Between Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract (1762), and including John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689), a tradition of political philosophy argued that legitimate authority derives from an implied agreement among the governed rather than from divine right or inheritance. Hobbes used the idea to justify a strong sovereign as the price of escaping a violent 'state of nature', while Locke grounded limited government and the protection of property in consent, and Rousseau located sovereignty in the collective 'general will'. These contrasting versions shared the premise that government must be answerable to the people. They became foundational texts of modern political thought.
They underpinned modern constitutional and representative government and, by locating sovereignty in the public, supported the idea of the city and its commons as matters of collective civic authority rather than private or royal possession.