Critically evaluate the contribution of feminist thinking to the study area of political philosophy, placing particular focus on the works of Iris Young, Carol Pateman, and Hobbes

Social contract theorists such as Hobbes have been very influential on political philosophy. He wrote in a time when society was dominated by men, the societal hierarchy revolved around the masculine, and women largely accepted their relegation to the role of caregiver and wife. Western political philosophy has been dominated by conceptions of unity and homogeneity. Difference has traditionally been suppressed in favour of oneness and the universal in terms of citizenship. Heterogeneity and personal desires and passions are thought to have no place in politics and the structure of human civilizations. Feminist thinking has challenged these pre-conceptions, as they have tended to make the exclusion of the female a necessary part of Western political ideologies. Feminist writers such as Iris Young and Carole Pateman have been able to re-evaluate long-standing political concepts and their relationship to the position of women in society, suggesting reasons for why it is that they have spent history languishing outside the political sphere.
By examining the foundations upon which political philosophy and social theory are based, feminist thinking has something practical to contribute. As Iris Young puts it, using the feminist thinking of writers such as Irigaray and Kristeva, we can produce “important results for political philosophy and practical emancipatory politics.” In her view, the aim of such thinking is to “…build a vision of positively heterogeneous and sensuous public life.” By stating such aims, feminist writers like Young and Carole Pateman contribute different perspectives and different goals for political philosophy. In doing so, they awaken new questions for the study of politics and social contract theory to do with the nature of unity and diversity, gender and equality, and reason itself.
Philosophy is the pursuit of truth, knowledge and wisdom through the process of rational thought. Most of political and moral theory bases its arguments around the perceived use of this reasoning power, and the way in which its correct utilization should manifest itself in the creation of a ‘good’ society. Hobbes, writing in the Seventeenth century, argued that the entire aim of reason was to create stable societies in which human beings can coexist peacefully. Indeed, the attainment of peace was the goal towards which Hobbes’ philosophy strived. He argued that in order to reach harmony within civilization, humans must obey civil law. Without such obedience, society would collapse, leading to selfish and individualistic attitudes which in turn would result in internecine warfare. This state of unrest is to him the ‘state of nature’, the state we would ordinarily lapse into, were we not equipped with the faculties of reason. But because we do possess these faculties, we understand that to maintain the status quo we must subject ourselves to sovereign rule. In return for our subjection and the subjection of our fellow humans, we are offered protection by way of the law. The idea is that we enter into a ‘social contract’ with a governing body: we accept their rule, and they protect us from the harm and injustice other citizens may inflict.
This idea of a contract is extremely significant in Hobbes’ theory. It enters into his discussion of all power relations. For Hobbes, a contract is made even when consent to the agreement must be acquired by force, or through threat. It is the individual’s natural drive towards self-preservation that ensures a contract of subservience will be entered into once their own life, or livelihood, is at stake. Acting in this way on the basis of pure survival instinct is, for Hobbes, the only right of nature we retain while still being able to stake a claim to reason. To act out of self-interest due to an immediate and personal threat is justifiable: in all other circumstances reason dictates that we should act out of concern for the long-term preservation of mankind, or at least, our own societies. This ‘buying into’ a power-relation between subject and protector is well understood and accepted by us in society today. Although we no longer have a powerful monarch, it has been replaced by the State, which governs (or should govern) over citizens much like a parent disciplines and protects his /her children.
The analogy between society and family is one often used. Traditionally, the father has been seen as the ‘head of the household’, with wife and children subject to his will and demands. This patriarchal view of family and civilization has long been entrenched in political philosophy. Carole Pateman argues that masculine dominance has been so accepted as part of the ‘natural order’ that many political theorists have overlooked questions surrounding the subjection of women in society and politics. The views of classic contract theorists such as Sir Robert Filmer; that the male has been granted a God-given and natural right to govern over families, countries, and women had in some respects gone unchallenged.
