How did social contract theory challenge the "divine right of kings" and underlie the Revolution?

0:05[MUSIC] A series of people, John Locke, for example, Algernon Sidney and others begin to develop an idea that is intended to take down this idea of divine right kingship. That is the idea of the social contract. What they say is, no. Human societies don't begin with God implanting a king at the top of society. No, human societies just begin with groups of people living in nature.

0:38Depending on which theorist you talk to, that's “State of nature” of living without government, but just in the forest or in the desert, or you choose your state of nature. That group of people can decide at a certain point that they're going to come together and form a social contract that becomes their government. What's so revolutionary about this idea is that they can not just decide to come together, they can also decide to come apart again to break the social contract. That's also known as a revolution. Which is what happens with the Declaration of Independence, is Americans are breaking the contract of government, and they're returning to a state of nature, and then they are building those contracts a new. The social contract idea, which comes up in Hobbs,

1:33in Locke, and Rousseau, and a few others, is a way of reimagining the beginnings of humanity, such that it doesn't begin with a primal act of God in the garden of Eden, which was the original story of humanity and over which God ultimately placed a king, whether that was King David or some other king you might read about in the Bible or the kings of Europe. It was saying, we're just going to clean the slate completely and imagine a wholly new beginning of human society, but if at any time, we are unhappy with our government, we can break the contract of government, aka, we can have a revolution. Social contract theory is probably the most powerful idea of the 17th and 18th centuries because it imagines that government is not divinely given

2:38to us. It is created by us as human beings as one of our natural rights. We can take it down anytime we are unhappy. Without social contract theory, you would not have been able to have the Declaration of Independence because that is the document by which the contract of government is broken, and out of which the colonies now states have to form new contracts of government, which they call the State Constitutions, and then the Articles of Confederation. Those are Lockean new contracts of government. [MUSIC]