Practice question · Put in order
Arrange these works and events in chronological order.
- Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
- Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
- Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)
- Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689)
- Pateman, The Sexual Contract (1988)
Hints
- The three seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts come first, in order.
- Pateman is more than two centuries later than Rousseau.
Show the answer
- Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
- Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689)
- Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
- Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)
- 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.
Practise The Liberal State and Its Contracts
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More questions on The Liberal State and Its Contracts
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