Introduction

The idea of a contract or agreement has played a central role in the political thinking of the western world over two main periods and in relation to two principal issues. In the first of these periods, the epoch of early modern natural law thinking., the idea of a contract served as the main intellectual device for analysing the grounds, scope and limits of political obligation: the duty of subjects to obey the constituted authorities of the political community to which they belong. In the second, in the American political philosophy of the last three decades, it has served instead principally to analyse the standard of justice in the distribution of the costs and benefits of social membership. The precarious bridge between these two preoccupations was provided by the eighteenth-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant.

Behind the first of these two intellectual episodes there lay the cultural and social heritage of medieval Europe. The social element of this heritage was furnished by the hierarchical relations of European feudalism with their intimate dependence on mutual commitment (the pledge of personal allegiance) and their heavy emphasis on the social virtue of trustworthiness (fides). Its cultural components were distinctly more complex. But they reflected at least two profound imaginative impulses: the Greek commitment to the critical power of human reason and the Christian stress on the significance of human intention and consciousness and on the equality of individual human souls.