Bradley also recognized the importance of social nurturing and teaching that raise a human being from the level of its basic desires and impulses to the level at which she becomes, and is recognized as, a rational moral agent. Only if one has learned the normative language of the community and shows by one’s behavior that the values and standards are understood, and that one is able to act with them in mind, does a person get recognized as a member of the moral community and treated as a full and equal member who can be reasoned with and who will take the values embedded in, and reflected in, society’s social and political institutions into consideration in her volitional action. Social and political institutions are not created by atomic individuals out of some pre-social primordial material, and this marks the place that contract theories of the state go wrong. Their basic error is to think that talk of individuals abstracted from all social relations would have any meaning. This error is compounded by assuming that individuals are pure rational calculators without emotional attachments to others around them who enter into social cooperation only for personal gain. This error then gets connected to the earlier error in theories such as Locke’s when it is claimed that these abstract atomic individuals enter the contracting situation with a bundle of natural rights which they hold as perpetual constraints on what others can do. Bradley and all the British Idealists thought that contract theories and individualistic approaches to social and political relations were grounding their political philosophies on false views of human nature and human society. In a word, their basic errors were mistakes in metaphysics.