Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills have traveled parallel paths to academic prominence. In their respective award-winning books, The Sexual Contract (1988) and The Racial Contract (1997), first Pateman and then Mills contended that the classic social contract tradition is fraudulent in design and effect: Ostensibly egalitarian and universally inclusive, it is in fact suffused with patriarchalist and white-supremacist ideology, and it has functioned less to promote civil freedom for all than to cast a legitimating veil over regimes of gender- and race-based domination. In Contract and Domination, the two join forces to extend and refine this argument.

Like its predecessors, this book is mostly critical and preparatory. Agreeing on the regressive history of contract theory and agreeing, too, that their earlier arguments needed to be integrated with one another, the authors disagree on the social contract's usefulness as a normative tool for theorists of freedom and democracy. In a stimulating dialogue in Chapter 1, Pateman contends that the contract story ought to be discarded altogether, whereas Mills holds that it should be reconceived to serve progressive (inclusively egalitarian) ends. Whereas she sees thoroughgoing alienation and commodification in the idea of human persons as self-owning contractors, he finds an essential moral soundness in Lockean and Kantian arguments in which freedom of contract is bounded by objective moral rules. After the defeat of Marxist socialism, Mills maintains, a “non-white-supremacist capitalism” would represent “real moral progress” (pp. 31–32); yet Pateman insists that political theory must redouble its search for nonliberal, noncontractarian alternatives (p. 33).

In Chapters 2 and 3, the authors cross over into theoretical terrains originally staked out by the other. Pateman extends the racial-contract argument with her historically informative account of the “settler contract,” whereby English settlers dispossessed indigenous populations in North America and Australia. Mills follows by proposing a synthesis of her critical work with that of prominent feminist contractualists Jean Hampton and Susan Moller Okin.

The heart of the book appears in Chapters 3–6, where the authors explore various intersections between their critical arguments. In Chapter 3, Mills introduces the “domination contract,” abstracting features common to the racial and sexual contracts. In Chapter 5, Pateman shows how the two contracts have interacted in American history via whites' fears of racial miscegenation. In Chapter 6, observing that “racial subordination … generally trumps gender,” Mills schematizes these relations in the form of a diamond, with white men standing alone at the peak as “full contractors,” white women and (one grade lower) nonwhite men at the midlevels as “subcontractors,” and nonwhite women alone at the bottom as “noncontractors” or nonpersons (pp. 172–75).

In Chapter 4, Mills begins the normative reorientation of contract theory that his critical arguments have prepared. In contrast especially to the ahistorical idealism of Rawlsian theory, a sounder contract theory, he argues, would begin in the actual, nonideal social conditions shaped by various modes of group exploitation, and it would focus primarily on corrective rather than distributive justice. Applying this reconceived contractualism to the question of racial reparations, he fashions a politically shrewd argument to the effect that even the weakest, least controversial conception of equal opportunity entails a strong reparations regime.

Like its two main predecessors, Contract and Domination is energetically argued and generally accessible. Building on their already powerful challenges to the mainstream contract tradition, it is likely to be warmly received by admirers of the authors' preceding works. Some lingering shortcomings, however, will likely prevent it from greatly broadening the authors' following.

Despite Mills's hope (p. 237), neither author disposes of the objection that the “positive reconstructive use” of their critique remains unclear. Pateman fails to clarify either the specific principles that might govern the renegotiations she calls for with legacy victims of the “settler contract” (pp. 76–78) or the larger theoretical alternative whereby she would transcend social-contract thinking (p. 227). Mills's reparations argument, though persuasive at a general level, leaves unaddressed the daunting practical and particular questions with which the whole issue is fraught. Given significant injustices in the histories of many groups, how should we decide which injustices to repair? How might we go about answering the complex counterfactual questions involved in efforts to repair chronic, large-scale injustices—that is, concerning what socioeconomic circumstances would prevail among dominant and subordinate groups, had the pertinent injustices never occurred? How far should remedies consist in the redistribution of material wealth, as opposed to the redevelopment of human (moral and social) capital?

Space constraints permit only a few further critical observations. First, the authors' claim that the mainstream contract tradition has functioned mostly to legitimate an oppressive status quo represents a very partial reading of its history. Pateman takes only cursory notice of feminists' long-standing use of self-ownership and contract arguments (pp. 207–8). Mills makes no mention of the theoretical support that African American protesters have derived from those arguments from the founding era on, nor does he mention the corresponding hostility with which many of slavery's defenders viewed them. If the classic theorists, as the authors contend, indeed meant to obscure the full implications of their doctrine, their labors to that end appear to have failed resoundingly.

More generally, the authors confine their arguments within the ideological boundaries of the self-styled progressive Left (see p. 230). They seem merely to suppose the truth of a premise crucial to their corrective-justice argument, namely, that historical and continuing injustices constitute the most important causes—indeed, the only causes worth serious discussion—of present race- and sex-based disparities in various social and economic goods. One can hardly doubt that historical injustices bear at least an indirect causal relation to those disparities. But as the authors acknowledge, discussion of present racial and sexual inequities is complicated by the rise, “especially in the rich countries,” of a regime of formal equality (p. 2). Yet they take no notice of arguments that the disparities they view as legacies of racism and sexism are explainable, in some substantial part, by more proximate, nontortious causes. They provide no discussion, for instance, of the massive changes in family structure in most Western societies in recent decades and the relation of those changes to the socioeconomic disadvantages of many women and nonwhites.

This criticism can be put more pointedly. Claiming a position of epistemological privilege for the downtrodden (pp. 179, 191, 197), Mills in particular neglects Aristotle's observation (Books 3 and 4 of The Politics) that suffering injustice can distort one's idea of justice no less powerfully than inflicting it can, and he seems, perhaps consequently, to excuse himself from asking self-critical questions concerning excesses to which overzealous opposition to “the racial-sexual contract” might lead. How, for instance, do the authors assess the merits of some recent writers' claim that a misdirected oppositional spirit contributes to racial disparities in educational achievement? What about the more long-standing contention that certain feminist arguments have helped foster a climate of opinion supportive of family dissolution, with all the attendant hardships that disproportionately affect women and nonwhites?

Absent a broader spirit of self-criticism, Contract and Domination suffers from a constricting partiality. Even so, the book sharpens the authors' formidable, invigorating challenge to the contract tradition in modern liberal thought. For that reason above all, it deserves a wide readership.