Welcome to Douglas Wilson's The Plodcast, presented by Canon Press.

Yeah. Yes, God, God, God don't never change.

So welcome to the plodcast this is episode

272 I'm glad to be with you my name is Douglas Wilson and I am glad you're here

so today I want to talk about social contract and I want to talk about social contract.

I want to talk about the social contract.

There are three thinkers that are usually associated with the social contract theory. They are Thomas Hobbs and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John

Locke. Now in this world of social contract theory I would argue that John Locke had the most Christian

capital in his system. John Locke was himself a professing Christian, wrote a commentary on Ephesians, and so on.

But he was not the same kind of Christian that his father actually had been part of the

Puritan parliament in the 1600s. So he was, John Locke was the son of a Puritan and, but he largely took Protestant resistance theology and then secularized it.

Part of the secularization has to do with this idea of social contract.

John Locke was sort of the right wing of social contract theory where C.S. Lewis calls Rousseau the father of the

totalitarian and Thomas Hobbs famously wrote Leviathan. So if you wanted, if you're

sort of braced for an overweening totalitarian state, you're probably going to get more of a straight line from Hobbs and Rousseau to that

than you would from John Locke. John Locke was more interested in a social contract

theory that resulted in a social contract theory that resulted in a social organization that would protect the rights of the individual.

But all of them begin with a social contract.

Now the problem with this social contract is that it is something that never happened.

It's an imaginary contract, an imaginary covenant, an imaginary

contract that is postulated as sort of an abstraction

to fill a void in the argument. What is it that ties us all together? Why do I have to pay

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