The Classic Social Contractarians: Critical Perspectives from Contemporary Feminist Philosophy and Law by Janice Richardson
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2011.00849_1.x |
| Date | 01 March 2011 |
| Published date | 01 March 2011 |
treaties may well need to be revisited as the economies of the many states which
have entered into investment treaties in the past decades begin to mature.
David Collins
n
Janice Richardson,The Classic Social Contractarians: Critical Perspectivesfrom
Contemporary Feminist Philosophyand Law
,Farnham:Ashgate,2009,163 pp,
hb d55.00.
Janice Richardson has written an interesting and original book on classical
social contract theory.The book o¡ers an analysis of the work of some key social
contractarians, including Hobbes, Locke, Rousseauand Kant. But it also includes,
unusually, the work of Spi noza, who is not normally thought to be a political
philosopher, let alone a Contractarian. Richardson is speci¢cally interested in
the light thrown by the various Contractarians on the question of political
equality, on issues of subordination and oppression, and on using the work of
contemporary feminist philosophers and political theorists to analyse the work
of the early Contractarians. She concludes with an interesting chapter on the
Contractarians and contemporary images of women.
Richardson uses the ‘¢ction’ of the social contract to consider the question of
what it is to be an individual. She further examines the relationship between
others and us. She is speci¢cally interested in what it means to be a woman and
how women are excluded or subordinated in various ways within the various
models of the social contract. She fol lows Pateman, but extends the latter’s
analysis,in valuing the work of Hobbes, for two reasons: ¢rstly, although Hobbes
o¡ered a model of the self as essentially self interested, this is valuable for femin-
ism (and here Richardson draws on Hampton too) because it o¡ers an important
corrective to the tendency amongst women to put others, and frequently
husbands and partners, before themselves. She quotes the case of Fritz Spiegel as
illuminating this point, if in extreme form. But Hobbes’s thought is also valuable
because he regards individuals in the state of nature as equal, as disti nct from
Filmer for whom patriarchy is natural.
Richardson argues that Hobbes, despite his rather unpalatable views about the
state of nature, o¡ers a theorythat is, forfeminists at least, more useful than that of
Locke. Following Pateman, Richardson writes that the‘door is closed’ by Locke
to feminists that ‘was left open by Hobbes’s rigorous individualism’ (81). She
points out that when Locke treats male domination within the family as natural
ratherthan constructed, he divides political power from power within the family
and thereby paves the way for marginalising women’s subordi nation as non-
political. Locke’s account, she argues, was also one that contributed signi¢cantly
to the view of power that is often thought of in the West as th e‘natural’view, as an
operation of a sovereign through the body poli tic.
Richardson makes a further important point about the conception of the self
that is in Locke and that relates not only to the position of women, but to other
n
The City Law School, City UniversityLondon
Reviews
324 r2011The Authors.The Modern Law Review r2011The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2011) 74(2) 322^328
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