These essays contest the truism that the social contract is a modern political idea. Just as Rawls came to acknowledge that his political theory built in the parochial horizon of his time, Hobbes s, Grotius s, and Locke s theories presuppose their ancien regime world. Despite their universalizing language, Hobbes s and Locke s theories addressed the age-old issue of resistance to tyrants and assumed the framework of hereditary monarchy. Essays in the volume also relate the logic of their contract claims back to Bodin s and Grotius s defenses of absolute sovereignty and direct attention to the affinity between an absolutism of fear and Hume s sensibility. For politically-inclined readers, these theories come to life by being read as treatises on politics in the early-modern state."
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