Social Contract Theory in the Ruins?

This excerpt (redacted and cut for the sake of space) is from The Social Contract in the Ruins: Natural Law and Government by Consent by Paul R. DeHart. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2024). Reprinted with permission of the University of Missouri Press.

The Rise and Development of Modern Social Contract Theory

Scholars have long debated the roots of social contract theory. While agreeing on the central importance of contractarian (or consent-based) justifications of political authority in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, scholars—as Harro Höpfl and Martyn P. Thompson demonstrate—dispute whether contractarianism originated in ancient Greece, in the Latin Middle Ages (with William of Ockham and later conciliarists), with Protestant resistance theorists in France and Holland, with Catholic Counter-Reformation theorists, in some combination of all of these, or with Thomas Hobbes and distinctively modern political thought. Still others trace the headwaters of social contract theory to the covenantal order of ancient Israel. Without rejecting the importance of other sources (especially Counter-Reformation theorists), it seems undeniable that modern contractarianism—in particular, its insistence on the necessity of individual consent as not simply the occasion of but also the ground for the authorization of civil power—has deep roots in the covenantal theology of Reformed Protestantism.

The idea of a covenantal foundation for political authority arguably begins with Heinrich Bullinger’s reframing of Christian theology in terms of covenantal relations in De testamento seu foedere Dei unico et aeterno. According to Charles S. McCoy and J. Wayne Baker, “Bullinger viewed the covenant as the divine framework for human life, both religious and civil, from the beginning of the world until the last judgment.” The Latin foedus corresponds to the Hebrew berith, which, says Bullinger, stipulates terms or “conditions.” In the covenant binding together God and Abraham’s descendants, the principal condition for Abraham and his descendants is “to walk uprightly before God.” What does it mean to walk before God and uprightly? Bullinger suggests that “the Decalogue . . . seems to be almost a paraphrase of the conditions of the covenant.” According to McCoy and Baker, Bullinger holds, “the moral law was a restatement of these conditions.” And Christ, ultimately, “renewed and confirmed” it and “left for us a living example which we might follow.” Some scholars, notably Heiko Oberman, endeavor to connect covenantal (or federal) theology to late medieval nominalism and the via moderna, which rejected the real existence of universal essences and subordinated good and evil to omnipotent will. Bullinger, however, was educated and remained grounded in the via antiqua, at least insofar as he affirmed moral realism (i.e., insofar as he affirmed that a goodness not reducible to will—even omnipotent will—really exists) and the realist understanding of God’s relation to morality. Thus, he speaks of “the sheer goodness which is God’s nature” and of “divine goodness” that created “all things for the benefit of human beings.” Alongside the divine perfections of unity and omnipotence, he notes that “the Hebrew word Shaddai” also “comprehends . . . all his moral excellence and goodness.” Further, from God’s promises to Abraham, “we are able to gain full understanding that this God is the highest good.” For Bullinger there is an objective, real, highest good—God Himself—whose prescriptions redound to human well-being. Goodness is the beginning and end (or telos) of the covenant.

The Reformation was an earthquake of great magnitude not only in theology but in ecclesiology as well. Not long after the advent of covenant as the central motif for understanding and interpreting Scripture, the covenant idea led to a revolution in the design of church government. Covenantal or federal theorists within Reformed Protestantism developed a congregational model of church formation and organization. In 1613 an English separatist named Henry Jacob contended that a “visible Church of Christ under the Gospel” is “a Spiritual Body Politike” in which “the people” have “power of free consent in their ordinary government.” The “Platform of Church Discipline,” adopted by a synod of churches that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1649, provides a detailed account of the congregationalist model of church governance. According to the “Platform,” particular churches (or congregations) can only be distinguished from each other by their respective forms. And the form of a particular church (or congregation) is its “visible covenant.” The authors of the “Platform” maintain that “voluntary agreement” or “consent” (“for all these are here taken for the same”) provide the only way by which some members of a congregation can come to have authority (“church-power”) over others. A congregation is formed or established when “there is real agreement and consent of a company of faithful persons to meet constantly together in one congregation, for the public worship of God, and their mutual edification.” On this model, then, congregations are created or formed by voluntary consent.