Feminist thinking has gone some way to challenging this world-view. Pateman hits upon a key aspect of Hobbes’ contract theory; that the right of men to subjugate women in his work is not part of the ‘state of nature’. Instead it is a contract, entered into by both parties. But because Hobbes does not view the acceptance of contracts as an entirely consensual agreement (a contract still exists if one party acknowledges it through fear or lack of choice), the basis of the patriarchal civic state is not naturally occurring, but rather due to the deliberate assertion of power by men. She suggests that this freedom of women to choose to enter into a marriage contract is illusory, arguing that women are coerced by accepted social norms into ‘consenting’ to marriage and that masculine sovereignty comes about through the deliberate domination of women: “…men establish patriarchal political right, exercised in large part as conjugal right.” Because the traditional consensus has been that the marriage contract is not political, women have been seen as ‘free’ to choose to accept marriage. Pateman argues instead for self-assumed obligation in society to redress the balance. This idea is that individuals are all viewed as free and equal, and as such are able to commit themselves to agreements and arrangements through free discussion. She maintains that to have a legitimate government, it must be created voluntarily through the argument and discussion of all free and equal individuals. She goes further to suggest that the very idea of self-assumed obligation as opposed to the ‘voluntary coercion’ of contracts such as the marriage contract has “…turned the justification of modern government, whether in the state, the plantation, or of the workplace or of men over women into a general and permanent problem.” Recognising this as a problem demonstrates a real contribution to political philosophy; it exhibits the ability of specifically feminist thinking to provide a fresh perspective on traditional views and suggest alternative ways of theorizing about politics with women and minorities in mind. There are problems, however, with the practical implementation of such theorizing. Laura Kipnis writes about the theories of consent in the in the overlapping fields of psychology and psychoanalysis: that the role accepted by women in a capitalist and patriarchal society as subservient to the male could be due to an unconscious structure of consent “negotiated in the suturing effects of…the specularity of ideology, or in the very construction of gender.” If the idea of male right to dominate women is so deeply rooted in the individual and collective consciousness, it becomes difficult for women and society in general to put a changing and more feminist political philosophy into practice.
But the idea of ‘involuntary consent’ given by women to men through the sexual contract does have implications for social contract theory. Pateman uses it to fill in the blanks left by Hobbes’ definition and explanation of the power-relations in human civilizations. Unlike other social contract theorists of his day, Hobbes recognized that the patriarchal order of society was not a natural state of affairs. He allowed for the fact that women, in a primordial state, are as free and autonomous as men. He observed that children have a primary relationship with their mothers: women are ‘lords and masters’ of their offspring because they have the power to either nourish or abandon them. In this way, infants enter into a ‘contract’ with their mothers from the moment of birth. They exchange obedience for protection. Pateman then asks how the change comes about from natural maternal dominion to absolute paternal right over wives, children, and society as a whole. She argues that the basis of this power shift has to be the forced or willing submission of rights from mother to father: the sexual contract between a man and a woman. Hobbes writes: “…there is not always that difference of strength or prudence between the man and the woman, as that right can be determined without war.” Following from that, she can argue that the genesis of political dominion lies in a battle fought and lost by women, and cemented in the conjugal right:
“…the original contract is not only a social contract that constitutes the civil laws and political right in the sense of (state) government; it is also a sexual contract that institutes political right in the form of patriarchal – masculine – power.”
This idea shakes the foundation of much political thought and assumption: sovereignty lies not in a natural hierarchy with the masculine at the top, but in a forcible overthrowing of female and maternal power. If we can see the social contract in this way, we can understand that without the conquest of women in the natural condition, Hobbes’ account of the institution of Leviathan would simply not make sense.
The exclusion of women from political life is therefore no longer seen as a natural occurrence due to innate gender differences, but as necessary for the establishment of the male-dominated civic state we live in today. In order to maintain control and stability, there must be unity among the rulers and heads of households; to preserve this unity, difference must be excluded, therefore political right must be reserved solely for men. The notion of unity and homogeneity in the public sphere has long been a tenet of political philosophy. Hobbes’ rational striving for the good of society is to be represented in the universal nature of the state: impartial and detached from individual passions and desires, the state can secure the common interest.
