the individuals and letting the State interfere minimally. For Rousseau, the General Will itself is an organic unity.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe was undergoing various revolutionary changes—political, economic and social. Political, to chart a direction from royal absolutism to constitutional democracy; economic, in the form of industrial and capitalist production; and social, as a result of rise of the bourgeois and middle classes and decline of the aristocratic and feudal structure. The three social contractualists were responding to the upheavals and drama that was integral to these changes. While Hobbes was sympathetic and in fact supportive of royal absolutism, Locke was convinced that a limited constitutional state was the only suitable political expression in times of rising bourgeois class (the class of rising entrepreneurs/capitalists) in England. Rousseau’s views influenced the French Revolution and found its expression as the ‘will’ of the people at the centre stage of political arena.
The type of political set-up, nature of sovereign authority in the state, relationship of the individual with this authority and the nature of political obligations that the individual and the State bear towards each other reflect the vision of the contractualists. We may put these briefly as shown in Table 3.3.
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