Because most Americans believe that government requires the consent
of the governed, the idea of the social contract may come as close
to a public philosophy as we've ever had. And, as Mark Hulliung
reminds us, we have frequently fought our greatest political
battles by wielding one or another version of social contract
theory.
Hulliung's book is the first to examine the role of the social
contract across the entire sweep of American history, well beyond
the Revolution and Founding periods. While he pays close attention
to the contested versions of the social contract from 1765 to 1861,
he also underscores its relevance after the Civil War, from late
nineteenth-century land reform to the rights revolution of the late
twentieth century.
By considering this lengthy timeline, Hulliung demonstrates the
life and death of what may be the most expansive and persistent
form in our country's political discourse, one that has figured in
virtually all major controversies in American history. He shows how
it has been enlisted by advocates of seemingly every major cause,
from Henry George to Martin Luther King and Justice Clarence
Thomas, whose view that constitutional authority rests in the
consent of the people of each individual state, rather than of the
nation as a whole, echoed the version of the social contract once
held by southern slave owners.
Hulliung treats the social contract as not one theory but
several, considering the Americanization of Grotius and Pufendorf
as well as Locke. He examines alternative readings of the contract
in the struggles between claims of alienable versus inalienable
rights; between consent given once and for all versus consent
reaffirmed with each generation; and between the sovereignty of the
people in various states versus the sovereignty of the people of
the nation.
Innovative and provocative, Hulliung's study clearly shows that,
until we come to terms with the centrality of the social contract
in American history--and the significance of its possible
demise--something essential will be missing from our accounts of
the past and our understanding of the present.
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