Social Contract

Social Contract

The quality of your individual life would greatly improve in utopia. The burdens you face from corporate monopolies, the overwhelming weight of the devaluation of your currency and the lack of faith in your neighbors to achieve a civilization of peace and mutual respect has taken its toll for too long. Although this sounds as if it was taken directly from George Orwell’s book (1984) itself, the propaganda of a utopian government rule and the current everlasting war breathes as it’s on self-reliant organization today. Weary of the multiple political parties that are emerging every three seconds, we are faced with a question that has been proposed since the beginning of logical thinking. Is it possible to have both physical and civil freedoms?

We all have our own individual ideology on the spectrum of our government. There are conservatives, liberals, republicans, democrats, independents, libertarians, and now tea party-ist. They all have their unique ideas on governmental structure and procedure. However, they are all collectively based, some more loosely than others, on the idea of the social contract. Though rather difficult to accept, it is impossible to have both physical and civil freedoms jointly and it is the social contract that argues that said point.

So what is the social contract exactly? As defined by Jean Jacques Rousseau, the social contract is the idea that government is based on the idea of popular sovereignty and that the people as a whole directly give power and steer the state (pg. 59-64).I think, the social contract is not based on any actual consent, but more so one’s voluntary decision to join said state. The social contract then represents logic, which is compos...

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...There are several ways that the state can be governed by. There are a ways to which it could be changed and created by. However, the people’s individual freedoms are sacrificed for the civil liberties in interest for the greater good of the state. This is fundamental cannot be changed. As long as the social contract is not broken, then the state itself, barring a non-corrupt governmental control which falls under individual responsibility, will efficiently care for its peoples and their interest without contest.

Works Cited

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, state, and utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974.

Orwell, George. 1984: a novel. New York, NY: Published by Signet Classic, 1977.

Rawls, John. A theory of justice: original edition. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University press, 2005.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The social contract;. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.