Part IV: The Modern Revolutions

When people decided they could redesign governance from scratch

Chapter 11 ended with the most ambitious and most dangerous idea in the history of governance: that a society could be rebuilt from first principles, by the will of the people, on a Monday morning. But before anyone could rebuild, someone had to imagine that rebuilding was possible — that governance was not a condition of nature or a gift from God but a design problem, subject to human reason and human choice.

Three men, working within a century of each other, gave that imagination its vocabulary. They agreed on almost nothing except the premise: governance originates in a contract among people. What they disagreed about — furiously, consequentially, and in ways that still shape every political argument on earth — was the terms.

Chapter 12: The Social Contract

In 1651, in the middle of a civil war that had killed a larger proportion of the English population than the First World War would, a philosopher in exile published a book with a monster on its cover.

The monster was the state. Thomas Hobbes called it Leviathan — after the sea creature in the Book of Job, the beast so terrible that no human power could subdue it. The frontispiece showed a giant figure composed of hundreds of tiny human bodies, crowned and armed, looming over a peaceful landscape. The image was the argument: the state is made of us. We create it by surrendering our individual power. And once created, it must be absolute, because anything less than absolute sovereignty returns us to the horror from which we fled.

Hobbes had reason to fear horror. The English Civil War, which drove him to Paris in the early 1640s, had shattered every assumption about governance that the English had held for centuries. King against Parliament. Protestant against Catholic. Army against both. Hobbes watched as a constitutional dispute over taxation and religious authority devolved into a slaughter that killed roughly 200,000 people in a nation of five million. His central political experience was simple and devastating: divided sovereignty causes civil war. When multiple authorities claim the right to rule, the result is not balance but bloodshed.

From this terror, Hobbes derived a thought experiment. Imagine a condition without governance — no law, no authority, no power above individual strength. What would that look like? His answer is the most famous sentence in political philosophy: life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Not because humans are evil, but because they are roughly equal in their capacity to harm each other, and in the absence of a common power to keep them in awe, rational self-interest leads to perpetual conflict.

The solution was the social contract: all individuals simultaneously agree to surrender their natural liberty to a sovereign authority. The sovereign — whether a monarch or an assembly — holds absolute power. In exchange, subjects receive the only thing worth having: peace.

This was not, as the caricature suggests, a defense of tyranny. It was a terrified argument about alternatives. Hobbes was not saying absolute government is good. He was saying it is necessary — because the alternative is worse. Any effective government is better than no government. The most brutal king is preferable to the war of all against all.

It is a bleak vision. But it was the first to ask the question that would detonate the old order: What if governance isn't given to us? What if we make it ourselves?

Thirty-eight years later, another Englishman published a very different answer.

John Locke's Two Treatises of Government appeared in 1689, just after the Glorious Revolution replaced one king with another. But Locke had likely written most of it a decade earlier, during the Exclusion Crisis, when he was allied with the Earl of Shaftesbury against royal absolutism. His first treatise demolished Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, which had defended the divine right of kings through a genealogy stretching back to Adam. Filmer's argument: God gave Adam dominion over the earth, and this dominion passed through the patriarchal line to current monarchs. Locke's demolition was surgical: the chain of inheritance is unverifiable, the logic is circular, and even if it were true, it would justify exactly one king — the one who could prove descent from Adam, which nobody could.

With divine right dispatched, the second treatise built Locke's positive case. Humans in the state of nature possess natural rights — life, liberty, and estate. Unlike Hobbes's state of nature, Locke's is not a war zone. It is merely inconvenient. People have rights but no impartial judge to settle disputes about those rights. Government is created through consent for the limited purpose of protecting what people already have. And if the government violates those rights — if it becomes tyrannical — the people may dissolve it and start again.

This was the right of revolution. And it would echo, almost verbatim, in a document written in Philadelphia eighty-seven years later.

Locke's theory had a structural feature that its author never acknowledged as a problem. If government exists to protect property, and only property-owners are full participants in governance, then the social contract protects the interests of those who already have resources. Locke himself invested in the Royal African Company — which traded in enslaved human beings — and helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which included provisions for slavery. The philosopher of natural rights was also a participant in the institution that violated them most fundamentally. The exclusion was not accidental. It was the design.

And then came Rousseau, who wanted more than security and more than property. He wanted freedom.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, published in 1762, opens with a sentence that still detonates: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The chains are not external — they are the social structures that humans have created: property, inequality, governments that serve the powerful while claiming to serve all.

Rousseau's diagnosis was devastating. In his Discourse on Inequality (1754), he argued that natural inequality is minimal — some people are stronger, others cleverer — but social inequality, arising from property and institutions, is enormous and illegitimate. The cure was not Hobbes's absolute sovereign or Locke's limited government. It was the general will — the collective decision of a community acting as citizens, not as private individuals pursuing private interests.

The general will is not a vote count. It is not the "will of all," which is merely the sum of individual preferences. It is what emerges when citizens deliberate together about the common good — when they ask not "what do I want?" but "what do we need?" Rousseau distinguished sharply between the sovereign (the people as a whole, who make laws) and the government (a limited body that administers). Popular sovereignty cannot be delegated. It requires active, ongoing participation — not occasional elections but continuous engagement.

