Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom

Political Theory

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 46-67

  Hirschmann, Nancy J ^a  

^a Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84997868322     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591796024001004     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. Tamar Lewin, “Hurdles Increase for Many Women Seeking Abortions,” New York Times, March 15, 1992, 1, 18.
2. John Gray, “On Positive and Negative Liberty,” Political Studies 28, no. 4 (1980): 507–26;
3. S. I. Benn and W. L. Weinstein, “Being Free to Act and Being a Free Man,” Mind 80 (1971): 194–211.
4. See Richard Flathman, The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), for an excellent survey of the range of definitions of freedom.
5. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Four Essays on Liberty, ed. by Isaiah Berlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 118–72.
6. Charles Taylor, “What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?,” The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honor of Isaiah Berlin, ed. by Alan Ryan (New York: Oxford University Press), 177.
7. Benn and Weinstein, “Being Free to Act”;
8. Gray, “On Positive and Negative Liberty”;
9. Isaiah Berlin, “From Hope and Fear Set Free,” Concepts and Categories, ed. by Isaiah Berlin (New York: Viking, 1979), 191–92.
10. Taylor, “What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?,” 177, 185–88.
11. Some critics will complain that I have collapsed two different conceptions of positive liberty here. Berlin, for instance, insists that positive liberty absolutely requires external determination of the will, and specifically determination by the state, as in Rousseau's infamous forcer d'etre libre. A central element for many positive libertarians such as Rousseau, however, is that freedom consists in following your true will, and that in turn involves a “freedom from” internal desires and passions that do not represent the true or higher self. Taylor emphasizes this same “divided self” in his account of positive liberty, focusing on internal barriers to realizing the better or higher desire rather than on the external mechanism that directs you to it, but does so in an individualist fashion; in his examples, the subject always seems to know that he or she has a higher and lower desire and is struggling to achieve the former. However, Taylor points out that even this individualist account of positive liberty implicitly incorporates aspects of Berlin's view by maintaining that a focus on inner barriers inevitably leads to “second guessing,” and I follow him here; but he stops short of acknowledging the ways in which this second guessing in turn can lead inevitably to state intervention. On the other hand, Berlin's focus on state determination leads to his forgetting about the importance of the divided self and the internal barriers to realizing the preferred or “true” will. See Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” esp. 133–34;
12. Taylor, “What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?,” passim.
13. Gerald MacCallum, “Negative and Positive Freedom,” Philosophical Review 76 (1967): 312–34;
14. Orlando Patterson, Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 3.
15. Stanley Benn, A Theory of Freedom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
16. Ian Carter, “The Measurement of Pure Negative Freedom,” Political Studies 40 (1992): 38–50;
17. Diana Coole, “Constructing and Deconstructing Liberty,” Political Studies 41 (1993): 83–95;
18. Flathman, Philosophy and Politics of Freedom;
19. Gray, “On Positive and Negative Liberty”;
20. Kristjan Kristjansson, “What's Wrong with Positive Liberty?” Social Theory and Practice 18 (1992): 63–70;
21. Leslie Paul Thiele, “Heidegger on Freedom: Political Not Metaphysical,” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 278–91;
22. David West, “Spinoza on Positive Freedom,” Political Studies 41 (1993): 284–96.
23. Those who focus on Berlin's differentiation between “freedom from” and “freedom to” to illustrate its incoherence—every freedom from is a freedom to—miss the deeper point of this external/internal divide. See, for instance, Patterson, Freedom;
24. MacCallum, “Negative and Positive Freedom.”
25. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
26. See, for instance, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990)
27. and Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1994);
28. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982);
29. Michele Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1980)
30. and vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1990);
31. Jean Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979);
32. Joan Scott, “Experience,” Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. by J. Butler and J. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 22–40;
33. Jacquelyn Zita, “The Male Lesbian,” Lesbian Ethics, ed. by Claudia Card (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 112–32.
34. In this, it is important to note that social constructionism does not require that theorists reject individualism or negative freedom out of hand. Developed in part as a response to absolutist political authority and emerging political movements for parliamentarian and representative government, and motivated in turn by largely economic considerations (see Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986];
