Depth: Foundation
Shared questions
- What could transform coercive power into legitimate political authority?
- Which rights or liberties remain beyond anything citizens could authorize?
Internal disagreements
- Whether agreement is historical, tacit, hypothetical, or an expository device, and whether it can justify sovereignty, popular self-rule, property, or principles of distributive justice.
Key texts
- Leviathan · 1651 — Hobbes derives sovereign authority from covenants made for security.
- The Social Contract · 1762 — Rousseau asks how association can preserve freedom through collective self-legislation.
- A Theory of Justice · 1971 — Rawls recasts contractual choice as a hypothetical device for selecting principles of justice.