Challenging the Contract: Hume, Pateman and Mills

Social contract theory has faced powerful criticism. In 'Of the Original Contract' (1748), David Hume argued that almost all governments were founded on conquest or usurpation, not consent, and that tacit consent is a fiction. A poor peasant who knows no foreign language, he said, has no more real choice to leave his country than a man carried aboard a ship while asleep has to leap into the ocean. Hume thought people obey government mainly from habit and because it is useful. In the twentieth century, other critics asked who was left out of the contract.

Carole Pateman's The Sexual Contract (1988) argued that classic contract theories assumed a prior subordination of women in marriage. Charles W. Mills's The Racial Contract (1997) argued that in practice the contract often included only white Europeans and excluded colonized and enslaved peoples. Defenders reply that the contract ideal itself demands universal inclusion, so these critiques show how to apply it more consistently.