Contract as a way of life in literature

Strange how certain anchors seems not to be susceptible to watering by continual exposure to the triggering stimuli.
Example: everytime I hear or read something semantically equivalent to “contract based”, or “contract driven”, I can’t help to think of Kenzo Yagai. It’s a fictional character, found in the marvelous novel (part of the fair trilogy of the Beggars) Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress: in the story he invents a moral code based on the concept of Contract between human beings, which soon becomes almost a religion for a significant portion of population.
I should try to convince some of the people around me to read it, so they’d get the joke when I speak about Yagaism during system design sessions… but that’s hard SciFi, not everybody likes it (but for the ones who do: check out Greg Egan by all means!!!)