The sentence that best describes the Enlightenment idea of the "social contract" is: People give up some rights in order to have other rights protected. Because people had the choice to hand their rights over to a ruler and create their own government (they created this for the own good will of the people and themselves). Social Contract is a theory that addresses the questions of the origin of society and the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual (originating during the Age of Enlightenment). Because people act in own self-interest, the philosopher Hobbes believed that people had to hand over their rights to a strong ruler and in exchange, they gained law and order (the ruler had to have total power to keep citizens under control).
