The Social Contract
Long before Hobbes and Locke, the Greeks sensed that justice springs not from nature or the gods but from a mutual pact among people not to harm one another.
Centuries before Hobbes and Locke, Greek thinkers floated the idea that political community rests on agreement. In Plato's Republic, Glaucon (voicing a Sophistic view) describes justice as a compact people make to avoid suffering wrong, while Epicurus (late 4th–early 3rd c. BCE) defined justice itself as a covenant 'neither to harm nor be harmed.' These ancient formulations planted the seeds of the contractarian tradition that would later dominate modern political philosophy.
How it traveled
- History of the Peloponnesian WarAthens · -400explains
- CritoAthens · -399explains
- RepublicAthens · -375explains
- Ratae SententiaeAthens · -270explains
- HistoriesMegalopolis · -118explains
- Ab urbe conditaPadua · -27explains
- Abarbanel on TorahNaples · 1505
- Historia RomanaRomeexplains
- Historical LibrarySyracuse (Sicily)explains
- De BellisConstantinople (Istanbul)explains
- Jewish Antiquities—explains
Key passages(20)
Vitae philosophorum · Diogenes Laertius
Vitae philosophorum · Diogenes Laertius
Antiquitates Romanae · Dionysius of Halicarnassus
Praeparatio Evangelica · Eusebius of Caesarea