Mills Charles W. - The Contract and Domination

Contract and Domination

Charles W. Mills

Carole Patemans The Sexual Contract (1988) has become a classic text of second-wave feminism, and is widely and deservedly seen as constituting one of the most important challenges of the last 20 years to the frameworks and assumptions of malestream political theory. Moreover, its influence is not restricted to gender issues, since it was the inspiration for my own book, The Racial Contract (1997), which has also become quite successful in the parallel, if not as well-established, field of critical race theory. The impact of both books, of course, originates in part from their refusal respectively of pink and black theoretical ghettoization for a frontal conceptual engagement with a (male, white) intellectual apparatus, social contract theory, that has historically been central to the modern Western political tradition, and which has been spectacularly revived in the past three decades as a result of John Rawlss A Theory of Justice (1999h). Pateman and I are saying that the history of gender and racial subordination requires a rethinking of how we do political theory, that it cannot be a matter of some minor, largely cosmetic changes a few shes sprinkled in where there were previously only hes, a pro forma (if that much) deploring of the racism of Enlightenment theorists before continuing basically as before. As such, the goal is a revisioning of the tradition that we both want the white male majority of practitioners in the field to accept and to incorporate into their own work.

What, though, is the specific nature of this challenge for contract theory in general, and Rawlsian normative theory in particular? As readers will have seen from our opening dialogue, Pateman is quite hostile to the project of trying to retrieve the contract for positive ends. So in this and the next chapter, I want to make a case for generalizing this revisionist version of the contract and turning it to the theorization of gender and racial justice. 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 non-ideal theory that, far from being marginal, in fact determine the fate of the majority of the population.

Let me begin in the underlaborer tradition of analytic philosophy with some preliminary clarificatory distinctions. For if Patemans book has been read in divergent and contradictory ways, as it has, then to a significant extent this interpretive variation goes with the conceptual territory. There are at least three major sources of the ambiguities in Patemans revisionist contract: one endemic to the literature in general, even just the mainstream variety; one arising distinctively from her radical and unfamiliar non-mainstream use of the idea; and one generated by divergences in terminology.

The general problem is the astonishing range of the ways in which the idea of the contract has historically been employed, ironically or then again, not ironically at all coupled with the fact that in most cases it is actually doing no work, and is, in effect, otiose, a disposable part of the argument. (With only slight exaggeration, one could quip that in the long history of social contract theory, very few actual social contract theorists can be found.)

To begin with, there is the notion of the contract as in some sense, whether stronger or weaker, descriptive/factual. For example, the contract as ur-sociology or anthropology, providing us with a literal account of what actually happened. Or, more weakly, the contract as a plausible hypothetical reconstruction of what might have happened. Or, more weakly still, the contract as a useful way of thinking about what happened the contract as if though we know perfectly well it did not happen that way. Then within this descriptive sense, whether robustly or thinly conceived, there are additional differences (cross-cutting the above) of, so to speak, the object of the contract. Is it a contract to create society, or the state, or both? And, to introduce further complications within these categories, is society envisaged as an aggregate of individuals or a transformed collective community, and are rights alienated to the state or merely delegated to it? Then there is the contract as normative. For example, the contract as the outcome of a collective-bargaining agreement that brings morality into existence as a conventionalist set of principles. Or the contract as a way of elucidating and codifying pre-existing and objective moral principles, whether grounded in natural law or human interests. Or the contract as a thought-experiment, a device for generating moral intuitions about justice through the strategy of combining prudential motivation with ignorance of crucial features of the self.

So the concept has been used in radically different ways the contract as literal, metaphorical, historical, hypothetical, descriptive, prescriptive, prudential, moral, constitutional, civil, regulative ideal, device of representation. It is no wonder then, that, as David Boucher and Paul Kelly conclude in an introductory overview of social contract theory: The idea of the social contract when examined carefully is seen to have very few implications, and is used for all sorts of reasons, and generates quite contrary conclusions (1994a: 2). Or as Will Kymlicka concurs in an encyclopedia essay: In a sense, there is no contract tradition in ethics, only a contract device which many different traditions have used for many different reasons (1991: 196).

Moreover, as if this bewildering array of distinctions were not enough, a further complication is that Patemans peculiar use of the contract idea revives a strand of the contract tradition that has been so marginalized and ignored that it does not even have a name in the secondary literature: what I have called elsewhere the domination contract (Mills 2000). Though Pateman herself does not explicitly make the connection in The Sexual Contract, and though I have never seen them linked in discussions of her work, a case can be made that the sexual contract develops an idea whose nucleus is actually originally to be found in Rousseaus class contract of his 1755 A Discourse on Inequality (1984, 1997a). Seven years before publishing the Social Contract (1968, 1997d), Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality (1997a) condemned and set out to explain the non-natural political inequalities of class society, which are the result of a sort of convention, and that consist in the different Privileges which some enjoy to the prejudice of the others, such as to be more wealthy, more honored, more Powerful than they (p. 131). He offered a hypothetical and conditional (p. 132) history of technological progress in the state of nature, which eventually led to the development of nascent society, private property, growing divisions between rich and poor, and a state of war. In Rousseaus reconstruction, the wealthy, alarmed by this threat to their property and security, promised to the poor new social institutions that pretended to offer justice, peace, and impartial social rules for the mutual benefit of all. But in actuality these institutions

irreversibly destroyed natural freedom, forever fixed the Law of property and inequality, transformed a skillful usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjugated the whole of Mankind to labor, servitude and misery. (p. 173)

Rousseaus contract is therefore a bogus contract, contract as scam in the words of Patrick Riley (2001a: 4), a kind of confidence trick on the part of the rich. In its uncompromising demystification of the consensual illusions of mainstream contract theory, it anticipates by a century Marxs later critique of supposedly egalitarian liberalism as a mask for the differential power of a capitalist ruling class. The later