From early in his career, Rawls was attracted to the idea of the social contract as a way of developing a systematic alternative to utilitarianism – one that defended our intuitive conviction that there are limits to the aggregation of interests across persons, but that went beyond intuition by yielding a definite ranking of competing priorities. While the details of the argument from the original position have been much criticized, the general idea of an agreement about principles of institutional design reached under fair conditions can be seen as the key to Rawls’s attempted reconciliation of liberty and equality. On the one hand, if the social order must be acceptable to everyone, it must be acceptable to minority religious and philosophical points of view, arguing for freedom of thought, conscience, and association. On the other hand, if the social order must be acceptable to everyone, it must be acceptable to the worse off, arguing that socioeconomic inequalities should benefit those with less. The social contract can thus be seen as the linchpin for Rawls’s egalitarian liberalism.