R A D I C A L P H I L O S O P H Y

a journal of socialist and feminist philosophy

83 CONTENTS MAY/JUNE 1997

Editorial collective COMMENTARY

Chris Arthur, Ted Benton, Nadine Cartner,
Andrew Collier, Diana Coole, Peter Dews, Who Are My Peers?
Roy Edgley, Gregory Elliott, The Research Assessment Exercise in Philosophy
Howard Feather, Jean Grimshaw,
Kathleen Lennon, Joseph McCarney, Sean Sayers ................................................................................................... 2
Kevin Magill, Peter Osborne,
Stella Sandford, Sean Sayers, Kate Soper
Issue editor
ARTICLES
Jean Grimshaw Generations of Feminism
Reviews editor Lynne Segal.................................................................................................... 6
Sean Sayers
Contributors
Feminism Without Nostalgia
Sean Sayers teaches philosophy at the Diana Coole .................................................................................................. 17
University of Kent, Canterbury.
Feminist Activism and Presidential Politics:
Lynne Segal is Professor of Gender Theorizing the Costs of the ‘Insider Strategy’
Studies at Middlesex University.
Anne-Marie Smith ....................................................................................... 25
Diana Coole teaches political theory
at Queen Mary and Westfield College, Thinking Naturally
University of London.
John O’Neill ................................................................................................. 36
John OʼNeill teaches philosophy at the
University of Lancaster.
Anne-Marie Smith teaches in the REVIEWS
Department of Government at Cornell
University, Ithaca, NY. Michael J. Sandel, Democracyʼs Discontent
Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society
David Archard............................................................................................... 41
Typing (WP input) by Jo Foster John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality
Tel: 0181 341 9238
Kevin Magill ................................................................................................. 43
Layout by Petra Pryke
John Keane, Reflections on Violence
Tel: 0171 243 1464
Anthony Arblaster ....................................................................................... 45
Copyedited and typeset by
Robin Gable and Lucy Morton Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism
Tel: 0181 318 1676 Michael Löwy............................................................................................... 46
Design by Peter Osborne Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question
Anne Seller................................................................................................... 48
Printed by Russell Press, Radford Mill,
Norton Street, Nottingham NG7 3HN Maurice Blanchot, The Most High
Bookshop distribution Julian Cowley .............................................................................................. 49
UK: Central Books, Régis Debray, Media Manifestos
99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Hugh Dauncey ............................................................................................. 50
Tel: 0181 986 4854
Simon Critchley and Peter Dews, eds, Deconstructive Subjectivities
USA: Bernard de Boer, 113 East Centre
Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07100, Gideon Calder .............................................................................................. 51
Tel: 201 667 9300; Philip Goodchild, Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy
Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Jean-Jacques Lecercle .............................................................................. 52
Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217,
Tel: 718 875 5491;
Fine Print Distributors, 500 Pampa Drive,
Austin, Texas 78752-3028.
NEWS
Tel: 512-452-8709 Forum for European Philosophy
Peter Dews ......................................................................................... 53
Cover: Feminist Mothers, Islington, 1975.
Honouring Levinas
Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. Robert Vallier ..................................................................................... 54
http://www.ukc.ac.uk/cprs/phil/rp/
XVIIth German Conference for Philosophy
Stephan Meyer .................................................................................. 56
© Radical Philosophy Ltd
COMMENTARY

Who are my peers?

The Research Assessment Exercise
in Philosophy

Sean Sayers

B
ritish universities have just gone through their third Research Assessment
Exercise (RAE). The ʻresearch outputʼ (i.e. publications) of every participat-
ing department has been graded by panels of ʻexpertsʼ on a seven-point scale.
The purpose of this massive operation is to provide a basis for distributing funds for
research. In theory, the idea of allocating these scarce resources according to the
standard of the work produced seems fair and reasonable; but in philosophy, at least,
that is not how things work out in practice.
The assessment process is supposed to be one of ʻpeer reviewʼ. This sounds reassur-
ingly cosy and communitarian; however, it is doubtful whether it operates that way in a
subject as divided as philosophy. What assurance is there that the panel adequately rep-
resents the diversity of contemporary British philosophy and is competent to undertake
a peer review of the field? The short answer is: none. The panel is a quango, with all
the secretive and undemocratic features typical of such bodies. How its members are
chosen is a mystery. Little attempt is made to present them as representative of the
different schools and approaches in the field. It is only a few years since a number of
prominent philosophers opposed the award of a Cambridge honorary degree to Derrida
(see Jonathan Rée, ʻMassacre of the Innocentsʼ, Radical Philosophy 62, Autumn 1992,
pp. 61–2). Are such philosophers suitable to conduct a ʻpeer reviewʼ of the work of the
followers of Derrida? Indeed, what constitutes a ʻpeerʼ group in a subject like phil-
osophy? Questions like these must be answered before the title of ʻpeer reviewʼ can
have any credibility.
The panel, so it is claimed, assessed the work submitted to it objectively and
impartially. In the previous exercises quantitative data were collected. This time the
assessment was purely qualitative. How ʻqualityʼ was judged is shrouded in Kafka-
esque obscurity. The panel does not explain or justify its decisions; nor is there any
appeals procedure. The criteria it employs are specified only in the vaguest fashion.
ʻInternationalʼ and ʻnationalʼ excellence are the key terms. According to one member
of the panel, however, these were not treated as geographical but rather as ʻvalue
conceptsʼ. Assurances are constantly given about the care and scrupulousness with
which the task was undertaken. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, we are simply
required to have faith in the panelʼs judgements. In typically British fashion, we are
expected to defer to the wisdom of authority. And, in typically British fashion, we do.
This extraordinarily opaque and undemocratic system has been accepted with scarcely
a murmur of dissent (though the demoralized state of the universities in Britain has
doubtless contributed).

2 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)

