theory was first articulated using this early argumentation. Natural or institutional laws are useless without first being established by a sovereign authority. Before you can talk about right and unjust, there must be some coercive authority that compels folks to keep their promises. There is no such coercive force before the establishment of the state. According to social contract theory, "inalienable rights" are those rights that can't be relinquished by people to the sovereign. These inherent rights were believed to be law-independent. In the state of nature, only the strongest could take use of their privileges. Thereby, individuals give up their natural rights in order to get protection, and thus have the legal rights conferred by the power to do so. Many historical justifications for slavery and illiberal governance include consensual arrangements to relinquish inherent rights to freedom and self-determination. De facto inalienability arguments supplied the foundation for the anti-slavery movement to argue against all involuntary enslavement, not only slavery explicitly defined as such. An agreement to unlawfully divide a right would be void of law. Similarly, the argument was used by the democratic movement to reject explicit or implicit social covenants of subjection (e.g., pactum subjectionis) that subjugate a people, for example, in Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. According to Ernst Cassirer,There is, at least, one right that cannot be ceded or abandoned: the right to personality...They charged the great logician [Hobbes] with a contradiction in terms. If a man could give up his personality he would cease being a moral being. … There is no pactum subjectionis, no act of submission by which man can give up the state of free agent and enslave himself. For by such an act of renunciation he would give up that very character which constitutes his nature and essence: he would lose his humanity. Influence Until the twenty-first century, standard accounts of early modern philosophy and traditional survey courses in Anglo-Saxon universities—presented histories dominated by Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Early modern theory has had a significant impact on many modern developments. One of which is political philosophy. American political philosopher A. John Simmons examined two interrelated transitions in the early modern period. The first is a metaphysical contrast between political naturalism, which holds that human beings are political by birth, and political anti-naturalism, which holds that humankind's natural state is apolitical. The second is the historical shift from "complex,