THE DOMINATION CONTRACT

Abstract

In order to discuss the history of racial and gender subordination, one needs to rethink how we do political theory. So the purpose is to conduct a review of the contract’s revisionist tradition and turn it to the theorization of gender and racialjustice. My claim will be that the concept of a “domination contract” can be fruitfully employed to overturn the misleading framework of assumptions of mainstream social contract theory, thereby better positioning us to tackle the pressing issues of “nonideal theory” that, far from being marginal, in fact determine the fate of the majority of the population. The understanding that the most significant claim of social contract theory is that political society is a human construct and not an organic growth is indeed revolutionary. I argue that indeed its full revolutionary significance has yet to be fully appreciated and exploited. For once we understand how far the “construction” extends, we will recognize that it can be shown to apply to gender and race also. Once one recognizes how protean the contract has historically been, and how politically pivotal is its insight of the human creation of society and of ourselves as social beings, one should be able to appreciate that its conservative deployment is a result not of its intrinsic features, but of its use by a privileged white male group hegemonic in political theory who have had no motivation to extrapolate its logic.