Social Contract Theory and Social Freedom: Entering the Feminist Debate

Abstract

Nearly all liberal theories of freedom recognize the value of freedom in individuals’ lives, but theorists have only recently begun to identify the extent to which the modern conception of freedom within the social contract tradition is inharmonious with freedom in daily life. Carole Pateman and Nancy Hirschmann, among other feminist theorists, interrupt the relentless dialogue about traditional, liberal political frameworks to demonstrate how those approaches to freedom leave many individuals behind as unfree (Hirschmann 1992, 2003, 2008; Pateman 1985, 1988, 1989). They argue that, by and large, liberal political theorists have failed to attend to the constitutive activities and interactions of daily life and that the absence of such experiences has repeatedly led to inadequate accounts of freedom. I work in tandem with these feminists to identify the problems of freedom as those that historically preclude entire groups of people and that have been glossed over in contemporary theories. Contemporary political theorists’ neglect of the exclusionary aspects of modern, social contract theories of freedom insulates the problems and thereby perpetuates implications of exclusion. When contemporary theorists identify explicitly exclusionary components of modern theories of freedom as mere contingent irrelevances, or when they assume that their inattention to the exclusionary aspects is tantamount to a rejection of such exclusion, they allow implicit biases to burrow into their frameworks.