It was the third book in Ardrey's Nature of Man series, following African Genesis (1961) and The Territorial Imperative (1966) and preceding The Hunting Hypothesis (1976).

The Social Contract continues Ardrey's work on understanding how evolutionarily inherited traits are manifest by contemporary man.

[2]The Social Contract also called for a reasoned respect of nature (in his next book, The Hunting Hypothesis, Ardrey would be one of the first to warn of climate change as an existential threat to humanity).

[5]Compared to the other works in the Nature of Man series, The Social Contract inspired more controversy and received more negative reviews.

Furthermore, the central theses of the other three books have come to be commonly accepted in scientific communities: African Genesis (1961) posited that humans evolved from African meat-eaters instead of Asian carnivores;[6] The Territorial Imperative (1966) demonstrated the influence of inherited territorial instincts on social formations;[7] and The Hunting Hypothesis (1976) showed the importance of hunting behavior on the evolutionary course of early man.

[10] In addition to insisting on the necessity for absolute equality of opportunity, Ardrey argued that the presence of inequality does not justify the domination of the weak by the strong.

Robert Wokler, on the importance of Ardrey's approach, wrote: What ought to be studied, according to Ardrey, are the relations between individuals that stem from the innate and universal attributes of animal life, whereas cultural anthropologists who detect a fundamental discontinuity between mankind and other zoological species are just impervious to the revolutionary ideas of Darwinism which have reverberated throughout all the life sciences apart from their own.