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Hello, man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

One thinks himself a master of others and still remains a greater slave than they.

Thus dramatically begins Jean-Jacques Rousseau's influential

work of political philosophy, the social contract. Russo was trying to

understand why a man would give up his natural freedoms and bind himself to the rule of a prince or a government.

It's among the oldest questions in political philosophy, but the argument flourished, particularly in the 17th and 18th century as France and Britain were racked by civil strife and revolution,

what another great social contract thinker Thomas Hobbes might call

the War of All Against All.

We'd me to discuss the social contract as Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College

University of London, Karen O'Brien, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick,

and Melissa Lane Senior Lecture at the heart at Hart, who is the social contract between?

Well, it's distinctive in the social contract of the 17th century beginning with Grocious and moving on to Hobbs and Rousseau is that the social contract is among individuals.

Previous theorists had talked about a contract, for example, between a king and the people for example some of the

Huguenot resistance theories but Grocious begins with the idea that individuals have

natural rights and that they have to establish a political society by giving up some of those natural rights

and then moving on to establish political authority.

Can we just go about and find a taproot in Plato which just might give it some sort of perspective?

I know we're talking about nearly 2,000 years before

Grocious, but nevertheless in Crito, when Socrates refuses to flee his cello, his urge to and go to another

city when he's been condemned to death and therefore condemns

...