Abstract

This chapter describes the nature and potentials of Rousseau’s and Locke’s social contract theories to be reformulated as global social contract theory. Despite their limits attributed to the seventeenth and eighteenth century western Europe where they lived their lives like Rousseau’s geo-cultural exclusion of Mediterranean and eastern Europe and Locke’s socio-religious exclusion of those without status and piety, we summarize those subsequent democratic developments in Rosseauesque direct democracy driven by empathy and compassion and in Lockean representative democracy driven by human reasoning and pragmatism. Citing Immanuel Kant’s Eternal Peace in comparing the year of 1912 when Norman Angell expressed optimism on the basis of free trade-derived peace and prosperity and the year of 2019 when international organizations, democracy and free trade have reached their peaks and the beginnings of a stall.