권력과 소통의 정치학

The Politics of Power and Communication : with a special reference to modern discourses of social contract in England

This paper aims to reconstruct the ‘social contract theory’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in terms of communication and reconciliation. In the beginning of seventeenth century, there emerged the idea of modern social contract, which argued that the formation of society was based on individuals will. In England, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were the representative thinkers of the ‘social contract theory’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, that is the tumultuous period of the English Civil Wars. The core of modern theory of social contract lies in voluntarism, in which political legitimacy originates from the will of the individuals which are composed of a society. On the other hand, the modern theory of social contract is the historical product of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, when the kings came into severe conflict with the civil society initiated by parliaments. This paper explores the nature and meaning of political communication in Hobbes and Locke s theory of social contract. To this end, I seek to elaborate the issues in the political conflicts of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, how the society was split by the conflicts, how to understand the opposing arguments, and what Hobbes and Locke proposed to bring them together. By doing so, this paper intends to provide clues and lessons for the problems of communication and reconciliation which we have faced today.