This model of church formation implies a model of church government. The “Platform” informs its readers that a congregation exists as a church prior to the appointment of officers and remains a congregation or church even without them. Thus, while supreme power ultimately belongs with Christ, in the local church, officials are subordinate to the congregation. The congregation controls membership—it possesses authority over admission to membership as well as to admonish, censure, or remove “an offending brother” from the church: “the whole church has the power to proceed to censure . . . him, whether by admonition or excommunication and upon his repentance to restore him again unto his former communion.” The congregation also appoints “their own officers, whether elders or deacons,” and if an official “offend incorrigibly . . . the church had the power to call him to office, so they have the power . . . to remove him his office” and return him to the status of an ordinary congregant. In cases of “contumacy,” after removal from office, “the church that had power to receive him into their fellowship hath the same power to cast him out that they have concerning any other matter.”

According to Höpfl and Thompson, “separatist congregations” “interpreted their churches as free and voluntary associations founded on covenants. And, by a process that has yet to be fully explained, they appear, having compared their congregations to bodies politic, to have gone on to interpret bodies politic as if they were sectarian congregations.” Thus in 1616 Henry Jacob asked, “How is a Visible Church constituted and gathered?” He answered: “By a free mutuall consent of Believers joyning and covenanting to live as members of a holy Society together in all religious and vertuous duties as Christ and his Apostles did institute and practise in the Gospell. By such free mutuall consent also all perfect Corporations did first beginne.” Indeed, say Höpfl and Thompson, “The Covenant of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ of 1620 simply converted the church into a civil society: ‘We . . . do, by these presents, solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation.’ ” Henry Wolcott’s notes of an election sermon delivered by Thomas Hooker, generally considered the founder of Connecticut, in 1638 recount Hooker arguing, “that the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God’s allowance” and “they who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power also to set the bounds and limitations of power and place unto which they call them.” Why? Hooker says, “because the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people.” Because political authority is founded in free consent, the people who appoint may limit or set boundaries to the authority of those they choose to govern them.

In his Politica methodice digesta, first published in 1603 and culminating in the third edition of 1614, Johannes Althusius laid out the first systematic, thoroughly covenantal account of political order. For Althusius, human relations are founded on covenants. According to Höpfl and Thompson:

Althusius thus interpreted civil society as an association of lesser associations. The elementary association was the family, which was initiated by a pactum and involved a mutua obligatio [mutual obligation]. After family came private associations (collegia, societas, and the like), all joined together by pacta and laws. The association of private associations was a city; an association of cities was a province; and an association of provinces, cities, and estates was the “the universal public association.” Sovereignty in the public association was not vested . . . in some absolute monarch but in the public association—that is, in the people or their representatives. Indeed, for Althusius the sovereignty was not absolute at all, since it was limited by natural and divine law.

Althusius’s covenantal account of political order includes the proposition that government is legitimate only if it is erected on the basis of covenant (or consent). By way of illustration, consider the following passage: “Politics is the art of associating (consociandi) men for the purpose of establishing, cultivating, and conserving social life among them. Whence it is called ‘symbiotics.’ The subject matter of politics is therefore association (consociato), in which the symbiotes pledge themselves each to the other, by explicit or tacit agreement, to mutual communication of whatever is useful and necessary for the harmonious exercise of social life.”

A few pages later Althusius writes, “We further conclude that the efficient cause of political association is consent and agreement among the communicating citizens.” According to this passage, consent constitutes the efficient cause of political association qua political association. It follows from this proposition that consent constitutes a necessary condition for all political associations among human beings. Moreover, Althusius weds the covenantal foundation of all political authority to a substantially classical understanding of natural law. His affirmation of a rather traditional moral realism is apparent in his denial of absolute power: “Absolute power is wicked and prohibited. For we cannot do what can only be done injuriously. Thus even almighty God is said to be unable to do what is evil and contrary to his nature.”

