Culmination, Critique and Restatement of Contract Theory

Abstract

Our task in this chapter is to depict the culmination of the classic phase of contract theory, and at the same time the development of a powerful critique of its basic postulates. This critique did not by any means immediately destroy the currency of the theory — that was the work of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, the contract theorists whose work we shall now survey differ in an important respect from almost all the major figures we have previously discussed. Manegold, Engelbert, Salamonio, Duplessis-Mornay, Althusius, Hobbes and Locke, no matter how ‘scholarly’ or ‘theoretical’ or ‘practical’ or ‘polemical’ they may have been in style and approach, were each and every one intimately concerned with (if not actually involved in) major political struggles and problems of their time, and produced their contract theories in this context. This is not to say that they are relevant only to such a limited context; it is to say that these universal theories were stimulated and informed by this particular kind of political experience.