ABSTRACT
I start this chapter by outlining key relationships in Pateman’s paradigmatic feminist critique of the social contract tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth enturies and the role of the social contract in perpetuating subordination. This outline illustrates how Pateman’s conception of freedom and participative democracy are central to her work. I then turn to The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Graeber and Wengrow 2021) to compare Patman’s political analysis of freedom with their conceptions of freedom drawn from their research on the variety of social structures in early societies. Despite the importance of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theory for Pateman’s analysis, I demonstrate why this work on early societies is useful based on two reasons. First, Graeber and Wengrow illustrate that there is no inevitability that societies always require systematic subordination, given their diversity; and second, that they provide such a basic analysis of freedom that it can be employed to think about the relationships that Pateman highlights as maintained through the fiction of property in the person.
