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APR Contemporary Approaches to the Social Contract The idea of the social contract goes back, in a recognizably modern form, to Thomas Hobbes, but is most notably embodied, in our times, in the work of John Rawls. The basic idea is a simple one. What makes some particular system of collectively enforced social arrangements legitimate is that it is the object of an agreement for the people who are subject to it. (As in the case of public justification voluntaristic and rationalistic readings of the contract.) In its modern guises, contract approaches are not intended as accounts of the historical origins of current social arrangements, but, instead, as answers to, or frameworks for answering, questions about legitimacy and political obligation. Important issues associated with the social contract include the binding force of hypothetical agreements, the reduction (or not) of ethico-political to instrumental reasoning, and the compatibility of contract reasoning with fairness and liberty. - 1. Hypothetical Contracts?
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