Editing Social contract (section)

===Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's individualist social contract (1851)===
While Rousseau's social contract is based on [[popular sovereignty]] and not on individual sovereignty, there are other theories espoused by [[individualist]]s, [[libertarians]], and [[Anarchism|anarchists]] that do not involve agreeing to anything more than [[Negative and positive rights|negative rights]] and creates only a limited state, if any.

[[Pierre-Joseph Proudhon]] (1809–1865) advocated a conception of social contract that did not involve an individual surrendering sovereignty to others. According to him, the social contract was not between individuals and the state, but rather among individuals who refrain from coercing or governing each other, each one maintaining complete sovereignty upon him- or herself:

{{blockquote|What really is the Social Contract? An agreement of the citizen with the government? No, that would mean but the continuation of [Rousseau's] idea. The social contract is an agreement of man with man; an agreement from which must result what we call society. In this, the notion of commutative justice, first brought forward by the primitive fact of exchange, ... is substituted for that of distributive justice ... Translating these words, contract, commutative justice, which are the language of the law, into the language of business, and you have commerce, that is to say, in its highest significance, the act by which man and man declare themselves essentially producers, and abdicate all pretension to govern each other.|Pierre-Joseph Proudhon|''[[The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century|General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century]]'' (1851)}}