Social Contract
Feminist Views
Some feminists have criticized the social contract approach as excessively individualistic, arguing that to treat contract as the fundamental moral and/or political relationship is to overlook the dependency on the care of others that characterizes infants, the elderly, the severely disabled, and everyone to the extent that they are vulnerable. Carole Pateman has noted the problematic relationship of women to contract in the seventeenth-century heyday of natural jurisprudence, when married women could not own property or make contracts in English common law. But others have argued that the social contract approach can be turned to feminist ends. Susan Moller Okin argues that a consistent Rawlsian theory would include the family within the scope of the theory of justice, while Jean Hampton contends that contractarianism can be used to test and prevent the exploitation that may pervade intimate relationships between family and friends.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hampton, Jean. "Feminist Contractarianism." In A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, edited by Louise M. Anthony and Charlotte Witt. Boulder, Colo., and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Rev. student ed. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Reprints the original frontispiece and has a valuable introduction.
Hume, David. "Of the Original Contract." In Political Essays. Edited by Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Laslett. Student ed. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Introduction summarizes Laslett's influential view on when the Treatises were written.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings. Edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Melissa Lane
Additional topics
Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Adam Smith Biography to Spectroscopic binarySocial Contract - Modern Formulations, Political Authority Versus Moral Principles, Hobbes And Rawls, Feminist Views, Bibliography