According to Daniel Judah Elazar, the covenant idea, which “received its first full exposition” in the 1603 edition of Althusius’s Politica methodice digesta, “subsequently . . . appeared in various secular forms, mainly as the idea of the social contract or compact” in the work of Thomas Hobbes, James Harrington, and John Locke in England and Benedict Spinoza, Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Baron de Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Continent. A. John Simmons contends that Althusius, Grotius, and John Milton “were authors of the first important consent theories, on the foundation of which the classic works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau were constructed.” Moreover, Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), and Rousseau’s Du contrat social (1762) arguably demolished alternative grounds for political authority such as Aristotle’s putative natural subordinationism (though natural subordination is only one element of Aristotle’s theory of authority) and the sort of divine right theory promulgated in Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680).

But just here a word of caution is in order. Whereas Otto von Gierke contends that Althusius first crossed the Rubicon to social contract theory—Althusius, he says, “was the first to construct in a logical way a scientific system of general politics on the assumption of definite original contracts”—Höpfl and Thompson maintain that “Althusian theory was a historical anticlimax; it appeared only to be ignored.” I think the claims of Gierke and of Höpfl and Thompson too strong on this count. I would adapt Brian Tierney’s insight concerning the relation of Althusius to American federalism. On that subject, he writes, “Americans had to reinvent federalism for themselves, guided by their own special needs and experiences; but they were working within the same tradition of thought as Althusius.” So also Althusius and the congregationalists and, downstream from them, John Locke (whose parents, after all, seem to have held Puritan views and whose father fought on the side of Parliament in the war between Parliament and the Crown). My point is simply that Althusius shows what covenantal theology looks like when applied to the foundations of political order.

The contention of Höpfl and Thompson and of Oakley, that the principal development in terms of influence occurred not with Althusius but with the advent of congregationalism as a model of church government that was almost immediately applied to political order in British North America, strikes me as compelling. But here again caution is in order. Some scholars have too quickly dismissed the influence of the judicious Hooker on social contract theory, by treating him either as a theorist of corporate rather than individual consent or as a consent rather than a covenant theorist. Yet, Richard Hooker not only insists on the necessity of individual consent for the original establishment of political authority but also infers its necessity from the equality of human beings. Moreover, the state of nature factors into the political thought of the later Thomists of the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and especially of those associated with the Salamancan School in Spain. According to Quentin Skinner the “later Jesuit writers . . . lay the foundation for the so-called ‘social contract’ theories of the seventeenth century.” They did so by positing a state of nature populated by naturally free individuals who were “subject to no one” (as Suárez puts it), a miserable state of affairs in which men and women lack those things requisite for human preservation and in which human selfishness precludes preserving peace among them, and by invoking the “concept of consent . . . to explain how it is possible for a free individual to become the subject of a legitimate commonwealth.” Thus, “the counter-reformation theorists not only arrived at a number of radically populist conclusions, but also served as the main channel through which the contractarian approach to the discussion of political obligation came to exercise its decisive influence in the course of the following century.” Filmer’s express criticism of Bellarmine and Suárez in Patriarcha and Locke’s close reading of Filmer’s text, Sidney’s express invocation of them in his Discourses, and Althusius’s invocation of Fernando Vázquez (and of Vázquez treatment of Bartolus) in Politica all provide substantial evidence that theorists of covenant and social contract knew the works of these writers and were influenced by them.

The destruction of natural subordination and the divine right of kings paved the way for the ascendancy of social contract justifications of the authority of the state and of the obligations of citizens to obey. But it was not merely social contract theory that became ascendant. Nor was it Althusius’s metaphysically and morally realist and natural law covenantal model that emerged as the dominant modern way of justifying the state’s authority. Rather, Hobbesian and Lockean theories, theories wedded to nominalist metaphysics (in both Hobbes and Locke) and voluntaristic ethics (certainly in Hobbes and some say Locke, though here the matter is vexed), became the dominant justification of state authority. The voluntaristic ethical theory of Hobbes (and perhaps Locke), at least on its face, was a kind of divine-command theory of natural law in which things are right or good because God wills them to be so. For Hobbes, in particular, it is God’s irresistible and absolute power that makes his commands binding on his creatures. In its secularized form, social contract theory retained its nominalist and voluntarist underpinnings, while shedding the will of God as the source of moral and political obligation. Human will and convention replaced divine will.

