Contract theory stretches to justify even slavery as mutually beneficial agreement.

Evidence

As Carole Pateman notes in The Sexual Contract, the most influential “story” in political theory is the story of the contract by which we supposedly create or have created political society. The vision of agreement on social order is carried to perhaps its most exaggerated level in the arguments of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf that even slavery is contractual: The slave benefits from steady employment, and the master benefits from the slave’s services (Pateman 1988, 68–69). … Her most important criticism of the idea is the conspicuous lack of participation by women in the social contract of any past time and, arguably, even of today, but her criticisms are more general than this in that, with Baier, she thinks much of moral life is grounded in the assumption of agreement. Agreement between those of unequal power is inherently suspect. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 486

Categorization

• XREF: The Grotius/Pufendorf slavery-as-contract inversion parallels Hardin’s own project: trust-as-encapsulated-interest fails precisely when power makes defection cheap, exactly as blindness-epidemic society degrades in Saramago.
• QUESTION: Hardin implies trust between unequals is suspect-but-possible (he criticizes the power-blindness of contract theory elsewhere). Worth chasing how Hardin distinguishes his trust theory from contract theory on exactly this point.