What deal did we strike
to stop fighting?

Hobbes — order at almost any price

Thomas Hobbes wrote during the English Civil War, and it shows. Strip away government, he argued, and you get a war of every person against every person, where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. People are roughly equal in their ability to kill each other, and fear rules everything. To escape it, they hand nearly all their power to a single sovereign, the Leviathan, whose authority must be near-absolute, because any crack in it invites the chaos back. Better one master than the war of all.

Locke — a government that can be fired

John Locke saw the same starting point far more calmly. In his state of nature people are already free, equal, and governed by reason, and they already hold rights to life, liberty, and property. The problem is not war but insecurity: no neutral judge, no reliable enforcement. So they create a limited government to protect the rights they already have, and, crucially, that government rules only by consent and forfeits its authority if it turns tyrant. The right of revolution is built in. This is the contract that shaped liberal democracy and the American founding.

Rousseau — the people rule themselves

Jean-Jacques Rousseau flipped the script. Natural humans, he argued, were free and basically decent; it is society, with its property and inequality, that corrupted them and put them in chains. A legitimate contract, then, cannot just install a ruler over the people; authority can only come from the people ruling themselves, through what he called the general will, the shared common interest of the community. It is a democratic and radical idea, and a double-edged one: critics warn that "the general will" can be claimed by anyone who says they speak for the people.