The Declaration of Independence’s assertion of popular sovereignty, introduced by the simple word “We,” is deeply rooted in social contract theory, an Enlightenment philosophy that reshaped political thought about governance. This school of thought posits that governments derive authority from agreements between rulers and the governed instead of hereditary or divinely sanctioned rule. Thinkers like Thomas Hobbes—the 17th-century English philosopher, whose landmark work Leviathan (1651) laid the foundations of modern political theory—imagined a “state of nature” (48) where life was chaotic and insecure. Hobbes famously described this condition as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (4) To escape this condition, people voluntarily surrendered certain freedoms to a governing authority in exchange for safety and order. For Hobbes, this authority took the form of an absolute sovereign, a single ruler or assembly granted broad power to maintain peace. As a philosophical concept, the social contract functions as a hypothetical agreement used to explain political authority and the relationship between individuals and the state (D’Agostino, Fred. “Contemporary Approaches to the Social Contract.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021).

The Founders, and especially Thomas Jefferson, were most influenced by the version of this theory articulated by John Locke, a seventeenth-century English philosopher whose Two Treatises of Government (1689) challenged absolute monarchy and argued that political authority derives from the consent of the governed. Locke differed from Hobbes by maintaining that people do not surrender all their freedoms to a ruler; they retain certain natural rights, which he identified as life, liberty, and property, rights that no government can legitimately take away. It was this framework that Jefferson adapted in the Declaration, famously recasting Locke’s message as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (25). Locke argued that legitimate government arises when free individuals consent to form a community for their mutual protection and well-being. He wrote, “The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community” (4). 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an 18th-century Swiss-French philosopher whose works The Social Contract (1762) and Discourse on Inequality (1755) made him one of the most radical political thinkers of the Enlightenment—further developed these ideas by defining the “we” as the “general will” of the people, a collective power directed toward the common good. Rousseau argued that systems of property and social inequality contributed to corruption within society. His concept of the general will held that political legitimacy comes from the collective moral judgment of the community as a whole, an idea that later influenced revolutionary political thought in Europe. Thus, when the Declaration begins with “We hold these truths” (53), it invokes the idea of political authority grounded in the collective will of the people, an idea later echoed in the Constitution’s preamble, “We the people” (3).