Abstract
The philosophies of John Rawls, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau influence US-specific understandings of social equity and its social contract. This chapter questions such a disciplinary reliance via postmodernism. Postmodernism helps to deconstruct an American over-reliance on methodologically Western spaces. This leads to interactions of the social equity concept with Buddhism, Hinduism, three approaches to “African” philosophies and one concept (Ubuntu), and the indigenous philosophies of the Quechua, Aboriginal, Diné, and Inuit. The implications of a deconstructed and epistemologically repositioned social equity concept for public administration are discussed in the conclusion.