 The ‘oxygen of competition’
The exercise is designed to inject the ʻoxygen of competitionʼ into philosophy by
rewarding ʻexcellenceʼ wherever it is found. It is most unlikely to have this effect. ʻOf
course, Oxford and Cambridge will get 5sʼ (the top mark), one member of the panel
is reported to have said, even before the submissions were in. Of course they did. Of
course Warwick and Essex (the main centres for ʻcontinentalʼ philosophy) will not
get 5s, he could well have added. Of course they did not. As regards the standards of
ʻinternationalʼ excellence, a colleague was assured: ʻonly the US and Australia count.ʼ
In short, what is regarded as philosophy in Oxford, Harvard and Sydney is the stand-
ard. If you want a high rating, you would be well advised to follow that model.
There can be no doubt that all this will have a deeply conservative impact on the
subject. Instead of promoting ʻexcellenceʼ, it will impose a narrow orthodoxy and stifle
innovation and creativity. Assuming that the RAE is going to be repeated, the system
should be opened up and made publicly accountable.
In the first place, the panel should be selected by an open process with the aim of
representing the diversity of approaches and schools in the subject as a whole. In the
USA this could be achieved through the machinery of the American Philosophical
Association, whose membership covers virtually the whole profession. Unfortunately,
there is no similar organization of philosophers in Britain.
Second, the rating criteria should be specified more precisely, and the reasons for
the panelʼs decisions explained and opened up to appeal. There is nothing particularly
radical in these suggestions. Apart from anything else, they are matters of elementary
justice which simply echo the recommendations of the Nolan Committee on Standards
in Public Life.
Given the divisions within philosophy, however, it is difficult to see how they could
be implemented without taking some account of more objective – that is to say, more
quantitative – standards. Scepticism about the value of these is very widespread, and
not just among defenders of the status quo. Sheer quantity of output – a concern in
previous exercises – is crude and unsatisfactory (and it engenders a deluge of pointless
publications). However, there are other indicators, such as frequency of citation and
even market success, which could help the system respond more fairly to the diversity
of approaches in the subject.
No doubt, as criteria of ʻqualityʼ, these measures are crude too, and I am not sug-
gesting that they should be used mechanically or on their own. No doubt they would
generate their own distortions, as authors would be motivated to cite and be cited rather
than to say anything worth saying. But rating philosophical work on a seven-point scale
is an inherently crude business. At least such criteria offer some objective indication
of academic standing, relatively free of the personal opinions of a few individuals; and
what they reveal is illuminating.
Citations 1981–97
The very idea of consulting citation rates and
Name Humanities Social sciences Total the like is often treated with disdain. According
Derrida, J. 1,867 578 2,445 to Professor Hepburn, reporting on the work of
Habermas, J. 1,493 1,291 2,784 the 1989 panel in philosophy which he chaired,
Gadamer, H.-G. 884 284 1,168
Rorty, R. 720 428 1,148 ʻwe made no use of mechanical aids such as
Levinas, E. 680 93 773 frequency of citation; a notably unsatisfactory
Putnam, H. 647 382 1,029 attempt on a philosophical problem can be cited
Davidson, D. 646 333 979
Quine, W.V. 552 254 806 repeatedly in the early pages of books or articles
Rawls, J. 328 342 670 that aspire to a more adequate theory!ʼ This well
Dummett, M. 284 112 396
Singer, P. 238 364 602 illustrates the complacent amateurism which has
so far characterized the whole exercise. Actual
Source: BIDS ISI Humanities and Social Science Citation Indexes. citation figures tell a very different story. The
most frequently cited philosophers include Rorty,

Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 3

Putnam, Davidson; Derrida, Habermas, Gadamer (see Table, previous page). It would
be absurd to suggest that any of these writers has gained his position merely by being
repeatedly refuted. Rather, it is clear that the most cited philosophers are on the whole
the best known and most influential ones.
The high citation rates for ʻcontinentalʼ philosophers like Derrida and Habermas are
striking. There can be no doubt that Derridaʼs work is cited not only by philosophers
but also in literary theory, cultural studies and many other areas, mainly in the humani-
ties. Habermas has a similarly wide influence, though more in the social sciences. To
those who regard philosophy as a narrow and self-contained specialism, such influence
is at best an irrelevance to their standing as philosophers, perhaps even grounds for
suspicion on this score.
Market success arouses similar distrust. To quote Hepburn again, ʻa substantial
published work could be of a semi-popular nature, perhaps summarising the research of
others rather than breaking new ground, and might well not qualify as research at all
in this context.ʼ The concept of ʻresearchʼ at work here may apply well enough in the
sciences, but it is far more debatable in philosophy. The idea that ʻgenuine researchʼ is
written only for a tiny band of specialists, and that the ʻsemi-popularʼ is suspect, has
had a lamentable impact on the style and content of contemporary professional phil-
osophy (of both the analytic and continental varieties); one of the most harmful aspects
of the RAE in its present form is that it enforces this conception of philosophy on the
profession as a whole.
A huge flood of such work has poured forth as a result of the obsession with
ʻresearchʼ dictated by the present system. Much of it is pointless from a philosophical
point of view; its main raison dʼêtre is to gain a research rating and/or promotion. It
remains unread and undiscussed on library shelves; it has no other market. Philosophers
like Derrida and Davidson can scarcely be accused of being ʻsemi-popularʼ. And yet
their work is very widely read and discussed, and sales of their books, I am sure, are
healthy. I do not suggest that frequency of citation or market success alone should
be adopted as measures of research quality. I do suggest that they should not be so
complacently disregarded in the assessment process. For there is every reason to believe
that they provide an indication of ʻqualityʼ less liable to partiality and prejudice than
the personal judgements of panel members.

A dead hand of conformity

To anyone of my generation, the situation in philosophy being fostered by the current
RAE system will be familiar. We have been there before. When I was a student in the
1960s, philosophy in Britain was entirely dominated by the narrow conception of the
subject which then prevailed in Oxford and Cambridge. There were virtually no courses
in British universities on Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger or Freud. Even Sartre, I
was told by one of my teachers at Cambridge, was ʻnot a philosopherʼ. Philosophy was
treated as an entirely distinct and separate subject. The idea that philosophical insights
could fruitfully be derived from, or applied to, other subjects or concrete practical
issues was alien.
It was to combat this situation, and to provide a forum for an alternative and broader
conception of philosophy, that journals like Radical Philosophy were founded. These
attempts to widen the subject were resisted by the established authorities. Mercifully,
this resistance was largely overcome and the subject has broadened very greatly in the
last thirty years, even if such resistance continues, particularly in those departments
rated as most ʻexcellentʼ by the RAE. Oxford and Cambridge remain almost untouched
by these changes.
Elsewhere, the subject has been transformed. New approaches and ideas have been
introduced and taken up. They have won an audience, they are cited in the literature,
they have gained a market. Citation rates and market forces have proved far more

4 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)

responsive to innovation and diversity in the subject than the judgements of senior
academics of the sort typically chosen for the RAE panels.
Such indicators demonstrate the reality of the changes that have occurred in phil-
osophy in Britain, and its resulting diversity, in an empirical and objective manner that
cannot plausibly be dismissed. This is their significance in the present context. Until
this diversity is duly recognized, the RAE system, so far from introducing new oxygen,
will impose a dead hand of conformity on the subject and stifle its development. The
sooner it is changed, the better for British philosophy.