This is the most radical vision of the three. Hobbes wants order. Locke wants protection. Rousseau wants genuine collective self-governance — a community where obedience to the law is obedience to oneself, because every citizen participates in making the law.

It is also the most dangerous. Isaiah Berlin and Jacob Talmon read Rousseau as a precursor to totalitarianism — the "general will" as a license for the majority to crush the individual. Contemporary scholars argue this is a misreading: Rousseau explicitly insisted that the general will cannot target individuals or minorities. But the danger Berlin identified is real, even if it is a misuse rather than the intended design. When the French Revolution attempted to implement Rousseau's vision, the general will proved far easier to invoke than to detect.

Three contracts. Three visions. All three shared a revolutionary premise: governance is not divinely ordained but humanly constructed. And all three shared a structural blindness: the "contracting parties" were assumed to be autonomous, rational, propertied men. The exclusions were not footnotes. They were load-bearing walls.

Carole Pateman saw through those walls. In The Sexual Contract (1988), she argued that the social contract was only half the story. Beneath the fraternal agreement of men to govern themselves lay a prior agreement — men's arrangement to divide access to women's bodies and labor among themselves. The original contract "constitutes men's freedom and women's subjection." Marriage, employment, domestic service — all were contracts in which women exchanged labor or autonomy for protection under terms systematically rigged against them. Freedom for the contracting parties was predicated on the unfreedom of those who cooked their meals, raised their children, and maintained the domestic infrastructure on which the "public" world of governance rested.

Charles W. Mills extended the analysis. In The Racial Contract (1997), he argued that the social contract, as historically practiced, was a racial contract: an agreement among white people to restrict moral and political equality to themselves. This was not a corruption of the contract but its actual historical content. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Mill — all constructed their theories using racial classificatory schemas that placed Europeans at the apex. White supremacy was not an ideology floating above the social contract. It was the contract's operating system.

Together, Pateman and Mills revealed the governance problem that the nineteenth century would spend a hundred years fighting over: the social contract promised universal consent, but the "universe" was a small club. Who counted as a contracting party — who counted as fully human — was the question that would drive the suffrage movements, the abolition campaigns, and the anticolonial revolutions of the next two centuries.

But before we follow that question forward, it is worth pausing to note that the social contract was not a uniquely European idea. It was not even a uniquely modern one.

In the Aggañña Sutta — a text from the Pali Canon, composed roughly two thousand years before Hobbes — the Buddha tells a story of human origins. In the beginning, beings lived in harmony, sustained by the earth itself. But greed crept in. People began hoarding. Conflict followed. And so they gathered together and chose one among them — the Great Elected One, Mahāsammata — to maintain order, receiving a share of rice in return. Government, in the Buddhist telling, is a practical arrangement arising from moral decline: not divine appointment but collective problem-solving. The contract is older than its European name.

In the Confucian tradition, Mencius, writing in the fourth century BCE, argued that a ruler who fails his people may be overthrown — that governance is conditional on moral performance. Xunzi grounded this in a quasi-Hobbesian premise: humans are naturally self-interested, and social order requires collective arrangement. But unlike Hobbes, Xunzi's arrangement was proposed by sage-kings, not agreed by equals. Authority flowed from moral wisdom, not from mutual consent.

And in the Islamic tradition, bay'ah — the pledge of allegiance between ruler and ruled — carried contractual weight. Al-Mawardi, writing in the eleventh century, maintained that bay'ah was a mandate "limited in time and authority" that could be revoked if the ruler abused his power. The structural similarity to Locke's right of revolution is striking. But the philosophical foundation is different: in bay'ah, ultimate sovereignty belongs to God, and the ruler governs as God's agent. The accountability runs upward as much as downward.

These are not the same theory wearing different cultural costumes. They are genuinely different answers to a genuinely shared question: on what basis does anyone have the right to govern anyone else? The Buddhist answer: practical necessity, arising from moral failure. The Confucian answer: moral fitness, demonstrated through virtue. The Islamic answer: divine delegation, conditional on just rule. The Hobbesian answer: rational self-interest, driven by fear. The Lockean answer: natural rights, protected by consent. The Rousseauian answer: collective self-determination, realized through participation.

Six answers. Six traditions. None sufficient. Each illuminating something the others missed. And all of them, in their different ways, turning governance from an inheritance into a choice — from something you receive to something you design.

That shift — from received governance to designed governance — is the hinge on which the modern world turns. Once you accept that governance is a human construction, you accept that it can be reconstructed. Once you accept that authority rests on consent, you must answer the question: whose consent? Once you accept that unjust governance may be resisted, you must decide: when?

Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau could not answer these questions fully. Their contracts contained exclusions so deep that the contracts themselves became sources of injustice. But they posed the questions — and once posed, the questions could not be unasked.

In 1688, in 1776, in 1789, and in 1791, people stopped asking and started acting. They took the philosopher's thought experiments and tried to build governments from them. The results were extraordinary, catastrophic, and instructive in equal measure.

The age of revolutions had begun.