Whether social contracts are explicit or implicit, they provide a valuable framework for harmony in society. 32. animals that are unable to enter into binding agreements between themselves to avoid causing or suffering harm have no right to justice; Similarly, for peoples who either could not or did not want to enter into binding agreements, so as not to do harm or suffer damage. According to Pateman`s argument, a number of feminists have also questioned the nature of the person, which is at the heart of contract theory. The liberal individual, the entrepreneur, is represented by the Hobbesian man, the owner of Lockes, the «Noble Savage» of Roussau, the person of Rawls in the original position and Gauthier Robinson Crusoe. The liberal individual is considered universal: without violence, without sex, without class, without body and considered an abstract and generalized model of humanity. However, many philosophers have argued that if we take a closer look at the characteristics of the liberal individual, what we find is not a representation of universal humanity, but a historically localized and specific type of person. C.B. Macpherson, for example, argued that the Hobbesian is in particular a bourgeois man, with the characteristics we would expect from a person at the time of the emergence of capitalism that characterized modern-day Europe. Feminists have also argued that the liberal individual is a particular, historical and embodied person.
(Like racist philosophers like Charles Mills, which are discussed below.) Specifically, they argued that the person who is at the center of liberal theory and the social contract is gender specific. Christine Di Stefano shows in her 1991 book, Configurations of Masculinity, that a number of historically important modern philosophers can be understood to develop their theories from the point of view of virility, as thought in modern times. She argues that Hobbes` conception of the liberal individual, which laid the foundation for the dominant modern image of man, is particularly masculine in that it is conceived as atomism and loneliness and owes nothing to another person, especially his mother. The man from Hobbes is thus radically individual, in a way that is particularly due to the character of modern virility. Virginia Held, in 1993, argued in her book Feminist Morality that the theory of social contract was implicitly based on an idea of the person who could best be described as a «businessman.» It is primarily a matter for the businessman to maximize his own interests, taken into account individually, and he enters into contracts as a means of achieving this objective. However, the businessman does not represent all people at all times and in all places. In particular, children and those who provide them with the care they need, who were women in the past, are not adequately represented. The «businessman» model cannot therefore claim to be a general representation of all persons. Similarly, Annette Baier argues that Gauthier`s idea of the liberal individual, who takes the social contract as a means of maximizing his own individual interests, is gender-specific, insofar as it does not take seriously the position of children or women, who are generally responsible for the care of these children.
The theory of the social contract, almost as old as philosophy itself, considers that people`s moral and/or political obligations depend on a contract or agreement between them to form the society in which they live. Socrates uses some kind of social contract argument to explain to Crito why he should stay in prison and accept the death penalty. However, the theory of the social contract is rightly associated with modern moral and political theory and, for the first time, it is fully presented and defended by Thomas Hobbes. After Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are the best-known supporters of this extremely influential theory which, in the history of the modern West, was one of the most dominant theories of moral and political theory.