In the absence of political order and law, everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the 'right to all things' and thus the freedom to plunder, rape and murder there would be an endless 'war of all against all' ( bellum omnium contra omnes). Thomas Hobbes famously said that in a 'state of nature', human life would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'. Grotius posited that individual humans had natural rights. Prominent 17th- and 18th-century theorists of the social contract and natural rights included Hugo de Groot (1625), Thomas Hobbes (1651), Samuel von Pufendorf (1673), John Locke (1689), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) and Immanuel Kant (1797), each approaching the concept of political authority differently. From this shared starting point, social contract theorists seek to demonstrate why rational individuals would voluntarily consent to give up their natural freedom to obtain the benefits of political order. In this condition, individuals' actions are bound only by their personal power and conscience. The starting point for most social contract theories is an examination of the human condition absent of any political order (termed the ' state of nature' by Thomas Hobbes). Although the antecedents of social contract theory are found in antiquity, in Greek and Stoic philosophy and Roman and Canon Law, the heyday of the social contract was the mid-17th to early 19th centuries, when it emerged as the leading doctrine of political legitimacy. The term takes its name from The Social Contract (French: Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique), a 1762 book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that discussed this concept. The relation between natural and legal rights is often a topic of social contract theory.

Social contract arguments typically are that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order. In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is a theory or model that originated during the Age of Enlightenment and usually, although not always, concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. The original cover of Thomas Hobbes's work Leviathan (1651), in which he discusses the concept of the social contract theory.

Rawls john a theory of justice