The foregoing discussion allows us to define conventional contractarianism in broad outline. Conventional social contract theory is committed to a conventionalist understanding (or a voluntarist ontology) of obligation. Moral and political obligations derive solely from some act or exercise of will. In conventionalism’s religious form, God’s omnipotent will ultimately underwrites all moral and political obligation. On this view, God’s omnipotent power alone is sufficient to obligate or bind individuals to observe the terms of the contract, whether hypothetical or actual. In its secularized form, human agreement (human will) alone makes the social contract binding.

The Self-Referential Incoherence of Conventional Social Contract Theory

Above I noted that modernist social contract theory is wedded to nominalist metaphysics and to a voluntarist ontology of obligation. In its secularized form, this involves a denial of any standard or measure of human acts independent of human will and normative for human willing. Consequently, ethics and moral obligation are nothing other than human conventions. Justice, for instance, is taken to result from human agreement, an agreement upon the rules by which we will live together. There are various mechanisms for producing this agreement. For instance, there is John Rawls’s veil of ignorance or Jürgen Habermas’s or James Fishkin’s dialogue of justice. All of these theories posit that the proper standards for human behavior are creations of human will, a will exercised either hypothetically or actually. So they posit; so they fall. For logically speaking, it is impossible to distinguish intelligibly among exercises of will on the basis of will alone. With respect to acts or exercises of will, just as such, we have nothing but this exercise of will and that one. Consequently, in order to judge that some exercises of will bind us where others do not, there must be a source of obligation independent of will. This conclusion is the ruin of conventional social contract theory, for, to underscore the point, conventional theories of social contract make the good and the just dependent on human will alone.

To make the preceding point more precise, consider possible exercises of will. Some are those of an individual—to savor a glass of wine; to watch the Cleveland Guardians play baseball; to contemplate the argument of Plato’s Republic; to immerse oneself in the world of C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces; to engage in a dual with one’s archnemesis; to perform “Amor ti vieta” from Fedora before a panel of judges for a vocal jury; to admire the ancient Assyrian colossal winged bulls at the British Museum; to prepare filet mignon with a red wine, shallot reduction; to go rock climbing and rappelling at Rattlesnake Point in Canada; to provide food for the hungry; to give money to a mendicant who tells one of their dire need; to lay down one’s life to save a friend. Others are those of a group or a community—to build and maintain a road; to raise taxes in order to fund construction of a new school building; to designate a parcel of land for a park; to defend the village or city or nation from invaders; to erect a protective wall around the polis or, in polities of a grander scale, to make other provisions for national defense; to provide a measure of relief for members of the community in serious need. Of those that are made by a group, some reflect the unanimous consent of the community, others only the consent of the majority, still others the will of some minority with sufficient power to compel the rest (for instance, the cloture rule of the US Senate allows a minority with at least forty-one votes to exact concessions from a majority to allow passage of a bill). Moreover, some exercises of will involve voluntary consent—to buy a soda or to build a road; others exercises are coerced—to hand over one’s wallet to the attacker or to walk the plank when ordered to do so at sword’s point.

Abstractly, we might posit a set of every conceivable exercise of will that looks something like this: (W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, . . . Wn). In terms of will alone it is utter nonsense to suggest that any particular exercise of will is binding or obligatory. It makes no sense to say that W4 should be favored over or considered normative for W1, W2, W3, and W5 such that all subsequent exercises of will (or even just some) must now conform to it (i.e., that they must be consistent with it or not contradictory of it). To do so would be to posit a new exercise of will—call it W6—that designates W4 as normative for the rest. But W6 is also an exercise of will. In fact, W6 is a member of our set. As such, the selection of W4 by W6 cannot establish W4 as binding, for W6 itself lacks normative force, it being nothing other than an exercise of mere will. And it cannot pass on to some exercise of will what it does not have to give. To suggest that some exercise of will or other binds me (perhaps the will of the majority or voluntary consent to become a member of a group) whereas others do not (e.g., a will constrained by violent coercion or the will of an oligarchic and oppressive minority) is to introduce into the consideration of will a property that is not itself reducible to mere will or made by will. To reiterate my point from the previous paragraph, we cannot, in a rationally coherent way, discriminate among exercises of will on the basis of will alone. If W4 is to be able to serve as a rule and measure for other acts of will, it must be set apart by something outside the set—it must conform to some standard external to—that transcends—the set.

