"Because most Americans believe that government requires the consent of the governed, the idea of the social contract may come as close to a public philosophy as we've ever had. And, as Mark Hulliung reminds us, we have frequently fought our greatest political battles by wielding one or another version of social contract theory. Hulliung's book is the first to examine the role of the social contract across the entire sweep of American history, well beyond the Revolution and Founding periods. While he pays close attention to the contested versions of the social contract from 1765 to 1861, he also underscores its relevance after the Civil War, from late nineteenth-century land reform to the rights revolution of the late twentieth century."--Book jacket.

Principles, forms, and foundations : Social contracts in Revolutionary America -- "Revolution principles" and forms of government -- Principles and foundations -- Social contracts in antebellum America : New tasks for Locke's contract -- The social contract in the South -- The social contract in the North -- The right to land in the land of rights : Agrarianism and "Revolution principles" -- Philosophers and agrarians -- To the Homestead Act -- Henry George in America and Europe -- Burke in America? : In the beginning: the Revolution and the founding -- Chronicles of the Adams family -- Burke as Yankee and as cavalier -- Woodrow Wilson and Edmund Burke -- The French disconnection -- Declarations of Independence : Declarations in 1689, 1776, 1789 -- The Declaration as inclusion -- Taming the Declaration -- The vanishing Declaration -- The end of the social contract? : Before, during, and after the Civil War -- From agrarianism to progressivism -- Fragmentation and dilution.