35. Isaac Kramnick, Revolutionary Politics and Bourgeois Radicalism [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990];
36. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke [New York: Oxford University Press, 1964]), the emphasis on the individual as the unit of analysis and freedom as noninterference by governments is an understandable, although not the only possible, reaction to contemporary historical and political conditions. However, calling these conceptions natural and timeless obfuscates their origin and meaning, decontextualizes and dehistoricizes, and thereby hides their biases. In such hidden biases lie the clangers of totalizing representation and the erasure of men and women of color, White women, workers, and the poor.
37. Adriana Cavarero, “II pensiero della differenze sessuale” (“Toward a Theory of Sexual Difference”), Diotima (Milan, Italy: La Tartaruge, 1987)
38. quoted and translated by Teresa de Lauretis, “The Essence of the Triangle, or Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain,” Differences 1, no. 2 (1989): 16.
39. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985);
40. Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. by Toril Moi (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1986).
41. See, for instance, Angela Brown, When Battered Women Kill (New York: Macmillan, 1987);
42. R. Emerson and Russell R Dobash, Women, Violence and Social Change (New York: Routledge, 1992);
43. Mildred Pagelow, Woman-Battering (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1981);
44. Lenore Walker, The Battered Woman Syndrome (New York: Springer, 1984).
45. Flathman, Philosophy and Politics of Freedom, 17.
46. Carter, “The Measurement of Pure Negative Liberty.”
47. Catherine MacKinnon, “Not a Moral Issue,” Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
48. Gray, “On Positive and Negative Liberty,” 522, 522.
49. See also Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 122.
50. See Brown, When Battered Women Kill
51. Lenore Walker, Terrifying Love: Why Battered Women Kill and How Society Responds (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
52. Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth (London: Faber & Faber, 1987), 52.
53. Foucault, “The Deployment of Sexuality,” History of Sexuality, vol. 1, esp. 92–95
54. and Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77, ed. by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 95–99.
55. Furthermore, as Iris Young argues (Justice and the Politics of Difference [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990]), the distinction between responsibility and blame is important; while feminists may not be able to blame individual men for patriarchy because they are victimized by it—perhaps even (some? many?) White, economically privileged men—we nevertheless can hold men collectively responsible for it because they benefit from the power it gives them over women and they either tacitly or overtly refuse to resist those benefits just as many Whites (women as well as men) tacitly accept the benefits of race privilege. As some benefit more than others, some are more responsible than others.
56. Equality is another example of such an aporia; while the liberal discourse of equality has been critiqued for including only White propertied men, the logic of equality discourse has provided access for feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft onward, as well as people of color, to claim new powers and statuses within liberal society. See Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
57. By this, I mean that social construction suggests that by saying women are inferior, women are inferior; that is, culture, ethics, and law encode the belief and it becomes materialized. But this materialization is never total, hence the ability to challenge the claim even as one lives it. See Butler, Bodies That Matter
58. Rosemary Hennessey, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1993).
59. Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984), 231–51.
60. See Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970)
61. and Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), on consciousness-raising groups;
62. see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), chap. 6, on Black “community othermothering”;
63. and see Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body (Boston: Beacon, 1987), on menstruation huts.
64. Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice, Trans. by Patricia Cicogna and Teresa deLauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 129, 138, 28, 129, 147, 119.
65. They even talk in terms of a “female social contract,” which I find an unfortunate choice of terms (Nancy J. Hirschmann, Rethinking Obligation [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992]), although this must be understood in terms of the reformulated conception of the “individual contractor” as a self located in relationship rather than the abstract interest maximizer of social contract theory, 138.
66. Judy Woods Cox and Cal. D. Stoltenberg, “Evaluation of a Treatment Program for Battered Wives,” Journal of Family Violence 6 (1991): 395–413.
67. David Bakan, The Duality of Human Existence: Isolation and Communion in Western Man (Boston: Beacon, 1966);
68. Hirschmann, Rethinking Obligation, 139–40