Society for European Philosophy

The results of the recent assessment of philosophy de-

partments within the UK clearly demonstrated the mar-
ginalisation of European philosophical traditions. In order
to counter this marginalisation we believe there is a need
for an organisation which would affirm the expanding
influence and vitality of European philosophical traditions.
We therefore propose that a society be
founded to provide a forum in which all
those working within these traditions
– whether within philosophy depart-
ments or not – could meet, further their
own work and defend their common
interests. Dr Christine Battersby,
University of Warwick
Professor Andrew Benjamin,
University of Warwick
In order to found the Society an Professor Geoffrey Bennington,
inaugural conference will be held University of Sussex
Professor Howard Caygill,
at Birkbeck College, Malet Street,
Goldsmiths College, University of London
London WC1 from 10.30am–4.30pm Dr Simon Critchley,
on Saturday June 28. All those inter- University of Essex
ested in participating in the Society Professor Peter Dews,
are invited to attend. University of Essex
Dr Joanna Hodge,
Manchester Metropolitan University
Panels will include: ʻTraditions in
Professor Salim Kemal,
European Philosophyʼ and ʻThe University of Dundee
Philosophical Geography of Europeʼ Dr Peter Osborne,
Middlesex University
Mr Jonathan Rée,
For further information write to: Middlesex University
Dr Kate Soper,
Society for European Philosophy,
University of North London
c/o Department of Philosophy, Professor Margaret Whitford,
University of Warwick, Queen Mary and Westfield College,
Coventry CV4 7AL University of London

Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 5

Generations of feminism
Lynne Segal

Politics makes comics of us all. Or we would weep. being overlooked should we fail to keep abreast of new
Sheila Rowbotham1 theoretical fashions; or unable to admit the tensions
and contradictions of past attachments.
I have been thinking for some time now about political
A small band of feminist historians, mostly in
generations.2 Indeed, I began my last book, Straight
the USA, who are trying to recapture the diversity
Sex, with a reflection upon the enduring impact of
of the movement in which they participated, declare
those formative moments which first enable us to
that they cannot recognize themselves, or others, in
make some sense of the world, and our place within
what they see as the distorting accounts of Womenʼs
it – an unjust and shabby world, whatever our personal
Liberation circulating in contemporary feminism.
circumstances. Such moments remain all the more
Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, for example,
powerful if, like many of my own generation who
are gathering material for a multi-volume collection
became students in the 1960s, you have hoped – with
of literature from the movement in the United States.
whatever levels of scepticism and self-mockery – to
They are joined by others interested in archiving
participate in the making of history. They leave their
the local histories of Womenʼs Liberation, such as
mark, even as changing times cause one to rethink,
Patricia Romney, documenting a group of fifty women
perhaps even to renounce, oneʼs formative political
of colour based in New York and Oakland, Califor-
presumptions. Yet, what often leaves erstwhile political
nia, who – with other Black activists in the sixties
crusaders with little more than mournful and confus-
and seventies – became the forgotten women who
ing feelings of loss and regret – whatever our capacities
ʻfell down the wellʼ (as Carolyn Heilbrun puts it)
for irony – is the way in which new narratives emerge
in subsequent rewritings of Womenʼs Liberation as
as collective memories fade, writing over those that
exclusively white.3
once incited our most passionate actions.
These historians are aware of the dangers of their
So it has been with Womenʼs Liberation, that second
proximity to their own research, of how memories
wave of feminism which arose out of the upsurge of
are muted or reshaped by subsequent perspectives and
radical and socialist politics in the late 1960s. It grew
interests – whether oneʼs own, or those of younger
rapidly as a mass social movement, peaking in the
recorders. At a recent symposium on the history of
mid-seventies before dissolving as a coherent organiza-
Womenʼs Liberation in the United States, Margaret
tion by the end of that decade. If only indirectly, it
(Peg) Strobel recounted that even when rereading her
affected the lives of millions of women. Now, however,
own diaries and letters she is amazed at their failure
a quarter of a century later, the sparse amount of
to match her current recollections of the events she
thoughtful scholarship analysing the distinctiveness of
has recorded there.4 Reading our histories through
that movement struggles for attention amidst a glut of
texts delineating its contemporary academic progeny the interpretations of others can be more unsettling
– largely scornful of its rougher parent, and the motley again. Contemporary texts reviewing recent feminist
basements, living rooms, workplaces and community history provide sobering examples of how the past is
centres in which it was hatched. This is not just a inevitably read through the concerns of the present,
female Oedipal tale, as disobedient daughters distance often invalidating earlier meanings and projects and
themselves from their mothersʼ passions, seeking rec- erasing their heterogeneity. The displacement of former
ognition for themselves. It is also a sibling affair, as struggles and perspectives, however, is all the more
feminists contend with each other: fearful, perhaps, of disconcerting when contemporary theorists start off

6 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)

