It might be difficult to believe, but philosophers love to play pranks on people. Often, they simply play pranks on one another. Some of the best pranks include trying to get each other to believe that there are no such things as mental states (this is known as Eliminative Materialism), or arguing that it is objectively true that everything is just a matter of perspective (this is known as Relativism). There is a whole branch of the philosophy of language devoted to writing lengthy explanations as to why words have no meaning. Hilarious!
But sometimes philosophers also like to play pranks on other people. And one of the most successful pranks has been convincing the general public that they are governed by consent. It was the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) who kicked the whole thing off when he suggested that the life of man in the absence of centralised government was doomed to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” He argued that it was only through the imposition of political authority that ordinary people could ever hope to live in harmony with one another, and that in exchange for this benevolence, every citizen therefore owed absolute obedience to the State. For Hobbes, this meant that King Charles I could raise as much taxation as he pleased without parliamentary approval — and that the plebs should be grateful, since they could hardly be trusted to know what was in their best interests anyway. The plebs unfortunately made their own feelings clear about this during the English Civil War, which just goes to show how little they understood politics. Today, Hobbes’ argument provides the philosophical basis of liberal democracy.
More generally, the idea is that political authority rests upon some kind of social contract established between the citizens and their rulers. The people come together and agree to relinquish some of their natural freedoms to the State in exchange for the social stability and other benefits that come from a centralised system of law and order. Principally, this usually involves granting the State a monopoly upon violence, whereby the police and the court system punish crime, rather than allowing everyone to have at it whenever they feel wronged. This line of thinking became particularly popular during the Enlightenment, when a growing middle-class of wealthy and well-educated individuals, who had been traditionally excluded from hereditary monarchy and the aristocracy — people like e.g. Hobbes — began to devise increasingly powerful administrative positions for them to occupy (for the good of the people).
Of course, no-one thinks that this is how governments are actually established. Historically speaking, political authority is invariably imposed when someone with a bigger stick arrives and beats you about the head until you decide that it would be less hassle to just let them be in charge. But more to the point, it would make no sense for political authority to be established by some form of social contract, for the very simple reason that you would already need some political and legal structures in place before any putative contract could be legally enforced. The idea then that political authority rests upon some pre-political legal contract is rather like the idea that language came into being when people started discussing what their words were going to mean. Or to put it another way, political authority cannot possibly establish social order, since it is something that emerges from social order.
Part of the problem here is that Hobbes lived in Wiltshire, and thus had a very poor opinion of his fellow man. He simply could not imagine them engaging in any kind of organised social activity — except endless war and conflict — without the guidance of their betters. By contrast, John Locke (1632-1704) was born and breed roughly 40 miles away in the much nicer county of Somerset, and fully recognised that even in his so-called state of nature, man was an essentially social creature who engaged in various forms of co-operative activity. He understood that civilisation ultimately rests upon the mutual recognition of private property, since it is only on this basis that man can make reasonable expectations about the future and thereby engage in longterm projects. According to Locke then, the social contract was based upon an informed decision that in giving up certain rights to the State, the individual would thereby enjoy greater protection of his private property — and that such a contract remained justified only insofar as the State continued to uphold its end of the arrangement (which was why it was totally legitimate to depose King James II in favour of Locke’s political patron, William of Orange).
The problem for Locke was that while a growing middle-class of well-educated and wealthy individuals — people like e.g. Locke — were very pleased with the idea of a powerful centralised State using its vast powers to protect their property rights, the vast majority of the population barely had a cider-pot to piss in and proved somewhat less enthusiastic at yet more attempts to preserve the status quo. It turns out that it is actually very hard to maintain a social contract with the State based on the protection of private property when only a tiny minority — most of whom now enjoyed cushy jobs working for the State — had any private property worth protecting.
Locke suggested therefore that while many people may grumble about the State and how it only benefits the wealthy and privileged, they nevertheless gave their implicit consent to the social contract through their day-to-day activities. For example, whenever they used a road that had been funded through taxation, they were offering their implicit consent to the political status quo that had taken a percentage of their income in order to built it. By the same token, whenever they enjoyed the law and order that resulted from strong and stable government, or purchased goods favourably tariffed by government customs — indeed, whenever they went about any aspect of their life overseen by some administrative branch of the State — they were offering their implicit consent to the entire political establishment behind it. And it is this revised understanding of the social contract that still underpins much political thought today.
Which is of course absolutely hilarious. As the English political philosopher and best-selling mystery novelist William Godwin (1756-1836) was quick to point out, in order to meaningfully consent to anything (implicitly or otherwise), one must also have the ability to withhold that consent. A prisoner does not choose to be incarcerated simply because he has so far failed to escape. Yet it remains extremely difficult to avoid the continuous imposition of political authority in almost every aspect of our lives in today’s society — try not paying your taxes and see how far that gets you. By the same token, while most contemporary democracies offer the voter a choice between various political parties of arguably different persuasions, there is never the option to reject any form of political representation altogether, to tick the box marked none of the above. As far as mainstream modern political thought is concerned, the social contract is something to which we have all willingly agreed, whether we like it or not.