# The Liberal State and Its Contracts

Political Science I · Political Science I · https://tryals.app/learn/political-science-i/the-liberal-state-and-its-contracts

## Consent Instead of Command

The liberal state rests on consent. Authority is legitimate because citizens would have agreed to it.

| Thinker | State of nature | The contract yields | Right of resistance |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Hobbes** | War of all against all | An absolute sovereign | None |
| **Locke** | Governed by natural law | Limited government in trust | Yes, if trust is broken |
| **Rousseau** | Free, corrupted by society | Sovereignty of general will | People remain sovereign |

Every contract is **hypothetical**. Nobody signed anything. It serves as a test of institutions, not a historical event.

### Liberalism vs Democracy

**This** distinction is often collapsed. Liberalism constrains power. Democracy distributes it.

The nineteenth-century liberal state restricted the franchise to propertied men. In **Britain** before **1832**, the electorate was under **5%** of adults. Even after the **Second Reform Act** of **1867**, it included no women.

### The Sexual Contract

**Carole Pateman** argued that classic theorists did not simply forget women. Instead, the social contract **required** a prior domestic agreement.

The contracting individuals were male household heads. Women were subjects of the settlement rather than parties to it.

* Theorists placed the family explicitly outside the contract.
* The theoretical individual was defined by property and independence.
* The exclusion was **structural rather than incidental**.

> **Common pitfall:** treating early exclusions as simple oversights. The public-private division remains load-bearing within the theory.

## Practice questions

9 of this lesson's 13 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. A nineteenth-century state has a constitution, entrenched rights, separated powers and a franchise of under five per cent. Why is it a liberal state but not a democratic one?

A. Liberalism constrains power while democracy distributes it, and only the first condition is met
B. Competitive elections alone make a regime democratic, regardless of the proportion of citizens who vote
C. A written constitution and rule of law automatically convert a limited state into a full democracy
D. Democracy is defined strictly by the division of state powers rather than the extent of the franchise

**Answer:** A. Liberalism constrains power while democracy distributes it, and only the first condition is met

**Why:** Because the two words answer different questions. **Liberalism** is about limits on power, rights, courts, separated institutions. **Democracy** is about who holds it. A state can have every liberal constraint and a franchise of five per cent, and most nineteenth-century European states did exactly that for decades.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-liberal-state-and-its-contracts/a-nineteenth-century-state-has-a-constitution-entrenched-rights

### 2. Which are true of the social contract as an argument?

A. It is a historical claim about an event in the past
B. Its standard objection is that hypothetical consent binds nobody
C. It tests institutions by asking whether they could have been consented to
D. It is hypothetical: nobody actually signed anything

**Answer:** B. Its standard objection is that hypothetical consent binds nobody; C. It tests institutions by asking whether they could have been consented to; D. It is hypothetical: nobody actually signed anything

**Why:** Reading the contract as history is the most common first-year error, and it makes the theory absurd rather than wrong. The argument is a **test**: legitimate authority is authority that free and equal people could have agreed to, and the serious objection is exactly that could-have-agreed is a strange ground for being bound.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-liberal-state-and-its-contracts/which-are-true-of-the-social-contract-as-an-argument

### 3. Complete the account of liberal theory.

**Answer:** Hobbes concluded that the contract yields an **absolute** sovereign, while Locke held that government holds power in **trust** and may be resisted when it is broken. Montesquieu supplied the mechanism by which power checks power, the separation of **powers**. Pateman argued that the social contract presupposed a prior **sexual** contract.

**Why:** The four blanks span the tradition and its sharpest internal critique. Note that Pateman is working **inside** contract theory rather than dismissing it: her claim is about what the argument required in order to work, which is why it is harder to answer than an external objection.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-liberal-state-and-its-contracts/complete-the-account-of-liberal-theory

### 4. Pateman argues that contract theorists simply forgot to consider women.

**Answer:** False

**Why:** **False**, and the distinction is the whole point. They discussed the family at length and placed it deliberately outside the contract; the contracting "individual" is specified as property-holding, independent and male-headed. Pateman's claim is that the exclusion is **structural**, the argument needed it, rather than an oversight that later reformers could simply correct.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-liberal-state-and-its-contracts/pateman-argues-that-contract-theorists-simply-forgot-to-consider

### 5. Social contract theory relies on a hypothetical agreement rather than a historical one. What follows from this distinction when evaluating whether an existing state is legitimate?

A. Legitimacy requires tracing modern laws back to an original charter
B. Citizens may withdraw their consent whenever a state breaches trust
C. Historical documents must demonstrate explicit consent from everyone
D. The contract serves as a conceptual benchmark rather than an event

**Answer:** D. The contract serves as a conceptual benchmark rather than an event

**Why:** Treating the contract historically mistakes a normative standard for an empirical occurrence. Contract theory assesses whether an institutional settlement could be justified to rational individuals, not whether a real founding event occurred or an explicit document was signed.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-liberal-state-and-its-contracts/social-contract-theory-relies-on-a-hypothetical-agreement-rather-than

### 6. Approximately what percentage of the adult population in Britain could vote before the 1832 Reform Act?

**Answer:** 4 (within ±3)

**Why:** Under **five per cent**, and it remained under a third of adult men after 1867, with no women at all until 1918. The figures are the answer to anyone who treats liberal and democratic as synonyms: these states had constitutions, rights and courts for a century before they had electorates worth the name.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-liberal-state-and-its-contracts/approximately-what-percentage-of-the-adult-population-in-britain

### 7. Sort each feature by whether it belongs to LIBERALISM or to DEMOCRACY.

**Answer:**

- Liberalism: Entrenched individual rights, Separation of powers, Independent courts constraining the executive
- Democracy: Universal adult suffrage, Majority rule through elections, Equal weight for every vote

**Why:** The columns can and did exist separately, which is why "liberal democracy" is a compound rather than a redundancy. The two can also conflict: entrenched rights are precisely limits on what a majority may decide, and that tension is a permanent feature rather than a defect.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-liberal-state-and-its-contracts/sort-each-feature-by-whether-it-belongs-to-liberalism-or-to-democracy

### 8. Arrange these works and events in chronological order.

**Answer:**

1. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
2. Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689)
3. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
4. Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)
5. Pateman, The Sexual Contract (1988)

**Why:** The gap before the last item is the shape of the argument: the framework was built over a century and its structural critique arrived two hundred years after it had become the common sense of European constitutions. That is normal for political theory and worth noticing.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-liberal-state-and-its-contracts/arrange-these-works-and-events-in-chronological-order

### 9. Arrange the steps of the contract argument in the order it proceeds.

**Answer:**

1. Describe the condition of people without political authority
2. Show why that condition is unsatisfactory
3. Identify what free and equal people would agree to in order to leave it
4. Derive the form of legitimate authority from that agreement
5. Test existing institutions against the result

**Why:** Laying the argument out as a sequence shows why the state of nature does so much work: everything downstream depends on how bad it was said to be. This is also why the three theorists reach such different conclusions from an identical method.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/political-science-i/the-liberal-state-and-its-contracts/arrange-the-steps-of-the-contract-argument-in-the-order-it-proceeds