Mark Button's intelligent and subtle book on social contract theory from Hobbes to Rawls is shaped by two paradoxes, the first of which the author is clearly aware, the second of which he does not draw to our attention.

The first of these paradoxes defines the first four-fifths of Button's study. It concerns what others have called “the paradox of politics” (see Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy, 2009). All social contract theories, Button shows, depend on two contentions that sit paradoxically together. First, social contract theory suggests that the legitimacy of a political regime is derived from the coming together of individuals to craft that regime through a mutually accepted contract. Second, most social contract theory also insists that the political regime shaped by such a contract helps to generate somehow better individuals—more politically able, more just, more virtuous—than those who lived in the precontract society. The social contract itself is thus the product of political actors of a kind that it is designed to transcend, and on whose consent its very legitimacy is said to depend. Social contract theory requires us to accept both of these claims simultaneously, or, as Button so crisply puts it, to recognize that “contract makes citizens, never simply the other way around” (p. 3).

The majority of this book focuses on the ways in which the three major social contract theorists—Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau—responded to this paradox. Button argues, contrary to scholarly orthodoxy, that each of these thinkers was driven more by the “transformative” role of contract than by such contract's origins in mutual, voluntary consent. It was the “ethics of character formation” (p. 9) that, thus, attracted these thinkers to the idea of social contract, as much, if not more, than the idea that the social contract was “the outcome of a rational bargain between free and equal persons” (p. 23). What the majority of the book then offers is a thoughtful and sustained discussion of this point. In a chapter on Hobbes, two on Locke, and one on Rousseau, Button persuasively demonstrates that each of these authors was deeply committed to the idea that the “beliefs, norms, and virtues” of those who lived in regimes shaped by contract would be advantageously “reshaped” by the political institutions and practices mandated by those contracts (p. 47). Even Locke, now so widely associated with a crude, atomistic voluntarism, valued contract as a means of “breeding citizens,” Button argues, as he seeks to reveal in “Locke's writings … powerful streams of nonvoluntarism in his account of political obligation and nonrationalism in his concept of education in virtue” (p. 170).

These are thoughtful, original, and persuasive chapters by a scholar of significant intellectual power. Their singular message—that social contract liberalism has historically been dependent on a much firmer, more prescriptive dedication to crafting citizen character than has generally been recognized—sits uncomfortably, however, alongside the argument of the final chapter, on liberalism and social contract theory today. Having worked through the careful and largely sympathetic renderings of the early contract theorists, one might expect this last chapter to make a strong case for continuing the work of this “transformative liberalism” in the twenty-first century, along the lines of the arguments of Stephen Macedo. But despite an occasional appreciative nod in this direction (Macedo-style liberalism is described as being “refreshingly self-conscious about its own partisanship” [p. 227]), what actually follows is a call for liberals to turn their back on the excessive “certainties” of the character-shaping social contract tradition that the author has so painstakingly described, and embrace instead a politics of “contingency” and “moral pluralism.” A politics along these lines, Button contends, does not necessarily require that political theorists abandon discussion of character shaping altogether, but it does demand that they do so in a spirit that pays far greater attention to the “deeper moral or religious disagreements” that apparently characterize modern societies (p. 230). The result is advocacy of a virtue of a very different sort than those advanced by his earlier thinkers. This virtue Button calls “democratic humility,” which he defines as “a cultivated sensitivity toward the limitations, incompleteness, and contingency of both one's personal moral powers and commitments and the particular forms, laws, and institutions that structure one's political and social life with others” (p. 229).

It is here, then, that we meet our second paradox. For a book in which the author takes great pains to describe a historical tradition of transformative liberalism as thoughtfully and generously as he can, this is also a book in which that author swiftly turns his back on key elements of that tradition just as his work reaches its climax. Having alerted the reader, therefore, to the multiple ways in which contract might serve vital transformative political purposes—helping render order out of chaos, justice out of injustice, equality out of inequality—he neglects in the concluding chapter the importance of those very challenges. A decent politics, instead, is said to require that citizens commit to doing less rather than more. The task of the publicly engaged political philosopher is to “foster an active sense of the limits and contingencies that inhere in all of our social and political enactments,” rather than to design political mechanisms that might, in time, help eliminate grave political evils (p. 236).

This is not only a paradoxical but, to my mind, also a disappointing place to end such an otherwise thoughtful and rewarding volume. Through his impassioned and imaginative reexamination of the social contract tradition, Button directs our attention to the inadequacies and complacencies of many twentieth- and twenty-first-century interpretations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought. He reminds us that the social contract theorists of those generations actually insisted that the legitimacy of political structures and actions resides not only in their point of origin but in their ability to contribute to the continual struggle for social and political improvement of some sort. He then, though, presents a normative political theory for our own time that seems to neglect those very insights and ends up taking far too much for granted. Although Button describes his call to “democratic humility” as a means to “moral growth” (p. 233), it is also a call that seeks to ensure that citizens never strive for too much; they are to accept their fate as living constantly and unsettlingly among strangers.

That kind of life might be satisfying enough for some, but those who currently suffer from the gravest of injustices, the excluded and the oppressed, need more from their politics than “humility.” Those citizens continue to need the kinds of transformations to which Hobbes, Locke, and, most of all, Rousseau aspired. Button's provocative book shows us where to look for earlier discussions of these transformational challenges, but it does not show us how to respond to them.