“Conversely, the other party to this "social contract" is presumably government.”
No. (I was going to go do other things but I can’t let that one go.)
Government is only a tool, an agency, an artifice, a construct, a means “to secure these rights.”
A Social Contract is an agreement among people, though it’s not necessarily formal (and may even be hypothetical, reached through a sort of consensus). In short, it’s an agreement about what rules to follow in pursuit of whatever goals the people have in mind that they wish to pursue jointly. It is the basis for legitimate government and the basis for the legitimate use of government.
The people of the United States have had maybe three (Pardon me if I’m wrong, I’m not a historian) different national governments: The government of the Continental Congress, the government of the Articles of Confederation, and the government of the present Constitution.
All three were initiated by basically the same people who were in agreement that they should be in some type of society or association with each other but took three tries to come up with a type of governance for that society or association.
From Blacks Law Dictionary:
Social contract or compact. In political philosophy, a term applied to the theory of the origin of society associatedd chiefly with the names of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, though it can be traced back to the Greek sophists. Rousseau held that in the pre-social state man was unwarlike and timid. Laws resulted from the combination of men who agreed, for mutual protection, to surrender individual freedom of action. Government must therefore rest on the consent of the goverened.
I fear I've done poor service in explaining this tonight but the main thing I want to get across is that government is an outcome of the social Contract, not a party to it.
There's a fourth, and probably the most important one: there was a period of near-self-government that grew up among the colonies while England was convulsed by civil wars and succession crises; which must be coupled with the formation of the various colonies founded on principles of religious dissent.
Moreover, there were numerous attempts to establish representative governments within the Colonies -- the House of Burgesses in Virginia being probably the most notable example.
You're claiming I'm a party to a contract that I never agreed to, that you can't even state with any certain detail, that provides no clear enumeration of responsibilities nor specific provision of penalties for breach... in other words, a "social contract" is nothing like a "contract". If you beleive that society around me has some prior claim over me, then go ahead and say so--but don't bastardize the language itself by calling it a "contract". The term was coined to give an air of legitimacy to a dubious concept.
Your quote from Blacks was apropos. The very notion of a "social contract" is founded on Hobbes's deeply flawed idea that humanity in its natural state is a violent struggle of all against all, and that some smart people invented government to restrain man's natural impulses. The idea is self-contradictory; he asserts first that man is essentially a predator incapable of making agreements in good faith, and then he supposes that these humans somehow did that of which they are incapable. It is further flawed by the obvious fact that nature contradicts his silly theory: even chimpanzees manage to exist without endless conflict of all against all--it is essentially not debatable that a group structure of tribes, or prides, or families, existed among our ancestors prior to the emergence of the great apes, let alone homo erectus, let alone homo sapiens.
Viewed in that light, you're postulating a contract that was originally entered into, on my behalf, by creatures lacking even rudimentary sentience. Apparently man's "natural state", according to Hobbes, was never actually found in nature.
...which brings us back to this term "social contract." You use it specifically to imply that I'm a welsher if I reject some aspect of this "contract" I'm supposedly party to. It won't work.