The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls.

• Author: McCandless, Amy Thompson

As its title suggests, The Social Contract From Hobbes to Rawls examines the various ways political scientists and moral philosophers have used the concept of the social contract to formulate their theories of the good society. The idea of a social contract has been crucial to shaping liberalism in Britain, the United States, and Canada, and although the authors discuss continental philosophers such as Rousseau and Kant, their emphasis is on the Anglo-American political experience.

The volume of essays had its origin in a conference on contractarianism held in Wales in 1993, and eleven of the fourteen authors are lecturers in politics at British universities. Of the three remaining authors, two hold positions at American institutions and one at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Several authors have backgrounds in law and philosophy as well as politics, but despite the book's claim to approach contractarianism historically as well as philosophically, there are no historians among the contributors, and only a few essays examine the historical context in any great detail. The volume is designed for "courses in the history of political thought and modern political philosophy" [p. xi] and will probably have little appeal outside these classrooms.

David Boucher, a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Wales, Swansea, and Paul Kelly, Lecturer in Politics at the same institution, introduce the essays by discussing the diverse forms contractarian theories have taken since the seventeenth century. They divide social contract theories into three types: moral, civil, and constitutional. Moral contractarians such as David Gauthier "ground moral principles in the creative self-interest of individuals who adopt constraints on their behaviour in order to maximize benefits" [p. 3]. Civil contractarians are more concerned about a social contract which delineates political authority and explains political associations. In constitutional contractarianism "civil society itself is not necessarily posited to rest upon consent, [but] it is instead the relationship between the ruler and the ruled that is said to be contractual . . ." [p. 10].

Boucher and Kelly also distinguish between the classical contractarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant and modern contractarians such as Rawls, Nozick, Buchanan, and Gauthier. The former were far more preoccupied with the personality of...