from a critical fascination with problems of ʻexperi-
enceʼ, ʻmemoryʼ and the ʻsilencingʼ of other voices,
alongside a formal abhorrence of binary logics and
apparent scepticism about generalization of all kinds.
Yet, it is precisely the reckless generalization and false
contrasts which astonish me when I read accounts of
the distance self-proclaimed ʻninetiesʼ feminism has
travelled from Womenʼs Liberation, and what now
appears newly homogenized as ʻseventiesʼ feminism.
Dubious contrasts
A recent British collection, edited by Michèle Barrett
and Anne Phillips, Destabilizing Theory, was put
together to highlight what it refers to as ʻthe gulf
between feminist theory of the 1970s and 1990sʼ. It
opens with the conviction: ʻIn the past twenty years
the founding principles of contemporary western fem-
inism have been dramatically changed, with previously
shared assumptions and unquestioned orthodoxies rel-
egated almost to history.ʼ5 Perhaps so. But just what is
being dispatched here? Was it all of a piece? And is it
equally anachronistic for contemporary feminists?
ʻSeventiesʼ feminism is criticized for its ʻfalse cer-
taintiesʼ; its search for structural causes of womenʼs
oppression (indeed for its very notion of ʻoppressionʼ);
its belief in womenʼs shared interests (and its very
attachment to the notion of ʻwomenʼ or ʻwomanʼ); and
so forth.6 ʻNinetiesʼ feminism, in contrast, has replaced
what is seen as the naive search for the social causes
of womenʼs oppression with abstract elaborations of the
discursively produced, hierarchical constitution of an
array of key concepts: sexual difference in particular,
binary oppositions in general, and the hetero/sexual-
ized mapping of the body as a whole. However, it does
tend to have a few generalizations of its own, not least
its totalizing dismissal of ʻseventiesʼ feminism, and the
reduction of dissimilar projects to common ground.
A somewhat similar tension can be found in a paral-
lel American collection aiming ʻto call into question
and problematize the presumptions of some feminist
discourseʼ: Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by
Judith Butler and Joan Scott, which, like the British
text, was published in 1992.7 Its introductory essay
shows greater caution in drawing comparisons between
different phases of feminism, and it is more aware
that contrasting ʻpostmodernʼ feminism with an earlier
ʻmodernistʼ feminism buys into precisely the conceits
of modernity itself, sharing all its enthusiasm for
identification with the ʻnewʼ and overconfident renun-
ciation of the ʻoldʼ. (Although it is surely a hostage
to fortune to insist, on the opening page, that ʻ“post-
structuralism” indicates a field of critical practices that
cannot be totalized.ʼ8) Circumspect and equivocal as
Butler characteristically is, always preferring the inter-
rogative to the more vulnerable affirmative mode, her
influential writing is always read as primarily decon-
structive, privileging regulatory semiotic or semantic
issues around ʻsubjectivityʼ, ʻidentityʼ and ʻagencyʼ, in
insisting, as she does here, that: ʻTo recast the referent
as the signified, and to authorize or safeguard the
category of women as a site of possible resignifications
is to expand the possibilities of what it means to be
a woman and in this sense to condition and enable
an enhanced sense of agency.ʼ9 Butler is certainly
right to stress that ʻwhat women signify has been
taken for granted for too longʼ. But, in calling for
ʻthe conditions to mobilize the signifier in the service
of an alternative productionʼ, she delineates a project
that is distinctly distanced from the close attention to
social structures, relations and practices which an
earlier feminist project prioritized in pursuit of politi-
cal-economic restructuring, and the transformation
of public life and welfare. Butler even suggests here:
ʻParadoxically, it may be that only through releasing
the category of women from a fixed referent that
something like “agency” becomes possible.ʼ10
Only? However ʻfictitiousʼ or ʻfixedʼ the category
of women, feminists did once manage successfully to
mobilize them (and not just signifiers) onto the streets
and into campaigns in support of demands for nurser-
ies, reproductive rights, education and skill training;
to assist women fighting discrimination at work, vio-
lence at home, militarism world-wide; to work within
Third World development projects; found the womenʼs
health movement, and so on and so forth: just as if
ʻsomething like “agency”ʼ – womenʼs agency – was
there all along. A feminism that seeks primarily to
re-theorize subjectivity is one that is incommensurate
with, as well as distanced from, the perspectives and
practices of Womenʼs Liberation. It is simply not the
same project, however sympathetic to those earlier
goals someone like Butler may be. As others have
noticed, the commitment to heterogeneity, multiplicity
and difference underlying recent feminist theorizing
can anomalously disguise a hegemonizing dismissal
of theoretical frameworks not explicitly informed by
poststructuralism.11 Joan Scott exemplifies this form
of exclusion of theoretical diversity when attacking
ʻresistance to poststructuralist theoryʼ as resistance to
ʻtheoryʼ itself: ʻSince it is in the nature of feminism to
disturb the ground it stands on, even its own ground,
the resistance to theory is a resistance to the most
radical effects of feminism itself.ʼ12
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 7
 Here is the problem. Contemporary feminist theo-
rizing rarely acknowledges the time and the place
of political ideas. It addresses only abstract theories
and their refutation. It operates with an idea of the
history of feminism as the evolution of academic
theory and debate. Tellingly, both the British and
North American feminist collections I have mentioned
offer their readers a full index of names – in which,
incidentally, extraordinarily few of the influential
feminist names of the 1970s appear – but no index
of topics. In the recent Blackwell textbook Feminist
Thought, by Patricia Clough, dedicated to ʻWomen
Around the World Resisting Oppression, Domina-
tion, and Exploitationʼ, there is a context index, but
interestingly neither hint nor whisper of abortion or
reproductive rights, housework, childcare, nurseries,
welfare provision, immigration, marriage, the family,
poverty, the state, employment, trade unions, health-
care or violence against women. There is pornography,
autobiography, film theory, literary criticism, Woman,
Native, Other. However you cross-reference it, just a
few aspects of womenʼs actual resistance ʻaround the
worldʼ seem to have gone missing.13 Almost no effort
is made in these texts to refer back to the activities
and goals of Womenʼs Liberation, only an attempt to
contrast theoretical positions as ideal types.
The reason is, of course, that this is an easy way
to teach feminism as an academic topic. But you
cannot translate the time of theory and its fashions
into political history without absurd caricature. Thus
early Womenʼs Liberation becomes, for example, a
ʻfeminism of the subjectʼ, when it was not a theory
about subjectivity at all. It is almost always described
as a theory of equality rather than of difference,
when it was neither of these things – the one usually
presented as merely an inversion of the other. Both of
these descriptions miss the point. Womenʼs Liberation
in its heyday was a theory and practice of social
transformation: full of all the embroiled and messy
actions and compromises of political engagement. It
endlessly debated questions of priorities, organization
and alliances in the attempt to enrich womenʼs lives
(heatedly discussing the varied – often opposed – inter-
ests of different groups of women). In the process, it
transformed the very concept of the ʻpoliticalʼ, giving
women a central place within it.
My sense of the recent history of feminism, in
particular of the socialist-feminist strand of Womenʼs
Liberation flourishing in the early seventies, conflicts
with Julia Kristevaʼs often cited stagist mapping of
three generations of feminist thought, in her famous
essay ʻWomenʼs Timeʼ, first published in 1979. There
8 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
she depicts the first wave of feminism as a time
when women, using a ʻlogic of identificationʼ, pursued
liberal, egalitarian ends, followed by the emergence
of a militant second phase, which rejected all ʻpatri-
archalʼ thought and practice, attempting to create
ʻcounter societiesʼ constructed around mythical notions
of womanhood. This is the now familiar account of
ʻequalityʼ feminism followed by a strictly alterna-
tive, ʻdifferenceʼ feminism: with women first seeking
inclusion in, and later exclusion from, the masculine
symbolic order. Drawing on Derrida, Kristeva pro-
poses a third generation of feminism which is critical
of the binary of sexual difference itself. Yet, as I hope
to show, although they never used the rhetoric of
deconstruction, this is precisely where many second-
generation feminists came in. The contrasts are not as
significant as recent re-tellings suggest.
Rowbotham’s ‘seventies’ feminism
In my view, the most useful – and perhaps the only
meaningful – way to think about the similarities and
differences between different generations of feminism
is by reflecting upon what defines a political generation
and what smashes its hopes and dreams. On an Inter-
national Womenʼs Day march in the early seventies,
Sheila Rowbotham carried a placard that read: ʻEqual
Pay is Not Enough. We Want the Moon.ʼ (File under
equal-rights feminism? Perhaps not. Is the moon here
a symbol of female difference? I think not.) We got
neither, as she wrote a decade later; but the radical
heritage of Womenʼs Liberation continues, she argued,
whenever feminists work to realize the dream ʻthat all
human beings can be more than present circumstances
allowʼ.14 That vision is not one of equal rights. It was
called ʻsocialismʼ and it was being reshaped to service