Consider mathematical sets—e.g., the set of all prime numbers starting with two and running to infinity. We cannot intelligibly distinguish 31 from 7 and 13 on the basis of the primeness of 31, for 7 and 13 are also primes (indeed, just as prime). It is a general principle of sets—and not only of mathematical sets—that one cannot intelligibly distinguish among the members of the set on the basis of predication of the property or properties that define it. Put another way, one cannot distinguish one thing from another, whether it be a number or anything else, on the basis of a property they both or all share. And this general principle of sets necessarily entails that one cannot distinguish among exercises of will on the basis of will alone.

The implication of the foregoing is that human will cannot be the source of political, legal, or moral obligation precisely because will, all by itself, cannot be the source of obligation at all. Consequently, to posit that some exercise of will, x, is binding vis-à-vis all (or any) other exercises of will, y, we need a standard or property of obligation, o, external to (or transcendent of) exercises of will and normative for them. Moreover, we cannot intelligibly appeal to the distinction between higher and lower order preferences to salvage the project of grounding obligation in human will. For that very distinction presupposes a standard external to human preferences by which some preferences can be deemed of a higher order while others are not. As with the argument concerning acts of will, some preferences cannot coherently be deemed higher than other preferences on the basis of preference alone. To hold that some could be higher on the basis of preference alone would be equivalent to saying that some prime numbers can be distinguished from others on the basis of primeness alone, would be to distinguish some member(s) of the set based on the predication of the property by which the set is defined, which is nonsense. Consequently, if some preferences are of a higher order than others, it must be on the basis of a property, of a rule and measure transcendent of preference alone. Ultimately, the attempt to derive obligation from mere will is self-referentially incoherent. It must therefore be rejected.

Prima facially, Hobbes and Locke appear to provide conventional contractarianism a way out of vicious circularity and out of self-referential incoherence when they posit a law of nature normative for human willing. We cannot distinguish among exercises of human will on the basis of human will, but we can distinguish some exercises of human will from others based on whether or not human will conforms to God’s will. God’s will can serve as rule and measure for human acts. Moreover, Hobbes and Locke maintain that humans have access to knowledge of God’s will for human behavior through the law of nature, a standard operating through human reason (though the reason in question may be purely instrumental in the case of Hobbes). Those who subscribe to a secularist interpretation of Hobbes (either because they think him insincere in his religious pronouncements or because they think the character of his political theory secular, whatever his personal beliefs may have been) will not be happy with such a resolution, to be sure. But some measure for human acts independent of human will is necessary if social contract theory is to escape a vicious circle.

But just here a significant problem emerges with what seems to be the Hobbesian way out of this dilemma. Suppose we ask Hobbes just why we should obey God. Hobbes answers that God has a right to rule us as a result of his irresistible power: “In the Natural Kingdom God’s right to Reign and to punish those who break his laws is from irresistible power alone.” Were we to ask Locke the same question, there are passages within the Lockean corpus in which he seems to concur. For instance, Locke says, “The foundation of obligation [in both the natural law and divine positive law] is the same, that is, the will of the supreme divine power [numen].” To be sure, certain passages within the Lockean corpus indicate a more complex moral theory—passages suggesting that the relevant thing about God’s will is that it is God’s and the relevant thing about God is that He is good and wise. For the sake of argument, however, let us take this passage as indicative of the Lockean position. If we do that, conventional social contract theory cannot escape self-referential incoherence.

Recall that we cannot intelligibly distinguish among exercises of will on the basis of will alone. By implication, obligation (moral or political) cannot be created solely by the sheer will of God, qua will. Sheer will (will qua will) provides no basis for distinguishing among exercises of will and consequently cannot distinguish among any of the following: an omnipotent will, an incontinent will, God’s will, the devil’s will, a good will, an evil will, human will, individual will, the unanimous will of society, the will of the majority in a society, the will of some minority within a society, the strongest will, the weakest will, and every will between strongest and weakest. The very act of distinguishing among exercises of will presupposes a standard external to will—some ground or property that transcends the set of exercises of will. Suppose, for a moment, that we know that some instance of will within this set is binding upon us. Consideration of will alone cannot tell us which one is, precisely because obligation and will are distinct properties. Suppose someone tells us the strongest will is binding (perhaps because the strongest will is omnipotent). And suppose, additionally, that we ask her why this is so. So far as I can tell, her reason must be because the will is the strongest will, not because it’s the strongest will. In which case strength rather than will is taken to be the source of obligation. Strength, however, is not a moral property and so, qua strength, cannot impose any obligation upon us. As Hadley Arkes puts it, moral propositions “cannot be drawn from distinctly nonmoral attributes as brute physical strength.”

