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We start our section with two examples from the social contract tradition, representing opposing ends of the tradition. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was born in Westport, England and entered the University of Oxford at the age of 15. After graduating, he served as a tutor to the Cavendish family and traveled widely, exchanging ideas with the intellectuals of his age (including Descartes and Galileo). His first publication was a translation of Thucydides (1628), but it was reading Euclid that ultimately convinced Hobbes that matters of political philosophy needed similar axiomatic treatment. He wrote Leviathan or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil in 1651.

Hobbes was often personally fearful and lived amid civil war; he made fear and the need for caution key themes in his theory. He takes as his starting point that people are by nature equal – in the sense that even the strongest can be overtaken by coalitions of others; and that skill in one area is outweighed by the skills and strengths of others. In the state of nature, the hypothetical time before government, people are characterized by “First Competition; Secondly, Diffidence (that is mistrust); Thirdly, Glory” (Leviathan I, 13). People are by nature competitors trying to gain at others’ expense. This leads to living in a continual state of war, where the fruits of one’s labor are never safe from theft by others. This means, according to Hobbes, that “In such a condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; […] no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and, which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan I, 13). He arrives at this conclusion deductively from the basic point that, without restraint, people try to take what they can from others. That we all lock our doors at night is all the evidence Hobbes needs to confirm the initial premise, and then his conclusion follows from his rigorous application of the deductive method borrowed from geometry.

Hobbes sees only the power of the commonwealth as the solution to the problem of the state of nature. Driven by our natural passions to a self-destructive state of war, civilized survival requires a power to check the passions and create order. This power must have the ability to control others through force, since “Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words,” which lack the power necessary to enforce order. Hobbes sees this power arising when people give themselves completely to “one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will” (Leviathan 2, 17). This is done by each transferring their rights to the leader, which creates the sovereign. So long as all give their rights similarly, all are bound to the leader (or leadership body) similarly. Note the sovereign rules completely, as the covenant is among all subjects, not between the subjects and the sovereign, and thus there can be no breach of contract by the sovereign (Leviathan I, 18). It is interesting to note that this model does, however, generate power from the subjects rather than God. It is in the covenant of people with each other that the Sovereign’s power derives, not from the divine right of kings.

The views of human nature, rights, and the sovereign are very different for Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Born in Geneva, Rousseau lived most of his life in Paris. He was influenced by an idealized memory of the smaller community of Geneva, but he also remembered being driven out by the city’s Calvinist leaders who found his theories scandalous. He promoted new approaches to music and education, as well as social theory. In all of his work, however, he emphasized the importance of nature – both individual human nature (with its inner voice) and outside nature. In his theory of education, for example, he advocated raising children in the countryside so that they would be close to nature and also discover their distinctive inner selves without the distractions and pressures to conform to the norms of urban society.

Rousseau was passionate about the exercise of individual reason, but in unconventional ways, he burst on the scene by writing the winning essay in a contest calling for discourses on progress in the arts and science. Shockingly, he argued that progress in science actually brought humanity unhappiness by separating people from nature. Rousseau argued that much of what was widely accepted as progress in society in fact brought alienation, that is, separation of people not only from nature but also from their inner, natural selves. (Karl Marx was greatly influenced by Rousseau when he took up this theme in the 19th century; it has been recurrently important in sociology.) Rousseau placed great emphasis on inner reflection to discover the truth, for example, and less on conforming to accepted standards of logic. We see something of this in the reading here where he presents two different ideas about how the common will of the people may be found. One, the “will of all,” is more superficial, based on the aggregation of separate, self-interested individual wills (as in voting or opinion polls). The other, “general will,” is more basic, he suggests, but cannot be measured in such mechanistic ways. Each of us has within us, however, a capacity to see this light. Though many later thinkers have found the logic of Rousseau’s writings difficult, they have been profoundly influential. This is partly because he was a wonderful writer and his work is a pleasure to read even if hard sometimes to pin down. However, even more, his influence stems from the powerful way in which he established the ideas of freedom and equality as basic to modern thought. “Man is born free,” Rousseau wrote, “yet everywhere he is in chains,” limited by the arbitrary conventions of society and the exercise of power. Nature is given by God to all humanity, yet private property divides it and erects boundaries to exclude. How is this possible? Can it be just? The questions remain basic.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) admired Rousseau enormously and kept a bust of the earlier thinker in his study. He lived his whole life in Königsberg, a Prussian city in the north of Germany (which after the Second World War was acquired by Russia and resettled as Kaliningrad). He took walks on such a regular schedule that townspeople were said to set their watches by him (and the very spread of watches was part of the era’s more general concern for orderly, precise social life). Though he never traveled, Kant was intensely curious about the rest of the world, reading reports from explorers and missionaries. He sought to develop an intellectual approach that would be valid for all humanity, based on the universal character of reason rather than the differences among cultures.