feminism.
I want, for a moment, to focus on Sheila Rowboth-
amʼs writing, as she has been one of the most careful
chroniclers (and continuing exponents) of Womenʼs
Liberation in Britain, in the hope that it may be, as
she puts it, ʻneither falsely valued nor undervaluedʼ, but
that feminists might reflect back upon ʻthe hurly-burly
of battle, draw clarity from real muddles and learn
from our mistakesʼ.15 (Dream on!, one might feel, in
these new mean-spirited times.) Since memories only
find resonance at certain times, Rowbotham adds, if
you ʻignore the humdrum you fall into arroganceʼ.16 It
was Rowbotham, one of the many inspirational voices
of seventiesʼ feminism, who proposed the very first
Womenʼs Liberation conference in Britain at Ruskin
College in 1970; importantly for my purposes here, her
books were read by tens of thousands of feminists in
the 1970s. They were hugely influential in the initial
years of Womenʼs Liberation. Rowbotham would be
criticized, early on, as representing a seventiesʼ femi-
nism, unformed by psychoanalysis or structuralism.17
Today, of course, her failures would be seen as an inat-
tention to poststructuralism or ʻpostmodernityʼ – that
paradoxical twist of modernity, contrarily repudiating
linear narratives while depending on one.
Joining the game of textual analysis, I recently re-
read some of Rowbothamʼs books from the seventies
and early eighties: something I do often to prevent
my own long-term memories from dissolving (there
seems nothing to be done about the crashing of short-
term memory). Ironically, what is extraordinary about
Rowbothamʼs writing is usually quite the reverse of
what critics of seventiesʼ feminism imagine. It conveys
an openness, a chronic lack of certainty, an almost
infuriating tentativeness, reiteratively asserting: ʻWhat
we have developed through action and ideas has always
to be subject to reassessmentʼ; or ʻI am too encumbered
by the particular to move with grace and delicacy
between subjective experience and the broad sweep
of social relationships.ʼ18
From her earliest reflections, Rowbotham describes
the search for the roots of womenʼs subordination as a
ʻperilous and uncertain questʼ.19 Her texts always stress
what she calls ʻthe differing forms and historically
specific manifestations of the power men hold over
women in particular societiesʼ.20 They focus sharply
on the diversity and situational specificity of women:
whether of class, race, employment, domestic situation
(although not at first, as she herself soon notes self-
critically), sexual orientation: ʻOur own indications are
only tentative and incomplete … Womenʼs liberation
is too narrow in social composition to comprehend
the differences between middle class and working
class, black and white, young and old, married and
unmarried, country and townswomen.ʼ Moreover, she
writes in 1972, ʻit is clear that most of the isolated
gains we can make can be twisted against women and
that many partial gains are often a means of silencing
one group at the expense of another.ʼ21 She emphasizes
the role of language as one of the crucial instruments
of domination:
As soon as we learn words we find ourselves out-
side them … The underground language of people
who have no power to define and determine them-
selves in the world develops its own density and
precision … But it restricts them by affirming their
own dependence upon the words of the powerful …
There is a long inchoate period during which the
struggle between the language of experience and the
language of theory becomes a kind of agony.22
Ignorant of ʻpoststructuralismʼ Rowbotham may have
been (writing these words in the early 1970s, in her
mid-twenties), but not so ignorant, I would suggest, of
the issues it addresses.
She tussles (a favourite word) endlessly with the
problems of relying on direct experience, seeing it as
both a strength and a weakness – again not so unlike,
but less theoretically fine-tuned than, the recent essay
by Joan Scott on the same topic in the collection from
the USA mentioned above.23 She continuously affirms
the pointlessness of attempting to pin down the nature
of either ʻwomenʼ or ʻmenʼ, adding that, ʻAll revo-
lutionary movements create their own ways of seeing
… But this is a result of great labour.ʼ24 Her writing,
like the forces which drew many women together in
the early years of Womenʼs Liberation, reflects the
radical Left (largely Marxist) thought of the day: ʻAn
emergent female consciousness is part of the specific
sexual and social conjuncture, which it seeks to control
and transform.ʼ25 So, while questions of subjectivity
and identity are not ignored (and, when they appear,
they are quite as shifting, provisional and contingent as
any postmodernist might desire), the goal is always to
transform society, to make it a better place for all its
members, especially the neediest, and, in her words,
ʻgradually accumulate a shared culture of agitationʼ.
She writes:
There is democracy in the making of theories which
set out to rid the world of hierarchy, oppression and
domination. The act of analysis requires more than
concepts of sex and class, more than a theory of
the subject, it demands that in the very process of
thinking we transform the relations between thinker
and thought about, theory and experience … Analy-
sis is not enough alone, for we enter the beings and
worlds of other people through imagination, and it
is through imagination that we glimpse how these
might change.26
Many seventiesʼ feminists have recalled, like Row-
botham, the imaginative leap when they first began to
turn outwards to other women, generating an almost
open-ended desire for solidarity with just those women
they had hitherto distanced themselves from: ʻThe
mainspring of womenʼs liberation was not a generalised
antagonism to men but the positive assertion of new
relationships between women, sisterhood.ʼ27 Socialist
feminists argued that while capitalist societies had
changed the relative power and privileges of men,
they had also consolidated womenʼs inferior status,
along with that of a multitude of other historically
subordinated groups – predominantly along racialized
and ethnic lines. So while it was not inconceivable
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 9
that women might gain equality with men in exist- nism, we also need to consider its limitations. But
ing capitalist societies, this would require such deep the precarious presumptions and faltering visions of
levels of cultural, economic and political change that the seventiesʼ feminism I knew have, as I see it, little
they would already have become societies which were to do with dogmatic certitudes, conceptual closure,
fundamentally different from any we have known.28 binary thinking, identity politics or false universalism,
The state, in socialist-feminist analyses like those and much more to do with the floundering fortunes of
of Elizabeth Wilson or Mary McIntosh, was seen as grassroots or movement politics in harsh and unyield-
not strictly ʻpatriarchalʼ, but serving to regulate, and ing times.
occasionally to restructure, the often contradictory and And I am not forgetting the many painful clashes,
conflicting needs of a male-dominated market economy at the turn of the 1980s, as a strengthening Black femi-
and the still intrinsically patriarchal arrangements of nism challenged Eurocentrism in the priorities of much
family life.29 It was from such analyses that they set white socialist-feminist analysis, which privileged
about shaking out and making visible the separate and sexism over racism and ignored the particularities
distinct needs and interests of women (kept hidden by of ethnic difference. But trying to learn to listen to,
familial rhetoric); campaigned against state policies and act upon, Black feminist perspectives was not
and discourses which defined and enforced womenʼs initially a decisive factor in the fading away of social-
dependence on men; demanded an end to social neglect ist-feminism. On the contrary, Black feminists then
of women and children at risk from menʼs violence; occupied the same political spaces, and pursued largely
fought for more and better social provision and com- similar or parallel strategic campaigns for expanding
munity resources – all the while seeking alliances the choice and resources open to Black women and
with other oppressed groups. Strategic priorities were their families. The political limitations they saw in
usually paramount, whether making demands on the what they defined as ʻEuro-Americanʼ feminism, at
state or the trade unions, and even when elaborating that time, as Valerie Amos, Gail Lewis, Amina Mama
utopian visions of communities and workplaces com- and Pratibha Parmar made clear in 1984, was that it
patible with choice and flexibility, where the needs of has ʻcontributed to an improvement in the material
all dependent people would not hidden away in ideal- situation of white middle-class women often at the
ized, yet neglected and isolated, often impoverished, expense of their Black and working class “sisters” …
family units.30 The power of sisterhood stops at the point at which
This socialist-feminist strand of Womenʼs Liber- hard political decisions need to be made and political
ation, chronicled in books like Rowbothamʼs The priorities decided.ʼ32
Past Is Before Us, remained
until the mid-eighties an active
and influential source of ideas
and strategies for promoting
womenʼs interests, usually
working in diverse radical and
reformist coalitions with other
progressive forces.31 However,
the frustration and defeats of
a second term of Conservative
rule (1983–87), which targeted
and weakened precisely those
nooks and crannies in local
government, resource centres
and collective spaces that femi-
nists (and other radicals) had
managed to enter, gradually
exhausted not only the politi-
cal hopes, but even the dreams
of many. In recalling the early
achievements of the womenʼs
movement in re-launching femi-

