The correct answer is (A) is correct, but (R) is not correct. Key Points Social contract theory Social contract theory nearly as old as philosophy itself is the view that persons’ moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement among them to form the society in which they live. Hobbes’ political theory is best understood if taken in two parts: his theory of human motivation, Psychological Egoism, and his theory of the social contract, founded on the hypothetical State of Nature. According to Hobbes, the justification for a political obligation is this: given that men are naturally self-interested, yet they are rational, they will choose to submit to the authority of a Sovereign to be able to live in a civil society, which is conducive to their own interests. Hobbes argues for this by imagining men in their natural state, or in other words, the State of Nature. In the State of Nature, which is purely hypothetical according to Hobbes, men are naturally and exclusively self-interested, they are more or less equal, there are limited resources, and yet there is no power able to force men to cooperate. Hence Assertion is correct. The social contract, in political philosophy, is an actual or hypothetical compact, or agreement, between the ruled or between the ruled and their rulers, defining the rights and duties of each. In primaeval times, according to the theory, individuals were born into an anarchic state of nature, which was happy or unhappy according to the particular version of the theory. They then, by exercising natural reason, formed a society (and a government) through a social contract. Social contract theory can be traced historically in terms of when did the first social contract take place. Hence, the Reason is incorrect. In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is a theory or model that originated during the Age of Enlightenment and usually concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. Although similar ideas can be traced to the Greek Sophists, social-contract theories had their greatest currency in the 17th and 18th centuries and are associated with the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What distinguished these theories of political obligation from other doctrines of the period was their attempt to justify and delimit political authority on the grounds of individual self-interest and rational consent.