Kant took up the core Rousseauian themes of freedom and equality, but emphasized overwhelmingly the link of each to the basic idea of the individual exercise of reason. One of the founders of the largely German philosophical school called “idealism,” he argued that secure human knowledge and morality came not from external imposition but from the inherent capacities of the human mind. Ideas, such as time and space, Kant suggested, do not come to us as material facts; they are mental categories we need in order to understand material reality.

Kant examined almost every philosophical topic, from mathematics (pure reason) to law and aesthetic judgment (different forms of practical reason). He was concerned to see reason used to settle human conflicts rather than force and imagined progress leading to an era of perpetual peace. He argued that morality needed to be achieved on the basis of human beings’ free will because we consider actions properly moral when they are chosen, not forced. This meant that morality was to be pursued by cultivating human capacity for reason rather than limiting human freedom.

Kant also pioneered what he called “critique,” a philosophical approach to examining the conditions of actual and apparent knowledge. When he wrote a “critique of pure reason,” he therefore did not attack pure reason; he asked how it was possible and urged his reader to try to grasp the underlying, most basic foundations of thought. Too much of what passed for knowledge, he thought, was merely belief accepted out of habit. We need to look critically at such beliefs in pursuit of the truth. This notion influenced all of sociology (and most of modern thought); it was also especially influential for the “critical theorists” we examine later. This notion of basic foundations for knowledge and the pursuit of pure truth became basic to modern science – as well as basic to the versions of “modernity” attacked in the late 20th century by those who sometimes called themselves “postmodernists.” It was too easy, they argued, for this idea of perfect knowledge to become the enemy of freedom, especially if it encouraged governments to develop top-down master plans for how society should be organized.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a central figure in what is often called the Scottish Enlightenment. Part of the broader European Enlightenment, the Scottish thinkers were distinctive in several ways. One was that they were more skeptical than Kant and most of the Germans about the capacities of unaided reason, and more attentive to the ways in which human beings – and human societies – learned from the accumulated trial and error of history. One of their greatest theorists, David Hume, had provoked Kant to take on his quest for secure foundations of knowledge by severely questioning the limits of abstract reason and arguing that for many crucial questions – such as the nature of cause and effect – we have no choice but to rely on inductions from empirical evidence that can never be entirely conclusive. Another, Adam Ferguson, helped to introduce the idea of civil society and also anticipated later evolutionary theory by holding that history revealed a pattern of improvements in social organization, reflecting among other things growth in productive capacity by which human societies sustained themselves in relation to nature and each other. Smith focused on questions of moral philosophy, arguing that humans would be bound together by natural sympathies and that human sentiments included benevolent dispositions, as well as sources of conflict. However, much more famously, he helped to create modern economics, as well as sociology, with his book The Wealth of Nations (1776). The selection printed here on the division of labor was widely influential. Smith wrote more generally about the extent to which markets created order and produced collective benefits even when the motivations of individual participants were entirely selfish. First, he suggested, markets taught sensible behavior by a kind of external conditioning: they rewarded buying cheap and selling dear and they punished the opposite. Second, markets led people with different skills or properties to cooperate through exchange, thus not only circulating goods effectively but also boosting production. Third, markets did all this without anyone being in charge and directing them. And this was the key point: markets were self-regulating. They were proof, Smith suggested, that it was not necessary to rely on kings or governments to establish all the conditions of social life. Markets could be self-regulating. This is what he meant by saying they worked as though led by an “invisible hand.” There were emergent properties of market structure and process that were not the results of any plan or intention. Studying such emergent properties of social organization has remained a key theme for sociology.

The common wealth, Smith suggested, could be better achieved by freeing individuals to compete in self-regulating markets than by central planning or restrictions on trade. Of course, markets could become imbalanced and fail in self-regulation. Smith argued that competition only worked among human individuals, not among large corporations, because the participants had to be relatively equal. And there were some things, such as national defense, that were best provided by government because they needed central authority. However, Smith’s points were not only about markets for their own sake. Markets were simply one of the best examples of social self-regulation that went on throughout society – as people found partners to marry, decided how many children to have, wrote books (for the “marketplace of ideas”), and so forth. Most of the civil society could be self-regulating, not only markets – as long as there was freedom for individuals to make their own decisions and at least substantial equality, though not perfect equality since individuals needed to learn from the decisions they made and this meant that some had to win and some had to lose.