Contract and Domination offers a bold challenge to
contemporary contract theory, arguing that it should either be
fundamentally rethought or abandoned altogether. Since the
publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, contract
theory has once again become central to the Western political
tradition. But gender justice is neglected and racial justice
almost completely ignored.
Carole Pateman and Charles Mills’s earlier books, The Sexual
Contract (1988) and The Racial Con...
Contract and Domination offers a bold challenge to
contemporary contract theory, arguing that it should either be
fundamentally rethought or abandoned altogether. Since the
publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, contract
theory has once again become central to the Western political
tradition. But gender justice is neglected and racial justice
almost completely ignored.
Carole Pateman and Charles Mills’s earlier books, The Sexual
Contract (1988) and The Racial Contract (1997), offered
devastating critiques of gender and racial domination and the
contemporary contract tradition’s silence on them. Both books have
become classics of revisionist radical democratic political theory.
Now Pateman and Mills are collaborating for the first time in an
interdisciplinary volume, drawing on their insights from political
science and philosophy. They are building on but going beyond their
earlier work to bring the sexual and racial contracts
together.
In Contract and Domination, Pateman and Mills discuss
their differences about contract theory and whether it has a useful
future, excavate the (white) settler contract that created new
civil societies in North America and Australia, argue via a
non-ideal contract for reparations to black Americans, confront the
evasions of contemporary contract theorists, explore the
intersections of gender and race and the global sexual-racial
contract, and reply to their critics.
This iconoclastic book throws the gauntlet down to mainstream
white male contract theory. It is vital reading for anyone with an
interest in political theory and political philosophy, and the
systems of male and racial domination.
