The framers drew on the ideas of the british political philosophers in perceiving the relationship between government and the governed as a social contract

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke

Most especially the American founding fathers looked to the ideas of John Locke.  Thomas Hobbes had pointed to the social contract as the source of a government's authority, but his argument in Leviathan (1651) still supported a strong monarch style of government for the sake of a country's security and stability.  Locke's arguments in his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689) were more focused on the authority of majority voting in a society and republican government through legislatures.