Invalidity of Personhood Alienation Contracts

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, three types of voluntary contracts, a lifetime master-servant contract, the coverture marriage contract, and the non-democratic constitution (pactum subjectionis) have all been abolished in the advanced democratic countries. Yet conventional classical liberalism and neoclassical economics offer no serious grounds for abolishing a genuinely voluntary contract—as opposed to suggesting various reforms and regulations or alternative voluntary contracts. However, there is a deeper tradition, which might be called “democratic or Enlightenment classical liberalism,” that historically developed a theory of inalienable rights in the Abolitionist, Democratic, and Feminist Movements that accounted for the abolition of those contracts. The ‘problem’ is that when that deeper theory of inalienable rights is recovered and reformulated in modern terms, then it clearly applies also to the human rental or employment contract that is the basis of the current economic system. This chapter describes the recovery and reformulation of that deeper theory of inalienable rights implying the invalidity of personhood alienation contractsInalienable rights.