Two Visions of the Social Contract: Hobbes’s Mechanical Order and Rousseau’s Moral Community

Two Visions of the Social Contract: Hobbes’s Mechanical Order and Rousseau’s Moral Community

This paper compares Thomas Hobbes’s and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s accounts of how society is possible. Both theorists employ the idea of the social contract, yet they arrive at almost opposite conceptions of society. For Hobbes, the state of nature is a condition of mutual fear in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”; individuals therefore covenant to transfer their natural rights to an external sovereign, creating society as an artificial mechanism that suppresses conflict without changing human nature. Freedom, in this view, is negative—the absence of interference. For Rousseau, by contrast, “man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains”; society arises through an act of total alienation in which each individual submits to the general will, transforming natural man into a citizen. Society is thus an organic moral community that changes human nature, and freedom is positive—obedience to laws one has prescribed for oneself. The paper examines these differences across three dimensions: the nature of society (mechanical versus organic), the meaning of freedom (negative versus positive), and the location of sovereignty (external versus popular). It concludes that Hobbes presents society as a machine built by self-interested individuals for survival, whereas Rousseau presents it as a moral community in which people become citizens—two visions whose tension still shapes modern political life.