Mayflower Puritan immigrant group

The Pilgrim Fathers appear in the book as the best-known historical instance of society founded by agreement among the individuals who compose it. Their 1620 declaration aboard the Mayflower gives the social compact a concrete political form: people covenant and combine themselves into a civil body politic. The example illustrates the popular, collective possibility of contract theory, while the book stresses that the same idea had also been made to support sharply different conclusions about who should rule.

The Mayflower Compact and Contract Theory

The account distinguishes this theory of society’s origin from an earlier model in which a people contracts with its ruler. In the second model, society itself originates in, or rests on, an agreement among its members. The Pilgrim Fathers’ declaration is its clearest practical example: the compact is made among the individuals composing the community, rather than between a people and a government already standing apart from it.

The declaration’s significance lies in what it makes imaginable. If members establish their civil body through their own agreement, popular sovereignty follows naturally: the people are not merely subjects whose ruler owes them constitutional conduct, but the parties who constitute political society. The book presents this as the implication later drawn by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, not as the only conclusion historically drawn from the compact principle.

A Principle with Opposed Political Uses

The book emphasizes that contract theory had no single political consequence before it was developed into a philosophical theory. An agreement among individuals might appear to establish the people’s continuing supremacy, but Thomas Hobbes used the same premise to defend a very different arrangement. He agreed that the original contract was made among the individuals composing the State and that government was not itself a party to it. He nevertheless held that the people agreed not only to form a State but also to invest a person or persons with its government, alienating sovereignty wholly and permanently.

The contrast clarifies the particular force of the Pilgrim Fathers’ example. Their declaration makes collective formation visible, but the mere fact of an original agreement does not settle whether sovereignty remains with the people or is transferred to a ruler. The compact becomes a practical illustration of contract as the basis of a civil community; its political meaning depends on how the parties’ continuing authority is understood.

Founding Agreement and the Problem of Political Authority

Elsewhere, the book rejects the attempt to establish a right to rule simply from existing power or submission. It criticizes Hugo Grotius for reasoning from facts to rights, a method that can favor tyrants, and describes the resulting image of humanity as herds of cattle guarded by rulers for their own use. Against that account, the compact’s political significance rests on the community’s formation through agreement rather than on a ruler’s superior force or supposed natural superiority.

The book also examines why founding institutions pose a difficulty beyond merely securing assent. A legislator must shape rules suited to a people, yet a young community may not already possess the social spirit and understanding that good laws are meant to cultivate. Since the legislator cannot rely simply on force or reason to make such laws acceptable, the book explains how founders have invoked divine authority to secure obedience. This account does not identify the Pilgrim Fathers with the legislator or religious founders discussed elsewhere; it places their compact within the broader problem of how a political order is constituted and made binding.

The Compact in a Wider Theory of the State

The book’s broader political argument treats institutions as vulnerable to the opposition between particular and general wills. Government can press against popular sovereignty until it suppresses the sovereign people and breaks the social compact; government also tends to contract from rule by the many toward rule by the few. Against this account of political deterioration, the founding agreement remains a telling image of society as a body made by its members, even though the declaration alone cannot guarantee that the people will retain control of the government they establish.

That political body must also be understood in relation to its material scale. The book argues that a State has limits beyond which greater size weakens it: distance makes administration burdensome, multiplies costly layers of authority, and drains resources needed for emergencies. It also measures a State through the relation between territory and population: land should sustain its inhabitants, while the number of inhabitants should suit the land. Its account of Roman origins similarly describes a new republic organized through tribes, curiae, and military divisions, showing how foundational arrangements can acquire political form. These comparisons widen the compact’s significance: forming a body politic is not only an act of agreement, but a continuing problem of institutions, scale, and the preservation of collective authority.