Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes (Re-Reading the Canon)
Language: English
Pages: 312
ISBN: 0271056363
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes features the work of feminist scholars who are centrally engaged with Hobbes’s ideas and texts and who view Hobbes as an important touchstone in modern political thought. Bringing together scholars from the disciplines of philosophy, history, political theory, and English literature who embrace diverse theoretical and philosophical approaches and a range of feminist perspectives, this interdisciplinary collection aims to appeal to an audience of Hobbes scholars and nonspecialists alike.
As a theorist whose trademark is a compelling argument for absolute sovereignty, Hobbes may seem initially to have little to offer twenty-first-century feminist thought. Yet, as the contributors to this collection demonstrate, Hobbesian political thought provides fertile ground for feminist inquiry. Indeed, in engaging Hobbes, feminist theory engages with what is perhaps the clearest and most influential articulation of the foundational concepts and ideas associated with modernity: freedom, equality, human nature, authority, consent, coercion, political obligation, and citizenship.
Aside from the editors, the contributors are Joanne Boucher, Karen Detlefsen, Karen Green, Wendy Gunther-Canada, Jane S. Jaquette, S. A. Lloyd, Su Fang Ng, Carole Pateman, Gordon Schochet, Quentin Skinner, and Susanne Sreedhar.
American Society (2002, 2005, 2011). Gunther-Canada is completing a book-length manuscript on Catharine Macaulay’s political thought. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University. Nancy J. Hirschmann is Professor of Political Science at The University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent books include Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory (2008) and The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom (2003), which won the 2004 Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on
Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 56. 68. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 15, 87. 69. Karen Green defends Hobbes’s laws of nature as having moral validity beyond prudence: “Hobbes recognizes an equality of natural right which exists independently of our power to enforce it. . . . It is our moral intuitions grounded in this notion that enable us to recognize that there are situations in which individuals may be forced to consent to unjust pacts, and that consent of itself does not
the state. Change is undesirable because it leads to fragmentation and decay. The mortal aspects of the body—its individuality, its gender—all threaten eventual death. In order to immortalize the body of sovereignty, Hobbes makes it other than human. The absence of human gender in Hobbes ironically invites feminist readings, for it severs the patriarchal link between the gendered roles of family and ideal forms of government, putting each in new contexts and allowing both family and government
have pointed out that there is an ambiguity, in this account, concerning the sexual status of the “free and equal” individuals. Do they come in two sexes? Or are they implicitly male? Hobbes explicitly accepts that the state of nature contains individuals of both sexes. But according to Hobbes, women, despite being the natural lords of their offspring, have in most societies been made subjects of the male heads of patriarchal families, and it is these heads of households who contract to set up
legitimate political obligation. Astell’s Critique of Hobbes Mary Astell’s critique of Hobbes’s assumptions, and her opposition to social contract theory in general, has been read as anticipating the contemporary critique by liberal feminists.18 Ruth Perry and Patricia Springborg have both made it a virtue of Astell’s politics that she rejected Hobbes’s notion of a state of nature and anticipated modern feminist critiques of the idea that political legitimacy can be grounded in consent. Perry