Laura Brace
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The social contract
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The idea of a social contract as the source of legitimate political authority has played a key role in the development of liberal political thought since the seventeenth century. This chapter provides a brief overview of the social contract tradition and of feminist critiques, and explores the ambiguity of this tradition for feminist theory. In particular, it discusses how feminist theory might take the social contract seriously by analysing it in the multiple contexts of unequal power that derive not from an initial baseline of equality but from historical relations based on force and fraud. After a brief overview of social contract theory, the chapter focuses on Carole Pateman's influential feminist work The Sexual Contract and the debates which it has generated. It then considers the relationship between the sexual and racial contracts.

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