This book has two intentions. Its first, announced, intention is to describe the “place of theories of the social contract in American history” (p. vii). Hulliung seeks to establish that the social contract was until recently the closest thing Americans had to a public philosophy, appealed to by Loyalists and Patriots, Democrats and Whigs, and radicals and conservatives. Unlike those who approach the subject of public philosophy “preoccupied with a current ideological conflict,” Hulliung means only to help us “come to terms with the importance of the social contract in American history and the significance of its possible demise”; “we need historical understanding … to learn who we were and who we are” (pp. viii, 9–10). Its second, unannounced, intention is to sound an alarm about our politics, in which “labor is in disarray; the welfare state is imperiled; and the most shrill forms of religion threaten to intrude into all matters of public life.” The decline of the social contract means that “fragments from all the political languages of the past … speak past one another, and public life suffers accordingly” (p. 205). Conservatives, who fear the radical implications of social contract theory, and liberals, who have abandoned the social contract for strategic reasons, share the blame for bringing this condition about. Unfortunately, Hulliung's second intention often undermines the first.

Hulliung's history of the social contract in America has much to recommend it. It covers more ground than previous histories, which have focused on the Revolution and Founding. Hulliung is alive to conflicts within the theory of the social contract, drawing attention not only to Locke but also to Grotius and Pufendorf, and to different strands of Lockeanism. He communicates the distinctiveness, even the headiness, of the American experience of putting the Lockean revolution principles that triumphed into practice. Finally, he offers a fascinating portrait of an American radicalism—rooted in Jefferson and Paine, and carried forward by nineteenth-century proponents of land reform—that “proclaimed a natural right to the soil” (p. 76). This radicalism spoke the language of natural rights and appealed to the Declaration. Although the most radical of the radicals repudiated Locke by repudiating private property in land, they relied in part on Lockean premises. Moreover, they shared Locke's understanding of the world-transforming character of human labor and even “took it for granted that minimal government was good government” (p. 88). Hulliung laments that the Progressives dismissed the possibility opened up by their predecessors of fighting for social justice within the limits of social contract theory. They were “convinced that the social contract was reactionary,” and they were wrong (pp. 189–90).

Hulliung's sense of the flexibility of social contract theory abandons him as he moves toward the present. He recognizes that the idea of a contract between the people and the government, defended by Pufendorf but rejected by Locke, was used by John Wise prior to the Revolution to put “governing authorities … on notice that they must … serve the governed or face the consequences” (p. 20). But he lights into President Clinton's rather innocuous appeal to such a contract, insisting that it “bears no resemblance to the American historical reality of popular sovereignty and natural rights” (p. 3). While he insists that the Lockean tradition includes those who viewed private property as theft, he denies that the distinction between “deserving and undeserving poor,” a distinction by no means foreign to Locke himself, has any place in “fully realized” social contract theory (p. 202). He allows that Madison and John Quincy Adams appealed to defensible interpretations of Locke when they resisted the more radical interpretations of Jefferson and Paine. But he asserts that Martin Diamond's respectable and respected interpretation of the Declaration, in which the Declaration stands for political equality rather than equality as such, was motivated by Diamond's opposition to 1960s counterculture. Diamond was one of several conservatives who preferred to suppress the Declaration because they were “fearful of its potential radicalism” (p. 167). If Diamond spoke of it, he did so because the “Declaration could not be ignored on its bicentennial” (p. 168). Having begun with the premise that the social contract permits a range of interpretations, Hulliung here suggests without argument that Diamond's interpretation is indefensible and disingenuous.

If conservatives were moved by fear to tame the social contract, Progressives and liberals, Hulliung claims, were moved by strategic considerations to abandon it. Progressives abandoned it in large part because conservatives “had captured the doctrines of natural rights and a social contract” (p. 189). Liberals abandoned it once they could appeal to constitutional law successfully. There was no need then to discuss that law's foundation (p. 172). Both arguments are speculative and neither convinces. The Progressives could have argued with conservatives about social contract theory, just as Loyalists argued with Patriots. And liberals have not carried on their argument solely in the courts. Hulliung himself observes that the Bill of Rights lacks the Declaration's theoretical clarity, not to speak of its power to inspire (p. 171). So the use of the Bill of Rights in courts hardly precludes the use of the Declaration and its theory of the social contract in other arenas. Perhaps “European historicism” helps explain why Progressives and some of their successors came to think of rights as a relic of the eighteenth century, but Hulliung suggests instead that it was merely a weapon the Progressives used to “drive the old doctrine out of public life” once they concluded that it belonged to the conservatives (p. 189). Of course, political actors adopt ideas in part because they are useful. But Hulliung neither offers a convincing explanation of the political strategy behind abandoning the social contract nor considers the reasons that the social contract retreated not only as a political strategy but also as an idea. That is a defect in a book whose ambition is to help us understand who we were and who we are.