10 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)

 The death knell of the seventiesʼ feminism I dwelt
within was not simply the fall-out from internal conflict
and divisions, whether over race or sexuality – much
as they turned feminist political spaces into stressful
combat zones. Rather, coming together as agitators, of
whatever sex, race or ethnic specificity, to pursue goals
which require, among other things, a more egalitarian
and caring world, brought us up against a ferocious, if
contradictory and erratic, political opponent – some-
thing a new generation of officially licensed theorists,
turning inwards rather than outwards, often prefer to
ignore altogether. Over the last two decades, the ever
more deregulated, ever more universalized, interests
of capital have produced deepening social inequali-
ties, nationally and internationally. In the process,
they have ensured a significant increase in womenʼs
poverty. Meanwhile the fickle, unintended effects of
market forces and new technologies, alongside the
arduously pursued, intended consequences of feminist
thought and campaigning, have ensured more paid
work, autonomy and choice for other women, at least
in the First World (as well as more insecurity for
some men).
Twenty years ago it would have been hard to find a
single self-respecting feminist in Britain who had not
trekked out to the Grunwick factory in West London,
in support of the predominantly Asian women on
strike, or at least considered such action. In the nine-
ties, as Melissa Benn has noted, it would be hard to
find a self-respecting feminist who had even heard of
the predominantly Asian women on strike at Burnsall
in Birmingham over an almost identical set of issues:
refusal of union recognition, low pay, and the use of
dangerous chemicals; or who would have contemplated
supportive action, if they had.33 For sure, Rowbotham
and like-minded socialist-feminists, working to help
organize support for women in struggle against the
harshest effects of global market forces, had for a
while a certain naiveté about the nature and potential
of ʻrevolutionaryʼ movements. The legacy of seventiesʼ
feminism, seen as a movement of social transformation
aiming to increase the power and self-determination
of women everywhere, is contradictory and diverse.
But serious consideration of its full significance is
grievously absent in recent appraisals.
Theoretical assaults
There is another twist in this tale of two generations of
feminism. In terms of the later writing over of earlier
feminist narratives, the painful irony is that just as
deconstruction and other forms of poststructuralism
imprinted themselves on the academic feminism which
had graduated from its lowly seventiesʼ birthplace in
adult education into professional status in the univer-
sities – promoting conceptual uncertainty, political
indeterminacy and subjective fluidity – opposing
forms of feminist fundamentalism, moral certainty and
psychic essentialism now really were entrenching them-
selves as the wisdom of the more accessible activist
feminism of the eighties. The voices of feminism – like
those of Robin Morgan and Andrea Dworkin – which
survived and intensified in the new decade were no
longer analysing the specific historical contexts, shifting
institutional arrangements, particular social practices
or multiple discourses securing womenʼs inequality
and marginality. Instead, they denounced the ageless
dominance of ʻmasculineʼ values over ʻfeminineʼ ones.
A new and complacent romance around the feminine
took precedence as essentially nurturing, non-violent
and egalitarian; there was an accompanying condemna-
tion of men and masculinity as ineluctably dominating,
destructive and predatory, rooted in the performance
of male sexuality.
It was this form of so-called ʻcultural feminismʼ
that I criticized in Is the Future Female? in the late
1980s. The original subtitle of my book, ʻArguments
for Socialist Feminismʼ, was rejected by my publisher,
Virago Press, as already too unpopular to promul-
gate, leading to the more neutral ʻTroubled Thoughtsʼ
of its published subtitle.34 Politically, Dworkin and
MacKinnon ushered in the simplistic and reductive
anti-pornography campaign as the single most visible
and highly funded feminist struggle in recent years.
The pessimistic corollary of the rejection of historical
specificities in this feminist discourse is the dismissal
of the significance of womenʼs political struggles and
victories: ʻOur status as a group relative to menʼ,
MacKinnon declared, ʻhas almost never, if ever, been
much changed from what it is.ʼ35 Without buying
into backlash anti-feminism, or the howls of anguish
we currently hear from and about men, I think we
might agree that this is not a very accurate picture
of the gender changes and turmoil that have occurred
throughout this century, and especially of the shake-
ups over the last three decades. Meanwhile, as the
1980s progressed, it was either those, like Catharine
MacKinnon, who offered some version of an increas-
ingly totalizing and sanctimonious feminism (clinging
to the moral high ground of womenʼs marginality and
helplessness), or others, like Camille Paglia, with
equally totalizing inversions of this position (caricatur-
ing feminism as prudish and puritanical) who found
favour with the media. Neither offered any challenge
to traditional gender discourses.
It is hard to summarize the illuminations and provo-
cations of academic feminismʼs current embrace of
poststructuralist critiques of universalizing thought
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 11
and emancipatory narratives without courting the
danger of homogenizing contemporary theorizing,
much as it has erased the complexities of seventiesʼ
feminism. The appropriation of poststructuralist priori-
ties would inspire what has become known as ʻfeminist
postmodernismʼ – although this conceptually confused
and confusing label would not be accepted by all those
placed under its banner. At least three separate strands
of thinking are usually lumped together under this
heading – deriving from Lacan, Derrida and Foucault,
respectively – despite their very different implications
for feminism.
The first and for a while the most influential post-
Lacanian strand, often simply called ʻFrench femin-
ismʼ, restricts its focus to the idea of sexual difference
effaced by the spurious unity or wholeness of the
Western ʻsubjectʼ (Man): the white, male bourgeois
subject of history who hides behind the abstract
universals of the philosophical tradition. It stresses
the need to fracture the universal or humanist self
through attentiveness to its repressed or marginalized
other: ʻfeminineʼ difference. Subversively imagined
and rewritten as positive, the decentred side of the
silenced and repressed ʻfeminineʼ is thought to enable
women to ʻforesee the unforeseeableʼ, and escape the
dichotomous conceptual order in which men have
enclosed them.36 This new focus upon images of
female corporeality has been seen by its exponents
as presenting a fresh purchase on the old essentialism
debate, transcending earlier forms of historical, socio-
logical or psychoanalytic anti-essentialist arguments.
The ʻfeminine feminineʼ, Luce Irigaray and Hélène
Cixous suggest, can emerge only once women find
the courage to break out of the male imaginary and
into a female one; once women begin to speak and
write their sexuality, which is always plural, circular
and aimless, in contrast to all existing singular, linear
and phallocentric, masculine forms of symbolization.37
Such feminist reclaiming of the body unfolds here as
