The Sexual Contract E-Book

Carole Pateman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 548

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Carole Pateman is one of the foremost political theorists writing in English today. In this outstanding new work, she presents a major reinterpretation of modern political theory. She shows how standard discussions of social contract theory tell only half the story. The sexual contract which establishes modern patriarchy and the political right of men over women is never mentioned. In a wide-ranging and scholarly discussion, Pateman examines the significance of the political fictions of the original contract and the slave contract. She also offers a sweeping challenge to conventional understandings - of both left and right - of actual contracts in everyday life: the marriage contract, the employment contract, the prostitution contract and the new surrogacy contract. By bringing a feminist perspective to bear on the contradictions and paradoxes surrounding women and contract and the relation between the sexes, she is able to shed new light on the fundamental problems of freedom and subordination. The Sexual Contract will become a classic text in the politics of gender and will be of major interest to students of social and political theory and philosophy, women's studies, sociology and jurisprudence.

Leseprobe

The Sexual Contract

Carole Pateman

Polity Press

Copyright © Carole Pateman 1988

The right of Carole Pateman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1988 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Reprinted 1989, 1991, 1994, 1995, 1997

Editorial office:

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Marketing and production:

Blackwell Publishers Ltd

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Oxford OX4 1JF, UK

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0–7456–0431–5

ISBN 978-0-7456-8329-4

ISBN 0–7456–0432–3 (pbk)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 11 on 121/2 Baskerville by Downdell Ltd., Abingdon, Oxon.

Printed in Great Britain by Hartnolls Ltd., Bodmin, Cornwall.

In memory of my fatherRonald Bennett

A ring of gold with the sun in it?

Lies, lies and a grief

Sylvia Plath The Couriers

. . . the man remains

Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but manEqual,. unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the kingOver himself;

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Contents

Preface

1  Contracting In

2  Patriarchal Confusions

3  Contract, the Individual and Slavery

4  Genesis, Fathers and the Political Liberty of Sons

5  Wives, Slaves and Wage Slaves

6  Feminism and the Marriage Contract

7  What’s Wrong with Prostitution?

8  The End of the Story?

Notes

Index

Preface

There has been a major revival of interest in contract theory since the early 1970s that shows no immediate signs of abating. New, sophisticated formulations of the idea of a social contract are accompanied by some highly technical and, in many cases, very elegant developments of contract argument, some of which are presented by Marxists, once firm opponents of the theoretical assumptions and practical implications of contract doctrine. My reason for adding a very different contribution to the literature is that something vital is missing from the current discussion. The sexual contract is never mentioned. The sexual contract is a repressed dimension of contract theory, an integral part of the rational choice of the familiar, original agreement. The original contract as typically understood today is only part of the act of political genesis depicted in the pages of the classic contract theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The aim of my study is to begin to break through the layers of theoretical self-censorship.

In one sense, this is an auspicious moment to write about the sexual contract. The extraordinarily widespread influence of contract doctrine means that the full ramifications of contract can now be glimpsed. In another sense, the moment is inauspicious; the very influence of contract theory threatens to bury the sexual contract more deeply than before and further to marginalize feminist argument critical of contract. That contract theory now has a new lease of life is not merely a consequence of the internal evolution of political theory but bound up with wider political developments centred on an interpretation of democracy as individual initiative (or choice), which can be summed up succinctly in the slogans of private enterprise and privatization. The whole political package is marketed under the name of freedom. Sales (at least until late 1987) have been spectacularly successful, with buyers coming from regions once resistant to such political advertisements. The old socialist arguments against contract have lost much of their cogency in the present political context and, if new forms of criticism are to be developed, a new look at contract theory is required. Contract theory is concerned with more than fictions of original agreements; contract theorists claim to show how major political institutions should properly be understood. Citizenship, employment and marriage are all contractual, but since they are seen through the lens of a drastically truncated contract theory – indeed, a theory that has literally been emasculated – the social contract and the employment contract are systematically misrepresented and the marriage contract is usually ignored.

I became aware that the social contract presupposed the sexual contract, and that civil freedom presupposed patriarchal right, only after several years’ work on classical contract theory and associated theoretical and practical problems of consent. I was interested initially in political obligation and although my conclusions on that subject (published in The Problem of Political Obligation) diverged from many accounts, my argument largely remained within conventional boundaries. My discussion began to push against the confines of social contract theory by noting that the classic theorists had left a legacy of problems about women’s incorporation into, and obligation within, civil society that contemporary arguments failed to acknowledge. I began to appreciate the depth and character of the failure only when I asked specifically feminist questions about the texts and about actual examples of contractual relations, instead of trying to deal with the problem of women’s incorporation from within mainstream political theory. Conventional approaches cannot show why the problem is so persistent and intractable, or why the critics as well as the advocates of contract cannot take feminism seriously without undermining their construction of the ‘political’ and ‘political’ relations.

Some of my arguments have been prompted by writers customarily labelled radical feminists, but the classification of feminists into radicals, liberals and socialists suggests that feminism is always secondary, a supplement to other doctrines. Feminism, like socialism, is implicated to some degree in contract and, despite controversy for more than a decade among feminists about the concept of patriarchy, remarkably little attention has been paid to the contractual character of modern patriarchy. Nonetheless, my deepest intellectual debt is to the arguments and activities of the feminist movement, which has transformed my view both of political theory and of political life.

