Abstract

The central or dominant intellectual model which provided the structure of social and political thought in the 18th century was the "social contract". Both hume and kant felt obliged to assess it carefully-Hume coming out an opponent and kant a supporter of the model. This opposition is particularly interesting for the following reason: hume's attack on social contract theory is directed primarily against hobbes and locke, And it is interesting to see if post-Humean social contract theories (especially kant's and that of our own contemporary john rawls) succeed in avoiding his very powerful objections to this line of thought