# Contractarianism — Tradition (Social Contract Theory) > [!note] Naming. This page covers the **academic tradition** (the school of thought from Hobbes to Rawls). The civic concept — government by consent and how the right attacks it — has its own canonical page at [[Social Contract Theory]]. The two are deliberately separate registers; this page was renamed from "Social Contract Theory" on 2026-06-06 to resolve the basename collision. Social contract theory explains political authority as arising from a (hypothetical) agreement among individuals to exit a pre-political "state of nature." Its three founding variants — [[Thomas Hobbes]]'s absolute sovereign (*[[Leviathan]]*), [[John Locke]]'s limited government protecting natural rights (*[[Two Treatises of Government]]*), and [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]'s general will (*[[The Social Contract]]*) — define the modern vocabulary of legitimacy, consent, and rights. [[John Rawls]] revived it in the 20th century as a theory of distributive justice. ## Why it matters on the right This tradition is unusual in being both **foundational to** and **a target of** the contemporary right. The [[John Locke]] strand — natural rights, consent of the governed, limited government, the right to revolution — is the philosophical DNA of the American Founding and remains the common idiom of mainstream conservatism and [[Libertarianism]]. Yet the [[Catholic Post-Liberalism]] right ([[Patrick Deneen]]) now indicts the entire contractarian framework: by founding society on the consenting, rights-bearing individual, it claims, [[Liberalism]] corrodes the unchosen bonds of family, faith, and place. Meanwhile [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]] is a stock villain in conservative genealogies of totalitarianism, and [[John Rawls]] is the egalitarian liberalism the right defines itself against. See the [[Political Philosophy]] branch and the [[Philosophy in Right-Wing Thought Hub]] MOC.