The “Social Contract” Theory
The theory of a pact or contract between the Government and the people became the favourite assumption of political writers from the sixteenth century onward, and it was this theory that Rousseau popularised in his “Social Contract,” the theory, too, which triumphed for a season in the French Revolution.
The theory is, of course, pure assumption, without any basis in history, and resting on no foundation of fact. It assumes that primitive man was born with enlightened views on civil government, and that for the greater well-being of his tribe or nation he deposited the sovereign authority which belonged to himself, in a prince or king—or in some other form of executive government—retaining the right to withdraw his allegiance from the government if the authority is abused, and the contract which conferred sovereignty violated. It was not maintained that the contract was an actually written document; it was supposed to be a tacit agreement. The whole theory seems to have sprung from the study of Roman law and the constitutions of Athens and Sparta. Nothing was known of primitive man or of the beginnings of civilisation till the nineteenth century. The Bible and the classical literature of Greece and Rome are all concerned with civilised, not primitive, man, and with slaves and “heathens” who are accounted less than men. The “sovereign people” of Athens and Sparta became the model of later republican writers, while the choosing of a king by the Israelites recorded in the Old Testament sanctioned the idea, for early Protestant writers, that sovereignty was originally in the people.
The Huguenot Languet, in his Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (1579), maintained on scriptural grounds that kingly power was derived from the will of the people, and that the violation by the king of the mutual compact of king and people to observe the laws absolved the people from all allegiance.72 The Jesuit writers, Bellarmine and Mariana, argued for the sovereignty of the people as the basis of kingly rule; and when the English divines of the Established Church were upholding the doctrine of the divine right of kings, the Spanish Jesuit, Suarez, was amongst those who attacked that doctrine, quoting a great body of legal opinion in support of the contention that “the prince has that power of law giving which the people have given him.” Suarez, too, insists that all men are born equal, and that “no one has a political jurisdiction over another.” Milton, in his “Tenure of Kings and Magistrates” (1649), had taken a similar line: the people had vested in kings and magistrates the authority and power of self-defence and preservation. “The power of kings and magistrates is nothing else but what is only derivative, transferred, and committed to them in trust from the people to the common good of all, in whom the power yet remains fundamentally, and cannot be taken from them without a violation of their natural birthright.” Hooker, fifty years earlier (1592-3), in his “Ecclesiastical Polity,” Book I., had affirmed the sovereignty or legislative power of the people as the ultimate authority, and had also declared for an original social contract, “all public regiment of what kind soever seemeth evidently to have risen from deliberate advice, consultation, and composition between men, judging it convenient and behoveful.” Hobbes made the social contract a justification for Royal absolutism, and Locke, with a Whig ideal of constitutional government, enlarged on the right of a people to change its form of government, and justified the Revolution of 1688. The writings of Hobbes and Locke have had a lasting influence, and Locke is really the source of the democratic stream of the eighteenth century. It rises in Locke to become the torrent of the French Revolution.
But Huguenots and Jesuits, Hooker and Milton—what influence had their writings on the mass of English people? None whatever, as far as we can see. Milton could write of “the power” of “the people” as a “natural birthright,” but the power was plainly in Cromwell’s army, and “the people” had no means of expression concerning its will, and no opportunity for the assertion of sovereignty. Lilburne and the Levellers held that democracy could be set up on the ruins of Charles I.’s Government, and the sovereignty of the people become a fact; and with a ready political instinct Lilburne proposed the election of popular representatives on a democratic franchise. Cromwell rejected all Lilburne’s proposals; for him affairs of State were too serious for experiments in democracy; and Lilburne himself was cast into prison by the Commonwealth Government. Lilburne’s pamphlets were exceedingly numerous, and his popularity, in London particularly, enormous. He was the voice of the unrepresented, powerless citizens in whom the republican theorists saw the centre of authority. The one effort to persuade the Commonwealth Republic to give power to the people was made by John Lilburne, and it was defeated. The Whig theory that an aristocratic House of Commons, elected by a handful of people, and mainly at the dictation of the landowners, was “the People,” triumphed. The bulk of the English people were left out of all account in the political struggles of Whigs and Tories, and democracy was not dreamed of till America was free and France a republic. The industrial revolution compelled the reform of the British House of Commons, and democracy has slowly superseded aristocracy, not from any enthusiasm for the “sovereign people,” but from the traditional belief that representative government means the rule of the people.
Precedent, not theory, has been the argument for democracy in England.