TITLE:
The Inalienable Liberty in the Social Contract Theory —As the Representative with Hobbes and Locke
AUTHORS:
Shuo Zhang
KEYWORDS:
Liberty, Social Contract Theory, Transfer
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.8 No.11,
November
24,
2020
ABSTRACT: The social contract is a doctrine about the origin of the state and a hypothesis of Western political philosophy. Many philosophers, jurists, and thinkers in history have put forward set of social contract theories of their own. Although these different theories in different eras have huge differences, the source of the power throughout them is the right of liberty. This article introduces the meaning and origin of the social contract at first, then compares the social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke to raise the question of whether the right of liberty can be alienated, and finally combines some of Rousseau’s views to demonstrate the impossibility of transferring the right of liberty in the social contract.