state of nature as so awful that he thought it likely that consent would freely be
given to the most authoritarian and draconian of governments. Locke, how-
ever, argued that the state of nature was only mildly awkward, and thus derived
a very liberal and weak state from his social contract. It was not necessarily
assumed that the social contract had ever been an actual historical event; the
emphasis was much more on a logical defence of a hypothetical state by
suggesting what would happen were people free to make such a choice. The
method of theorizing became unfashionable for a long time, being replaced by
utilitarianarguments which tended to get to much the same conclusions from
a different approach. Since the 1960s modified versions of social contract
theories have reappeared, especially in the work of the most important of all
modern political philosophers, JohnRawls.
Social Democracy
Social democracy is a label used to indicate a reformist and non-Marxist left-
of-centre party, one which differs from moderateconservatism only in
relatively marginal ways. A typical social democrat party, for example, will
probably espouse some degree ofnationalization, but do so more in terms of
the capacity for organized planning of the economy, or the guaranteed
production of public utilities, than from any theoretical opposition to private
propertyper se. Again, a social democrat party is likely to opt for higher and
more proportional direct taxation, and for taxes on industry and commerce, on
the grounds of social justice. Such a party will, in general, seek some redis-
tribution of wealth, especially through an organizedwelfare state, but will not
make equality a primary goal in its own right. The Social Democratic Party of
Germany (SPD) and the FrenchParti Socialisteare all social democrat
parties, whether or not the words appear in their titles. The BritishLabour
Party, was formerly social democrat, but since the rise to power of Tony Blair
and his reformists who re-branded the party‘New Labour’, it is difficult to
claim that the label is still valid. The other parties mentioned have either
begun, or appear likely to begin, to move the same way as an international
consensus forms around the commitment to a morelaissez-faireeconomic
policy and a monetarist fiscal policy.
The prototypes, or paradigms, of social democracy are the more or less
identical and so-named social democrat parties of the Scandinavian countries,
which presided over a mixed (that is, capitalist but partly nationalized and
highly planned) economy, and a tax-expensive welfare state, for most of the
period between the end of the First World War and the early 1970s and, in the
case of Sweden into the 1990s. Occasionally, as in the German constitution
(Grundgesetz—the Basic Law), the phrase ‘social democracy’ is used to identify
an entire system of government. If this usage means anything at all, it is a
Social Democracy