ABSTRACT
In this book I have argued that if diversity is taken seriously, much of social contract theory is subject to revision. In particular, I have argued for the central role of perspectives in the design of the procedures to generate a social contract. This central role of perspectives leads us to abandon the Rawlsian model of public reason for political discourse, and replace it with a discovery procedure undergirded by a bargaining model. This is further supplemented by principles of proportionality and mutual advantage for the determination of the distribution of wealth and income in society. Even more basically, however, I have argued against the idea that social contract theory’s focus should be on developing a single account of the ideal social contract. Instead, we should reorient what we are doing toward an approach designed around experimentation, discovery, and dynamism.
