Do we implicitly agree to obey the law?

Social contract theory, developed by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, attempts to solve the problem of political legitimacy: Why should an individual obey the state? 

The answer is that authority is not natural or divine but derives from the consent of the governed, expressed through a real or hypothetical agreement. Thomas Hobbes, writing after the English Civil War, depicted the state of nature as a “war of all against all,” where life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Rational individuals, to escape this chaos, would contract with each other to surrender all their rights (except self-preservation) to an absolute sovereign-the Leviathan-in exchange for security. For Hobbes, the social contract is between individuals to create the sovereign; obedience is absolute, as the alternative is anarchy.

John Locke’s more influential version starts from a more benign state of nature governed by natural law. Individuals possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property. They form a social contract not primarily for survival but to better protect these rights through impartial judges and collective enforcement. The government thus created is a trustee of the people’s rights, with powers strictly limited to protecting them. This introduces the revolutionary corollary: if the government systematically violates its trust-if it becomes tyrannical, seizing property without consent, denying lawful process, or waging war against its own people-it breaks the contract. The obligation of obedience dissolves, and the people retain the right to revolution. The American Declaration of Independence is a Lockean document, listing the “long train of abuses” by King George III as evidence of a broken contract, justifying the withdrawal of consent.

The modern application is less about revolution and more about the limits of obligation. Do citizens of an unjust regime have a duty to obey its laws? Social contract theory suggests the duty is conditional on the state’s performance of its basic functions: protecting rights, providing justice, and governing with the common good in view. When a state engages in systemic discrimination, corruption, or brutality, it forfeits its legitimacy. 

This philosophical stance underpins civil disobedience. A protestor who breaks a segregation law argues that the state, by enforcing that law, has already broken the contract’s terms of equal protection; their law-breaking is not lawlessness but a public appeal to the higher principles of the contract itself. The contract is also implicit in debates over political obligation: is there a duty to obey a law one considers unjust if it was passed by a democratic majority? Locke’s answer would be that majority rule is itself a contractual procedure, but it cannot licitly violate the core natural rights the contract was meant to secure. 

The social contract, therefore, is not a historical fact but a continuing test of a government’s legitimacy: but does it act as the agent of the people, or as their master?