Jean Hampton completed her PhD under the direction of John Rawls at Harvard University. She was a Harvard Knox Fellow at Cambridge University, Pew Evangelical Scholar, and a distinguished visiting lecturer at Dalhousie University, University of Notre Dame, Pomona College, and Bristol University. She taught at several American institutions, most recently the University of Arizona, where she was a professor of philosophy at the time of her death in 1996. Her last book, The Authority of Reason, was published posthumously in 1998.

• Introduction; 1. Feminist contractarianism; 2. Selflessness and loss of self; 3. Mens Rea; 4. Correcting harms versus righting wrongs: the goal of retribution; 5. The common faith of liberalism; 6. The contractarian explanation of the state.