Quote Originally Posted by TheCurmudgeon View Post
Just for fun ...

The myth of the Social Contract is a necessity of a liberal society. Hobbes needed something beyond religion to explain why were no longer engaged in the war of all against all. Since that was before the recognition that man is simply a social animal and huddles together in groups naturally, and despite the fact that Socrates noted that man was a political (social) animal, the myth of the Social contract was created. Others like Locke added to it, although Locke believed that man lived in a moral state of nature in effect, denying the idea of “the fall from grace”. Still, unable to finding our social nature in secular theory, Locke’s ideas rested on that morality origins in God-given commands to act in a moral way. Rousseau came the closest to a secular theory for man’s social nature, although he did cling to the idea of the “fall from grace” as the reason for property rights.

That is the basis of the individual in relation to society. Rousseau went farther to argue that from that state of nature, the only way to defend ourselves was to create limitation on our natural rights.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/
Hobbes actually claimed that mankind has a duty to seek peace and that creating the the Great Leviathan (AKA a government) is the only way to do that. In Hobbes' view, people have no right of revolution either--if your governance is bad, you must just suck it down. The state of nature would be even worse.

For Locke things are a little better because Locke starts from a state of nature where natural resources are not scares(scarcity is a fact for Hobbes). As a result Locke's social contract focuses on rights rather than duties.

Rousseau seems to waffle on rights and duties.

So again, part of the myth includes one's view of the state of nature out of which a group of folks come together to form a nation/government.

However, to one of Stan's points and his parenthetic claim of identity above, even though we were social before we were human, that does not necessarily mean we were political as well. Being political does not equal being social. I think both Plato and Aristotle, the first 2 Western political theorists, at least the first two with significant extant written work, agree on that point.