James Farmelant wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Apr 1999 20:59:44 -0700 Gar Lipow <lipowg at sprintmail.com>
> writes:
> >
> >
> >You see, the idea of the social contract was not new, but went back to
> >at least mediaeval times and probably to before Aristotle.
>
> The earliest discussion that I am aware of the social contract can
> be found in Book II of Plato's "The Republic." There Plato gave a
> critique of this idea which apparently was already enjoying currency
> among the sophists. Later in antiquity the Epicurean school took up
> the notion of the social contract as the basis for legitimate government.
Cornford in his translation of the *Republic* offers some interesting commentary on this. I will just speculate that the grounds for Plato's repudiation of it was that Plato was (despite offering implicitly the earliest defense of individualism as a reactionary doctrine) fundamentally (as K. Burke says) "tribalist" -- i.e. anti-individualist. If James is correct about the social contract theory having been originally a sophist innovation,
then we can see that no matter how reactionary now, it was in its origins a democratic theory, for the sophists were *the* defenders, at a theoretical level, of Athenian democracy.
Carrol