always culturally and psychically inscribed female
experience, not anatomical destiny, and is perhaps best
seen as a form of aestheticized, high modernist, ʻavant-
gardismʼ.38 It is nevertheless still narrated in terms of
a universal corporeal subjectivity for women.
The attraction of such difference theory, which
allows the feminist to speak ʻas a womanʼ, is obvious.
The revaluing of those aspects of womenʼs lives
and experiences previously ignored or demeaned in
male-centred theorizing was, and remains, crucial
to feminist research and practice. But there is still
a problem which it cannot easily tackle (even if we
12 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
ride with its own cheerfully embraced contradictions),
once we turn from the academic to the political realm.
As I have argued elsewhere, it is precisely ideas of
sexual difference encompassing the experiences sup-
posedly inscribing our distinctive ʻfemalenessʼ which
most dramatically divide, rather than unite, feminists
attempting to fight for womenʼs interests.39 It is easier
for women to join forces around issues on the cur-
rently unfashionable economic front (demanding parity
in wages and training), or social policy (demanding
more and better publicly funded welfare resources),
than it has ever been for women to unite around
issues of sexuality and the meanings we attach to
the female body. Creatively exciting as the project of
re-imagining female corporeality has proved to be to
some feminists,40 its neglect of issues of class, race,
ethnicity and other forms of marginality as equally
constitutive of womenʼs subjectivity and destiny has
seemed exclusionary and disempowering to other
feminists. Such criticism has been most forcefully
expressed by Black and ethnic minority feminist theo-
reticians – from Gayatri Spivak to Barbara Christian
or Deborah McDowell.41 Some academic feminists like
to quote Gayatri Spivak in support of their view that
women today must ʻtake “the risk of essence” in order
to think really differentlyʼ.42 Spivak herself, however,
has reconsidered her earlier suggestion for a ʻstrategicʼ
use of a positive essentialism. Since such a move is
viable only when it serves ʻa scrupulously visible
political interestʼ, she now warns: ʻThe strategic use
of essentialism can turn into an alibi for proselytizing
academic essentialisms.ʼ43 And it has.
Spivak leads us to the second, more rigorous,
Derridean strand of feminist poststructuralism, which
is critical of the monolithic Lacanian version of differ-
ence theory. It questions all universalizing or totalizing
theoretical tendencies, deconstructing every discursive
patterning of the self, including that of ʻwomanʼ.44
Here, in tune with the input of Black, Third World,
lesbian, and other feminisms, every generalization
about women, including the feminist search for the
causes of womenʼs subordination or any generalized
expressions of womenʼs difference – whether seen in
terms of responsibility for child-rearing, reproductive
and sexual experience, menʼs violence, phallogocen-
tric language, a female imaginary, or whatever – is
regarded with suspicion. This position is summed up
by Donna Haraway:
There is nothing about being ʻfemaleʼ that naturally
binds women. There is not even such a state as ʻbe-
ingʼ female, itself a highly complex category con-
structed in contested sexual scientific discourses and
 social practices … The feminist dream of a common
language, like all dreams for a perfectly true lan-
guage, of a perfectly faithful naming of experience,
is a totalizing and imperialistic one.45
Haraway wants to replace this dream with her own
one of ʻa powerful infidel heteroglossia … building
and destroying machines, identities, categories, relation-
ships, spaces, storiesʼ, seeking a place for women in a
future ʻmonstrous world without genderʼ.46 Her dream
is full of playful optimism about the future. For other
more strictly deconstructive feminists, however, there
is no theoretically defensible affirmative position, but
only a reminder of the limits of concepts, as Spivak
explains: ʻthe absolutely other cannot enter into any
kind of foundational emancipatory projectʼ.47 Such a
deconstructive feminism certainly avoids the perils
of generalizations about female subjectivity. But it
courts the danger that its own interest in endlessly
proliferating particularities of difference, and the
partial, contradictory nature of womenʼs identities,
endorses a relativity and indeterminacy which works
to undermine political projects.
The third, Foucauldian, strand of poststructuralist
feminism returns us to the body – to its ʻsexualityʼ
rather than to sexual difference – but only as a site
or target of ubiquitous technologies of classification,
surveillance and control. Foucaultʼs warning that oppo-
sitional discourses are inevitably caught up in the
relations of domination they resist has been impor-
tant in highlighting the traps facing emancipatory
movements: of reproducing rather than transcending
traditional frameworks of subjection. And his argu-
ments about meaning and representation have proved
particularly productive for lesbian and gay theorists.
Here, feminists can learn much from Foucaultʼs
insights about the genealogy of discursive regulation,
but next to nothing about how organized resistance
might impinge on such all-encompassing regimes of
power, other than through the discursively disruptive,
micro-political strategies favoured by some lesbian
theorists.
Judith Butler, for example, suggests ways of making
ʻgender troubleʼ by subverting the masculine/feminine
binary producing sexuality as heterosexuality. Empha-
sizing the multiplicity of sexual acts which occur in
a non-heterosexual context can, she concludes, disrupt
and disturb dominant heterosexual/reproductive dis-
courses, ʻthrough hyperbole, dissonance, internal con-
fusion and proliferationʼ.48 But despite its influence on
some feminists, others respond with sheer bewilder-
ment or exasperation at what they see as the staging
of battles at a strictly semiotic level.49 And while some
ʻqueer theoristsʼ have understood Butler to be suggest-
ing a type of individual transgressive ʻperformanceʼ
as the most relevant way of undermining existing
gender dynamics, it is an interpretation she herself
now rejects.50 Meanwhile, some feminists have used
Foucault to reject earlier feminist analysis of power in
relation to key structural and institutional sites. Again,
as often noted, the problem here is that it discourages
analysis of where and how women are best placed to
combat the authority and privilege men commonly
wield over them – by entering those sites which are
most expedient or have proved receptive to change, and
supporting strategies to undermine or transform those
which remain most rigid and resistant to change.51
Political agendas
Poststructuralism, especially in its Derridean and
Foucauldian forms, has provided feminists with fresh
(if not unique) conceptual tools for problematizing
identities and social differences. It usefully emphasizes
their hierarchically imposed and coercive nature, and
the multiplicity of intertwining, destabilizing and exclu-
sionary discourses or narratives in which subjectivities
are historically enmeshed. It suggests the possibility
(however difficult) of categorial re-significations or
reconfigurations, as well as the need for acceptance of
paradox and contradiction in conceptualizing change.
Feminists need to pay heed to the normativities and
exclusions of discourse, especially as they construct
differences between women. But in a world of inten-
