Political philosophy relies on three alternative types of theory to explain social order. The first, is order anarchy, built on the system of spontaneous Humean conventions. They are equilibria, self-enforcing or enforced by the participants‘ own contingent strategies and involve no central, specialised enforcer. The second type is contractarianism. This paper contends that its name is a misnomer hiding a redundancy. The third type is social contract theory, where there is unanimous commitment to submit to non-unanimous collective choices of certain kinds or reached by certain rules. The paper suggests that social contract theories serve mainly to render acquiescence in political obedience more palatable.

Justice is intrinsically distributive; it distributes by its rules. Distributive‘ or social‘ justice redistributes by overruling them. It has theories that do not start from here‘. It has no rules; it makes claims instead. Both its names are fraudulent aliases, social‘ perhaps less blatantly so. Satisfaction of a claim in `social‘ justice depends on politics and tends to favour the poorer half of society. This commands general sympathy, but sympathy does not make it any less unjust.