Civil Society And Social Contract Research Paper

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This paper attempts to analyse the relationship between the civil society and the state and economic forces. In particular the paper seeks to historicize the concept of civil society and social contract. The paper uses the social contract theorists particularly Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (1965), John Locke Two Treatises of Government (1690) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract (1994) as fundamental political theorists in making a critical analysis of civil society and social contract. In order to provide a debate on the social contract and civil society historical accounts and analysis are drawn from the sources of Hegel’s Philosophy of Rights (1991), Karl Marx’s the 18th Brumaire (1852), Karl Marx the Jewish Question (1843), Plato’s …show more content…

Why social contract? When it legitimate to disobey community’s laws? What makes a social contract legally or morally binding? What kind of coercion can be found in social contract? The paper attempts to present a detailed account on these questions.

Historical Perspectives of Civil Society
G. W.F. Hegel defines civil society an association of members who are self-sufficient individuals in a formal universality, occasioned by their needs and by the legal constitution as a means of security for persons and property, and by an external order for their particular and common interests. Civil Society (in …show more content…

It was first used by Aristotle in his argument that every community is established for sake of some good and every community aims at some good and mankind always act in order to obtain what he thinks is good. During this period civil society was a sphere in which man had the all round possibilities of achieving his full moral status. To Aristotle, civil society was still a political association that improved its citizens, but it was founded on the respect for the different spheres and multiple associations in which life lived. Additionally, the association was meant to living beings that had a sense of good and evil and bad and good of making a family and a state. The members of the association had necessarily some one thing the same and common to all, in which they shared equally or unequally in terms of food, land and any other things. However, Rousseau believes that a transfer from the state of nature to the civil state, produces in man very a remarkable change of replacing instinct by justice in his behaviour and conferring on his actions the moral quality that he had lacked before; it is only now, as the voice of duty succeeds to physical impulse and right to appetite that man who had previously thought of nothing but himself is compelled to act on the principle and to consult his reason before attending to his inclinations. Although in civil

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