Abstract
“The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, including the classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State” , noted the American anarcho-capitalist Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995). Indeed, what justifies the authority that the political institutions have over their citizens? What justifies the obedience of the population? And, what justifies a State? The questioning of the concept of a State is at the core of modern political discussions. While some States, such as the USRR, abruptly vanished in the XXth century or, others like Somalia, have been called “faint”, an aspiration for a State remains ever growing, as might be proven with the current developments in Kosovo. Indeed, the necessity of the State being asserted as early as in the XVth century by Niccolo Machiavelli, and since the XIXth century, the State has become a usual form of societal organization - natural, accepted and justified. With the development of market capitalism and the breakdown of feudalism, was seen the emergence of liberalism, a philosophy committed to individualism and rationality, that brought answers to the teeming questions about the State – its birth, its construction, its necessity and even its form. The question of legitimacy of a State, and hence its acceptance by the population, has conspicuously found an explanation in liberal social contract theories, which have attempted to elucidate, in a variety of ways, the rationale behind the erection of a legitimate state authority, and the consent of the governed to obey to the political obligation it induces. The social contract theories may be broadly divided into two main currents – contractarianism and contractualism. Contractarianism, based on the writings of Thomas Hobbes, is a social contract theory based on the self-interest of the governed. By concluding a contract with others, an individual, in his pursuit of happiness, seeks to maximize his own interest. Contractualism, derived from the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and equally present in John Locke and John Rawls works, has a radically different basis for the creation of a social contract – its rationality and justifiability.
