ABSTRACT
Modern contractarians accept without question that most of the social and political institutions which interest them are not in fact the upshot of any contract or agreement among those whose lives they affect. They are happy to repudiate ideas like the state of nature and the original contract as historical hypotheses, to regard them, in Robert Nozick’s phrase, as ‘fact-defective’ characterizations, and to accept that the actual evolution of political society probably took an entirely different course from the one the contract image suggests.1
