[T]o highlight only the critical tradition is to lose sight of the emancipatory prospects of contract. Absent such insight, the cultural power of contract ideals becomes inexplicable, even mysterious. For the generation who witnessed the transition from slavery to freedom and argued over the meaning of that transformation, contract offered a way of making sense of the changes in their world and of distinguishing between the relations of freedom and slavery. Contract opened up ways of thinking about the perplexities of a culture that condemned the traffic in slaves while otherwise celebrating the boundlessness of the free market. It did not offer a common vantage point to differently situated persons, but instead some common principles for expressing differing visions of the genuine meaning of self-ownership, consent, and reciprocal exchange. It was a language of aspiration as well as of criticism.

This is an excerpt from Amy Dru Stanley’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 63).