Now, suppose someone maintains that God’s will is obligatory. What matters in this proposition is not sheer will or strength or omnipotence of will, but, rather, that the will is God’s. It is the fact that God has willed that makes His commands binding, not the fact that God has willed. Indeed, it is the fact that a good God—more aptly, a God that is Goodness—has commanded that makes His commands obligatory. The point, again, is that will alone cannot ground obligation. The implication is that political authority cannot derive from mere will precisely for the reason that obligation cannot be based on will alone. The inability of will alone to ground obligation per se and to ground moral obligation in particular also entails that voluntarist ontologies of moral obligation are in fact false. But, more importantly for our considerations, because the giving of consent is nothing other than an exercise of will, it follows that consent alone (even unanimous consent) is incapable of grounding obligation, moral or political. Consent cannot, therefore, provide a sufficient condition for political authority. By implication, it would be wrong to claim that consent can form both a necessary and sufficient condition for political authority. Consent alone will not do.

The problem comes to this:

(1)   It is logically impossible to distinguish among exercises of will on the basis of sheer will.

(2)    Because it is logically impossible to distinguish among exercises of will on the basis of will alone, any distinction among exercises of will presupposes a standard external to and transcendent of mere will and also normative for it—put another way, to distinguish among exercises of will in the set comprised of all exercises of will, we require a criterion (a rule and measure; a norm) or property external to the set.

(3)    Conventional social contract theory posits no other basis for obligation (moral, legal, or political) than will by virtue of its subscription to conventionalism.

(4)    A conventionally grounded social contract theory attempts to distinguish some exercises of will on the basis of mere will because the social contract makes a particular exercise of the society’s will binding upon subsequent exercises of a society’s will and on the wills of its members.

(5)   By implication of (1), (2), and (4), a conventional social contract presupposes a standard transcendent of and normative for acts of will.

(6)   Premise (5) entails the denial of conventionalism.

(7)   Conventional social contract theory therefore presupposes its own denial.

(8)   Conventional social contract theory is therefore self-referentially incoherent.

The Dilemma Posed by the Fall of Conventional Social Contract Theory

The incoherence of conventional social contract theory presents us with a crisis. Human equality, as Locke saw, seems to imply that consent is a necessary condition for the legitimate exercise of political authority. As Arkes characterizes Locke’s reasoning, “No man can be, by nature, the ruler of other men in the same way that God is by nature the ruler of men, and men are by nature the rulers of dogs, horses and monkeys. Therefore, if a situation has come about in which some men have been placed in the position of exercising power over others, that situation could not have arisen from nature. It had to arise from convention or agreement; it had to arise, one might say, from consent.” The necessity of consent follows from human equality. If that inference is correct, then, given modus tollens, denying that consent is necessary to ground political authority, entails denying human equality. As I see it, the arguments for human equality are sound. Consequently, we seem bound to hold that consent is a necessary condition for political authority and obligation while simultaneously recognizing that social contract theory, in its conventional form, is logically incoherent.

Can the Principle of Consent Survive the Fall of the Social Contract?

Is government by consent irretrievably lost? I maintain that the principle of consent is not lost and that we can rebuild a different sort of social contract theory from amid the ruins. The problem with conventional social contract theory, as it turns out, is its conventionalism. Obligation cannot be generated from conventions or constructed from will alone. Authority cannot be justified by sheer power shorn of any normative property.

We should begin the work of reconstructing social contract theory, first, by rejecting conventionalism and, second, by embracing moral and metaphysical realism. So doing we start not from scratch but engage in the work of retrieval—drawing upon an understanding of government by consent with roots in Richard Hooker, Salamancan Thomists, Bellarmine, Johannes Althusius and American founders and framers like James Otis, James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton.

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