One narrative about tax policy has dominated recent thinking among development partners, academics, and advocates: tax as part of a “social contract” between citizens and the state. This powerful idea, rooted in the history of the state and the origins of taxation, particularly in medieval Europe, offers a resolution to one of the challenges of public finance: how to stimulate the public’s interest in the fusty topic of fiscal policy. By linking government taxation to expenditure on service delivery (e.g., health and education) for ordinary people, the narrative of the social contract could provide an avenue for greater public engagement in tax policy that underpins a more robust and productive relationship between state and society. This in turn can support enhanced domestic resource mobilization, a key policy goal for many low- and middle-income countries and development partners. In this paper, I argue that the social contract approach is too tidy. While the social contract has a critical role to play in the pantheon of narratives, advocates must also consider its weaknesses. These include an overemphasis on reciprocity rather than equity, limited utility in highly informal economies, a tendency toward earmarking revenues, questionable premises about the principal role of taxation in many contexts, and optimistic assumptions about the outcomes of bargaining over contracts in highly unequal societies. These arguments are not all original, but they tend to be overlooked when the notion of a social contract moves from a historical narrative to an advocacy agenda. No tax narrative is perfect, however. Ultimately, narrative pluralism, which allows advocates to draw on alternatives, such as “services first” or “fairness first” approaches (described below), is preferable to an overreliance on the social contract narrative alone. Even if advocates decide to rely mainly on a social contract narrative, however, which may be appropriate in certain contexts, the paper provides insights that may minimize some of the pitfalls of a contractual approach to taxation.