Young challenged this view, arguing that “the ideal of the civic public exhibits a will to unity, and necessitates the exclusion of aspects of human existence that threaten to disperse the brotherly unity of straight and upright forms.” Within these ‘aspects of human existence’ she includes women, and ethnic and sexual minorities. Pateman would agree with Young here, stating: “To attempt to represent both sexes within the figure of one master would be to dissolve his unity and oneness and to shatter political order.” This allusion to familial relations is analogous to the entire structure of the state. In Hobbes’ theory, the institution of Leviathan represents the patriarchal order, both in civic and domestic life. What is needed for both to operate satisfactorily is complete submission to the universality of the master; to cast aside differences and submit to his oneness, and his will.
Young argues that the promotion of homogeneity in public life secures, not the interests of everyone, but only the interests of the few and the powerful. She questions the ideal of the civic state as universal and impartial. This use of universal reason as the absolute tool in government ignores private and individual concerns and desires, leaving the needs of those who do not entirely fit the profile of what constitutes the universal unfulfilled. In political philosophies such as those of Rousseau and Hegel, women are excluded because they are traditionally viewed as the caretakers: they are symbolic of emotional needs, desire and the body, none of which can be seen as impartial attributes, all of which would disrupt the balance in the public realm of citizenship.
Young argues that:
“…this ideal of impartiality is illusory, and because claims to assert normative reason as impartial issue practically in the political exclusion of persons associated with affectivity and the body, we need a conception of normative reason that does not hold this ideal and does not oppose reason to affectivity and desire.”
She suggests that Habermas’ idea of communicative ethics, whereby reason and truth are not grasped through intuition, but worked out through discussion, is closer to a view for an inclusive political framework, although she finds that his version of it does not hold up under scrutiny, and actually implicitly reproduces the opposition between reason and desire. With a competent communicative ethics, however, women (and minorities) would be able to participate in political life, through the acceptance and understanding of individual perspectives. ‘Reason’ as it is needed in the political sphere, would be derived from the sum of particulars, rather than attempting to hold on to the ‘illusory’ impartial ideal.
The implications ideas and arguments such as these have for political philosophy is that they shift the way in which the civic public can be viewed, and broaden the theoretical possibilities for the political domain. Feminist thinking exposes the dubious logic behind the foundations and philosophies of the patriarchal political state, hitherto taken for granted as generally ‘correct’ or having been derived from nature and pure rationality. They refresh the question ‘what is reason?’ and demand that the theories underlying the structure of society be re-examined. Can our political culture remain as it is once we have looked into its ideological foundations, those of impartiality, justice and reason, and still find it sound, once we have considered the fact it has at its genesis an unjust conquest over one gender by the other? These are questions that feminist thinking has allowed political philosophy to raise. And politics itself has indeed changed under the influence of feminism and movements towards equality and against discrimination. In the twentieth century in particular, steps taken towards the emancipation of women have helped to ensure a global consciousness of the female political right, although there is still some way to go to ensure that the generally white and masculine domination of politics and indeed of philosophy and reason itself, becomes more inclusive. But as well as the marriage contract, we now have ‘civil partnerships,’ which have no connotations of conjugal or patriarchal right. In the last few decades, it has been accepted that a husband can be guilty of raping his wife: the conjugal right no longer exists in the laws of our state. Writers such as Young and Pateman have taken the patriarchal contract theories of old scholars such as Hobbes, and used their logic and ‘reason’ to demonstrate the irrational subjugation of women throughout history, and made the way for women to take on a larger role in global politics. They have brought in the serious arena of political philosophy Mary Astell’s question: “If All Men are born Free, how is it that Women are born Slaves?” Read more at: http://www.essaywriter.co.uk/critically-evaluate-the-contribution-of-feminist-thinking-to-the-study-area-of-political-philosophy,-placing-particular-focus-on-the-works-of-iris-young,-carol-pateman,-and-hobbes.aspx?id=r57ghhTtcSi4h