Abstract
This chapter defends an account of Hobbes’s social contract against the revisionist interpretation defended by Jean Hampton in her Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition. Hampton argues that the social contract is no contract, but a “self-interested agreement” or convention. She is led to deny that this agreement involves the alienation of liberties to the sovereign; instead, the latter is (only) the agent of the people, with their liberties loaned to it. This essay defends the more traditional view that Hobbes’s argument does make use of contract and not (only) convention, and that his is an alienation theory, not an agency one. With a richer moral psychology and understanding of practical rationality, Hobbes’s alienation theory can adapted to a limited sovereign. This essay revises some of the author’s interpretation defended in his earlier work, The Logic of Leviathan.
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