 A descriptive use to which contractarianism has been put is to exploit the exclusionary, in-group/out-group nature of the contractarian project to illuminate the phenomenon of oppression. Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1989) uses contractarian theory to argue that there has been an implicit contract among men to enforce patriarchy. She calls her approach a “conjectural history,” which she uses both to illuminate the actual history of patriarchal oppression of women and the ideology of social contract theory. Similarly, Charles Mills argues in The Racial Contract (1997) that whites have had an actual, historical, sometimes explicit, though often only implicit, contract to enforce white supremacy. The arguments are similar in their contractarian outlines, though they differ in the historical and factual details. According to both philosophers’ theories, there are moral, political, and epistemological terms of the contract, and its effect has been to allow one group of persons effectively to dominate, subordinate, and exploit another group. The moral terms require the dominant group to evaluate the lives of their group more highly than those of the subordinated, the political to deprive the subordinate group of effective political power, and the epistemological terms require the members of the dominant group to see themselves as intellectually superior to the dominated. The social contract then can be seen as a justification by the parties to the contract of their interaction, and of their exploitation of those who are not parties to the contract, but only if the fundamental division of in-group and out-group is accepted. If the racial and sexual contracts were to be shown to be rational, they would constitute prima facie critiques of normative contractarianism, since they would then seem to justify racism and sexism. Pateman and Mills have more recently teamed up in Contract and Domination (2007) to explore their similarities and ways in which they diverge. Pateman extends her critique of the ideology of contract to the case of colonial appropriation of native peoples’ lands with what she calls the “settler contract.” Mills also extends his analysis both in scope to include gender and class, and to give a normative application of the descriptive contract to the issue of reparations for slavery. He calls this more general contract the “domination contract.” While Pateman holds that contractarianism essentially permits domination, Mills holds that contract theory can be salvaged by beginning with a more realistic non-ideal starting point and asking how existing injustice ought, rationally be eliminated. However, his positive theory is contractualist rather than contractarian, as it begins with the premise of moral equality.