Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory

THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK is to examine the concept of freedom in five key canonical figures: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Mill. The importance of the concept of freedom is, I assume, self-evident to readers of this book: it is clearly a, if not the, key concept of the modern canon. Defining “the canon” of modern political theory in terms of these five figures, rather than Hume, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, or any number of other figures, is justified because of their centrality to at least the West’s understanding of freedom, and particularly to Western political theory arguments about freedom; they are all key figures in modern liberalism, which is arguably the ideology that has been responsible for translating the political theory ideal of freedom into the common collective con­ sciousness of the modern West. For Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the “natural freedom” of the state of nature posited by each theorist has had profound effects on how we understand, think about, and talk about free­ dom in the West today.1 Mill made vital contributions to this understand­ ing in his famous defense of individual liberty of conscience and speech, and his articulation of the notion of a zone of privacy into which the state may not intrude. Kant, perhaps better known as a moral philosopher who posited the “categorical imperative,” also defended liberal freedoms such as freedom of speech in his political writings and is associated by many scholars with social contract theory and the liberal tradition. As the ensu­ ing chapters will demonstrate, I do not always agree with these dominant readings, but these readings make the selection of these five theorists obvi­ ous and central for anyone writing on freedom. In one sense, then, this book is a very traditional work of political the­ ory: it selects some major canonical figures, examines their texts, analyzes their arguments, and develops an account of freedom out of that. But it is not traditional in the three related themes that I use to guide my reading of the texts: Isaiah Berlin’s typology of negative and positive liberty in its historical, rather than analytic, dimensions; the idea of social construc­ tion; and the place of gender and class in the concept of freedom. At first glance, the first and third might not seem that untraditional: but instead of justifying those themes here in summary fashion, I will break down my introduction to this book along the lines of those three themes, to present © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.