In the history of the evolution of political thought, safeguarding individual autonomy in the process of establishing political order and resolving the tension between the individual and the collective has been considered one of the central challenges of social contract theory. Reexamining this issue has therefore become an even greater necessity for an independent political philosophy. The present study seeks to clarify the manner in which this theory is redefined on the basis of the concept of “common ownership” in the thought of Mehdi Haeri Yazdi and to investigate its structural distinctions from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s paradigm of the “general will,” in order to provide a solution for overcoming the theoretical deadlocks surrounding the preservation of individual freedoms.



Employing an analytical method together with the tools of formal logic and analytic philosophy, this study offers a conceptual clarification of the ontological and epistemological foundations of the subject and concludes that Haeri, by rejecting holistic models and replacing Rousseau’s “collective universality” with the model of “distributive universality,” transforms the nature of the social contract from a dissolutionary commitment into a technical “agency contract” among proprietors. Within this paradigm, contrary to the Rousseauian model—which requires the dissolution of individual identity into the general will and the absolute transfer of rights to the state—citizens, even after entering into the contract, remain “fully realized human beings” and the original holders of rights, while government merely functions as a rational agent entrusted with administering common property.



Ultimately, this study demonstrates that replacing the concept of the “agency contract of common owners” with that of the general will restores the source of legitimacy to the citizens’ natural ownership of their living environment and, by linking practical reason to fundamental human rights, provides a philosophical framework for the realization of democracy within the Islamic intellectual tradition.