ABSTRACT
Part I argues for the historical significance of relational sociality as a liberal construct informing novelistic visions of contract. It examines core concerns of contracts histories: the question of the economy as a separate sphere, abstraction in contract, and contract's relation to freedom, to show both the critical liberal impulse to move beyond status, and the dominance of relational liberalism.
Relational liberalism should be differentiated from both status and atomism. The Foreword to Part I includes a discussion of the analytic significance of making distinctions between forms of sociality, particularly between status and relational sociality (commonly treated as “embeddedness”), that theorists and historians of relationality often collapse together. Yet the Foreword also cautions against the assumption that relationality implied an effort to eliminate status hierarchies.
