Tribe and Empire: An Essay on the Social Contract

We are all torn between tribal moralities, which stress differences and dangers, and imperial ethics, which attempt to overcome differences and defuse dangers. We are all tempted to break--or at least cheat on--the Social Contract. The provocative thesis of Tribe and Empire is that the nation is an unstable halfway house between the paranoid tribe, which sees all other tribes as actual or possible enemies, and the open-ended empire, which sees all people as potential subjects or citizens. Indeed, the modern nation is made up, on the one hand, of increasingly moralistic tribes from the Ku Klux Klan to the National Organization of Women that have rejected the Social Contract, and on the other, of imperial organizations from Amnesty International to Microsoft that seek to expand the Contract beyond the limits of the nation. In order to throw light upon these processes in the modern nation state, the book examines the political development of various North and South American Indian groups from the Social Contract perspective of the 17th century philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.