The main idea of the social contract is that to live together in a harmonious society, people must agree to give up certain rights not to infringe on the rights of others. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines the social contract as:

"An actual or hypothetical compact, or agreement, between the ruled and their rulers, defining the rights and duties of each."

If my right to swing my arms stops at the tip of your nose, then I tacitly agree to stop swinging my arms once I am in sight of you lest I infringe on what we both understand to be your personal space.

The social contract extends to many other things beyond the swinging of my arms. It extends to my presumably limited right to bear and use arms and to do anything that infringes on another person’s rights.

Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century British philosopher, is credited with writing about the social contract, which he used as a means of justifying the existence of a sovereign ruler or monarch.

While this was the conclusion that Hobbes reached based on the social contract, the theory nevertheless underlies the way citizens should live in a democratic society. Other philosophers have come to different conclusions about the ultimate goal of an implicit social contract among individuals living together as a nation that are more aligned with the way people in democracies such as the United States view their role in society and relationship to government.