  Given Rehberg's critique of rationalism and his respect for tradition, his reaction to social contract doctrine should not be surprising.  He condemned it in the sharpest terms.  This doctrine not only assumed that every individual has the power to judge political affairs, but it also seemed to absolve him from all traditional responsibilities and obligations.  The social contract doctrine falsely holds, he argued, that we enter society and the state at will, as if we were born free and had some natural criterion by which to judge them; but we are born into society and the state, and the criteria by which we judge things are formed by them.  We must give up the assumption, he insisted, that civil rights belong to people by nature; ranks and rights are inherited and depend upon the place in society into which we are born (62).