The Research Of The West Social Contract Thought Development

Western political thought stretches more than 2,000 years, its theme in inheritance and continuity, broadly speaking, is the relations of human and society. In the western political thought history, "The Social Contract" as the one of the political theories with the most extensive impact, its core exploration is the theme."The Social Contract" mainly refers to this kind of theory the western classical natural jurists held that the people in the "Natural State" transferred their natural rights to form the national political power through setting contract; to a large extent it belongs to the modern nation theory. Social contract concept has a long history, the holders of this theory often traced some theoretical sources or carriers back to ancient times; but no matter how, until the emergence of "Classical Social Contract", the social contract theory in the modern sense truly gave birth to itself. By Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and many political thinkers' development, adjustment and perfection, social contract theory was to be Western countries orthodox theory for a time. Meanwhile, the theory also suffered from its opponents' criticisms and attacks, such as Hegel and Hume, and so forth. "The Social Contract" played an important role in theory for modern bourgeois revolutions and the creation of bourgeois states. With the completion of this historic mission, and many contradictions in itself, it withdrew from the historical arena.However, in 1971 the publication of Rawls's A Theory of Justice, triggered a continual great discussion about political philosophy, and formed a large number of the political philosophical literatures with important significance; the social contract theory achieves its revival in modern and seeks its new purport. Despite a difficult beginning, but the revival at least clears us that the once silent, is not the end of its history.