This book has been some years in the making and has benefited from many conversations, often on apparently unrelated topics, and discussions of papers and lectures in Australia and the United States, and I am grateful to all the participants. The writing was less protracted. I decided to attempt to draw together one strand of my work, and I wrote drafts of some of the material, while I was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1984–5. I was fortunate to have such exceptionally congenial intellectual and physical surroundings and the assistance of the friendly, efficient staff while I was trying to get my thoughts in order. I was just as fortunate during 1986–7 when I was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. At the Institute, I was in a very different but exceptionally tranquil yet stimulating intellectual environment. The whole of the present text was written in the private affluence of the Institute for Advanced Study, except for the final chapter, which was completed amid the public stringency of the University of Sydney.

I am especially grateful to Joan Scott for reading and commenting on chapters 1 to 4, to Itsie Hull for detailed comments on chapter 5 and to both of them and Giovanna Procacci for our lunch-time discussions of my work. I also owe thanks to Sandy Levinson for assistance with legal questions. I owe a different kind of debt to Maria Vigilante for relieving me of many of the tedious tasks associated with writing a book and for her critical enthusiasm, and to Peg Clarke and Lucille Allsen without whom, in this case, the book could not have been written. Their skills, acts of supererogation and cheerfulness in the face of a mess of sinister longhand and ill-typed pages rescued me and the book from a recurrence of repetitive strain injury. My husband transferred chapter 8 and this Preface to the computer and, once again, has given support to my academic work and has been an acute critic. I should also like to thank David Held for his encouragement and exemplary editorial efficiency.

1Contracting In

Telling stories of all kinds is the major way that human beings have endeavoured to make sense of themselves and their social world. The most famous and influential political story of modern times is found in the writings of the social contract theorists. The story, or conjectural history, tells how a new civil society and a new form of political right is created through an original contract. An explanation for the binding authority of the state and civil law, and for the legitimacy of modern civil government is to be found by treating our society as if, it had originated in a contract. The attraction of the idea of an original contract and of contract theory in a more general sense, a theory that claims that free social relations take a contractual form, is probably greater now than at any time since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the classic writers told their tales. But today, invariably, only half the story is told. We hear an enormous amount about the social contract; a deep silence is maintained about the sexual contract.

The original contract is a sexual-social pact, but the story of the sexual contract has been repressed. Standard accounts of social contract theory do not discuss the whole story and contemporary contract theorists give no indication that half the agreement is missing. The story of the sexual contract is also about the genesis of political right, and explains why exercise of the right is legitimate – but this story is about political right as patriarchal right or sex-right, the power that men exercise over women. The missing half of the story tells how a specifically modern form of patriarchy is established. The new civil society created through the original contract is a patriarchal social order.

Social contract theory is conventionally presented as a story about freedom. One interpretation of the original contract is that the inhabitants of the state of nature exchange the insecurities of natural freedom for equal, civil freedom which is protected by the state. In civil society freedom is universal; all adults enjoy the same civil standing and can exercise their freedom by, as it were, replicating the original contract when, for example, they enter into the employment contract or the marriage contract. Another interpretation, which takes into account conjectural histories of the state of nature in the classic texts, is that freedom is won by sons who cast off their natural subjection to their fathers and replace paternal rule by civil government. Political right as paternal right is inconsistent with modern civil society. In this version of the story, civil society is created through the original contract after paternal rule – or patriarchy – is overthrown. The new civil order, therefore, appears to be anti-patriarchal or post-patriarchal. Civil society is created through contract so that contract and patriarchy appear to be irrevocably opposed.

These familiar readings of the classic stories fail to mention that a good deal more than freedom is at stake. Men’s domination over women, and the right of men to enjoy equal sexual access to women, is at issue in the making of the original pact. The social contract is a story of freedom; the sexual contract is a story of subjection. The original contract constitutes both freedom and domination. Men’s freedom and women’s subjection are created through the original contract – and the character of civil freedom cannot be understood without the missing half of the story that reveals how men’s patriarchal right over women is established through contract. Civil freedom is not universal. Civil freedom is a masculine attribute and depends upon patriarchal right. The sons overturn paternal rule not merely to gain their liberty but to secure women for themselves. Their success in this endeavour is chronicled in the story of the sexual contract. The original pact is a sexual as well as a social contract: it is sexual in the sense of patriarchal – that is, the contract establishes men’s political right over women – and also sexual in the sense of establishing orderly access by men to women’s bodies. The original contract creates what I shall call, following Adrienne Rich, ‘the law of male sex-right’.1 Contract is far from being opposed to patriarchy; contract is the means through which modern patriarchy is constituted.

One reason why political theorists so rarely notice that half the story of the original contract is missing, or that civil society is patriarchal, is that ‘patriarchy’ is usually interpreted patriarchally as paternal rule (the literal meaning of the term). So, for example, in the standard reading of the theoretical battle in the seventeenth century between the patriarchalists and social contract theorists, patriarchy is assumed to refer only to paternal right. Sir Robert Filmer claimed that political power was paternal power and that the procreative power of the father was the origin of political right. Locke and his fellow contract theorists insisted that paternal and political power were not the same and that contract was the genesis of political right. The contract theorists were victorious on this point; the standard interpretation is on firm ground – as far as it goes. Once more, a crucial portion of the story is missing. The true origin of political right is overlooked in this interpretation; no stories are told about its genesis (I attempt to remedy the omission in ). Political right originates in sex-right or conjugal right. Paternal right is only one, and not the original, dimension of patriarchal power. A man’s power as a father comes after he has exercised the patriarchal right of a man (a husband) over a woman (wife). The contract theorists had no wish to challenge the original patriarchal right in their onslaught on paternal right. Instead, they incorporated conjugal right into their theories and, in so doing, transformed the law of male sex-right into its modern contractual form. Patriarchy ceased to be paternal long ago. Modern civil society is not structured by kinship and the power of fathers; in the modern world, women are subordinated to men or to men as a fraternity. The original contract takes place after the political defeat of the father and creates modern