 How is this social contract to be conceived? It is not an historical event that must actually take place at some point in time (TJ 120/104). It is rather a hypothetical situation, a kind of “thought experiment” (JF 17), that is designed to uncover the most reasonable principles of justice. Rawls maintains (in LHPP, cf. p.15) that the major advocates of social contract doctrine—Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant—all regarded the social contract, as a hypothetical event. Hobbes and Locke thus posited a hypothetical state of nature in which there is no political authority, and where people are regarded as rational and (for Locke) also reasonable. The purpose of this hypothetical social contract is to demonstrate what types of governments are politically legitimate, and determine the nature of individuals’ political obligations (ibid. p.16). The presumption is that if a government could or would be agreed to by all rational persons subject to it in an appropriately described pre-political situation, then it is acceptable to rational persons generally, including you and me, and hence is legitimate and is the source of our political obligations. Thus Hobbes argues that all rational persons in a state of nature would agree to authorize an absolute sovereign, while Locke comes to the opposite conclusion, contending that absolutism would be rejected in favor of constitutional monarchy. Similarly, in Rousseau and Kant, the social contract is a way to reason about the General Will, or the laws that hypothetical moral agents would all agree to in order to promote the common good and realize the freedom and equality of citizens.