- social contract
- noun Date: 1837 an actual or hypothetical agreement among the members of an organized society or between a community and its ruler that defines and limits the rights and duties of each
New Collegiate Dictionary. 2001.
social contract
Look at other dictionaries:
Social contract — social contract … Philosophy dictionary
social contract — social contract, or compact In political philosophy, a term applied to the theory of the origin of society associated chiefly with the names of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, though it can be traced back to the Greek Sophists. Rousseau (Contract… … Black's law dictionary
social contract — so·cial contract n: an actual or hypothetical agreement among individuals forming an organized society or between the community and the ruler that defines and limits the rights and duties of each Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of Law. Merriam… … Law dictionary
social contract — (also social compact) ► NOUN ▪ an implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for mutual benefit, for example by sacrificing some individual freedom for state protection … English terms dictionary
social contract — or social compact n. in the theories of certain political philosophers, as Locke and Rousseau, the agreement among individuals uniting for various reasons, by which organized society was begun and sets of regulations were instituted to govern… … English World dictionary
Social contract — This article is about the political and philosophical concept. For Rousseau s 1762 treatise on the concept, see The Social Contract. For other uses, see Social Contract (disambiguation). The social contract is an intellectual device intended to… … Wikipedia
social contract — 1. the voluntary agreement among individuals by which, according to any of various theories, as of Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau, organized society is brought into being and invested with the right to secure mutual protection and welfare or to… … Universalium
social contract — A basis for legitimate legal and political power in the idea of a contract. Contracts are things that create obligations, hence if we can view society as organized ‘as if’ a contract had been formed between the citizen and the sovereign power,… … Philosophy dictionary
social contract — A theory of social order that was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although the idea goes back to Plato. The social contract is an unwritten agreement between the state and its citizens, in which the relative rights and duties … Dictionary of sociology
social contract — noun an implicit agreement among people that results in the organization of society; individual surrenders liberty in return for protection (Freq. 2) • Hypernyms: ↑agreement, ↑accord * * * ˌsocial ˈcontract 7 [social contract] ( … Useful english dictionary
social contract, or compact — In political philosophy, a term applied to the theory of the origin of society associated chiefly with the names of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, though it can be traced back to the Greek Sophists. Rousseau (Contract Social) held that in the pre… … Black's law dictionary
