Hobbes and Rawls on Social Contract

Abstract

This article aims to compare two social contract projects designated by Thomas Hobbes and John Rawls who have rarely similar but mostly different background assumptions. The comparison is important because it accounts for the conventional history of varying social contractarian models. While Hobbes developed his views by focusing on political stability in an age of religious and social turbulences and animosities, Rawls shaped his convictions by emphasizing what constitutes a just unity in modern diverse societies. Putting both philosophers’ views over human nature and ideal governmental types on the table, this study finds out that Hobbes’s social contract having an hedonistic understanding of human motivations serves the sovereign and have almost no toleration towards diverse views, whereas Rawls’s social contract considers human beings, who are in nature is good and has conceptions of good and justice, as an end in themselves not as a means to a state and displays, to a certain extent, the peaceful existence of pluralist societies in the modern era with the constitutional and democratic form of government. Lastly, being skeptical of Rawlsian political innovation to reach an overlapping consensus, the article revisits Morsi’s ouster in light of the debates about state neutrality between so-called multi-truths