Carole Pateman

Works

• 1970Participation and Democratic Theory

  Against elitist theories of democracy: participation, including at the workplace, makes democratic citizens.

• 1988The Sexual Contract

  The story of the social contract hides a sexual contract: modern patriarchy is the rule of the brothers over women.

Position

Participation and Democratic Theory (1970) answered the theories of democracy that followed Joseph Schumpeter, for which citizens only choose between competing elites. Drawing on Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and G. D. H. Cole, Pateman argued that participation educates people for democracy and that democracy has to reach the workplace, and she used studies of industrial participation and Yugoslav self-management as evidence. The Problem of Political Obligation (1979) asked how liberal theory, which bases obligation on consent, can bind citizens who never consented. The Sexual Contract (1988) is her best-known book. The story of the original contract, she argued, is a story of freedom only for men: it presupposes a sexual contract that gives men access to women’s bodies and a “patriarchal right” over them. Modern patriarchy is fraternal, not paternal; the sons overthrow the father and share power over women among themselves, a reading she developed from Robert Filmer, Locke and Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Marriage, prostitution and surrogacy contracts, and in a different way the employment contract, are for her contracts about the use of persons that create subordination rather than mere exchange. Charles Mills took the book as the model for The Racial Contract (1997), and the two later developed a joint theory of the “domination contract”. Critics objected that she reduces modern gender inequality to a single relation of command and obedience (Nancy Fraser, 1993), that she reads the contract tradition too uniformly, and, among advocates of sex workers’ rights and of reproductive choice, that her rejection of prostitution and surrogacy contracts takes decisions away from women themselves. In later work she has argued for an unconditional basic income as a condition of democratic citizenship.

Life & context

Carole Pateman was born in Maresfield, Sussex, on 11 December 1940. She left grammar school at sixteen and came to university by way of Ruskin College, Oxford, a college for adult and working students, which she entered in 1963; she then read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Lady Margaret Hall and took a doctorate at Oxford. From 1972 she taught political theory at the University of Sydney, and from 1990 at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus. She was the first woman to serve as president of the International Political Science Association (1991–94) and was president of the American Political Science Association (2010–11). In 2012 she received the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. With Charles W. Mills she wrote Contract and Domination (2007).

Further main works

• The Problem of Political Obligation (1979)
• The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (1989)
• Contract and Domination (with Charles W. Mills, 2007)
• Basic Income Worldwide (ed. with Matthew C. Murray, 2012)