Any political theory must at some point address the following question: To which kinds of individuals is the state answerable? The broadest possible answer would be that the state is answerable to every individual within its territory that matters morally. This would be a good answer if it was the state’s job to enforce the entirety of morality, but that’s not the state’s job. So we face a philosophical question: What (narrower) purpose does the state have? This is a teleological question, and as such it can be answered only by telling a story about why the state might have been brought into existence. Such a story is a state-of-nature thought experiment. If we construe social contractarianism more broadly (than it is usually construed) as the political theory that infers conclusions about the proper function of the state from a story about its origin, then social contractarianism cannot be avoided.