sifying inequality, any concern with either gender
justice or the fate of women overall must also direct
us to issues of redistribution, alongside issues of
identity and recognition.52 It is a socialist imaginary,
combined with feminism, that has always stressed the
sufferings caused by the material exploitation, depriva-
tion and social marginalization of women and other
oppressed groups around the world. These cannot be
either superseded or replaced by battles over discursive
marginalization and invalidation. The two objectives,
though relatively distinct, are also intricately inter-
woven: the one turning feminists outwards towards
women in struggle; the other directing us inwards
towards refiguring a hitherto abjected ʻfemininityʼ.
Once we address both sets of issues, then some dif-
ferences will matter more than others in generating
political interventions.
However plural and irreducibly complex our char-
acterization of the social, any politics seeking the
most inclusive transformation of socio-economic and
cultural marginalization must seek to challenge the
major systems of domination. This means seeking
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 13
to understand just what they are at this historical
moment: uncovering why, and how, they persist, as
well as their interaction with whatever specific location
we occupy. Fearful of totalizing generalizations we
may be, and cautious we must be, but the central global
axes of economic exploitation and cultural oppression
continue to construct and reconstruct themselves in
the interrelated terms of ʻgenderʼ (tied in with sexual
orientation), ʻclassʼ (tied in with nationality and eth-
nicity), and ʻraceʼ (tied in with nationality, ethnicity
and religion), within what is currently the ever more
totalizing control of a transnational capitalist market.
The invocation of specific differences can only serve
broadly based transformative ends as part of some
wider political project seeking to dismantle these basic
structures of domination.
The Anglo-American reception of poststructuralism,
with its central place in ninetiesʼ feminist theory, came
to prominence at a political moment far removed from
that which generated the confident hopes Womenʼs
Liberation took to the streets. (Ironically, some expli-
cations and critiques of ʻpostmodernismʼ present it
as responsible for putting feminism on the political
agenda, as in Eagletonʼs recent The Illusions of Post-
modernism;53 while others would see its influence as
quite the reverse.) Distrustful, when not dismissive,
of traditional forms of collective action and reformist
political agendas, especially when class-based, femin-
ism faces inhibiting dilemmas in describing how either
attention to the discursive specificity of ʻfeminineʼ
difference, or the proliferation of categorial hetero-
geneity and transgressive display, might ever again
bring women together in any transformative feminist
project.
We need to remember that the word ʻfeministʼ has
a history. Sometimes feminists have focused directly
on issues of sexual difference; at other times feminism
has been more a movement for the transformation of
the whole of society. At the close of the nineteenth
century, ʻfeminismʼ first appeared in English to des-
cribe the movement of women campaigning for the
right to vote, but within a few decades the concept
had expanded to include a variety of different types
of moral, economic, social and political campaigns
waged by women. The second wave of Western femi-
nism has similarly drawn upon different meanings,
at times stressing social transformation (especially in
its early days), at others emphasizing gender-specific
issues.54 The difficulties of generalizing from womenʼs
experiences (or ʻcorporeal existenceʼ, through whatever
mode of representation) are not hard to document.
Nevertheless, it is premature to downplay the signifi-
14 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
cance of gender in favour of a plurality of differences.
The tenacity of menʼs power over women means that
feminists must just as tenaciously seek to emphasize
the diverse and multiple effects of gender hierarchy on
the lives and experiences of women. But if feminism is
to address the problems of the many women who need
it most, it must see that the specificities of womenʼs
lives do not reduce to gender, which means working
in alliance with other progressive forces combating
class, racialized, ethnic and other entrenched social
hierarchies.
Interestingly, one of the continuing threads between
seventiesʼ and ninetiesʼ feminisms (and there are
many such threads, although we may not read about
them in a significant number of ninetiesʼ feminist
texts) is the continuing growth and vision of the
international human-rights movements, now often in
the form of NGOs.55 Even there, however, as Suzanne
Gibson and Laura Flanders have described, it has
proved far easier for women to get their demands
taken seriously by the United Nations when they
have addressed gender-specific, apparently fashion-
able, issues like rape and violence against women,
than when they have addressed employment rights,
illiteracy or poverty.56 Back in Britain, there will be
little significant change in the situation of the women
who are worst off until public resources are shifted
to provide far greater welfare provision, without the
constraints of market considerations. Yet todayʼs
Foucauldian-informed feminists who write about the
state reject earlier feminist analysis of its structures
and functions, claiming, like Rosemary Pringle and
Sophie Watson, that ʻ[i]n poststructuralist accounts of
the state, “discourse” and “subjectivity” rather than
structures and interests become the key terms.ʼ57 But
such re-theorizing only leads us further away from
any analysis of the state itself, and the way in which
it has been changing in recent years. The state now
embraces market forces in most of the areas from
which they were previously excluded, and precisely
against the interests of, in particular, women, children
and all dependent people.
Britain, like North America, has been moving as
fast as it can in quite the opposite direction to that
which might assist those women in greatest need of
economic and social support. This is why I remain
a socialist-feminist: still hoping for more dialogue
than I find at present between different generations
of feminism. Sometimes, as one of my colleagues
writes, recalling his own formative moments in North-
ern Ireland, you need to have the ʻcourage of your
anachronismsʼ.58
Notes limitations in perspectiveʼ (Rowbotham, Dreams and
Dilemmas, p. 59).
1. Sheila Rowbotham, ʻReclaim the Moonʼ, in Dreams and
26. Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 74, 208, 218.
Dilemmas, Virago, London, 1983, p. 348.
27. Ibid., p. 83.
2. This is a revised version of a talk given at the Radical
28. Ibid., p. 82.
Philosophy Conference, ʻTorn Halves: Theory and Poli-
29. Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State, Tavis-
tics in Contemporary Feminismʼ, London, 9 November
tock, London, 1977; Mary McIntosh, ʻThe State and the
1996.
Oppression of Womenʼ, in Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie
3. Patricia Romney, unpublished notes prepared for round-
Wolpe, eds, Feminism and Materialism: Women and
table discussion, ʻWriting about a Visionary Movement
Modes of Production, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London,
in the “Get Real” World of the ʼ90s: The History of
1978. Some later commentators, though sympathetic to
Womenʼs Liberation in the United Statesʼ, at the 10th
the accounts of the state provided in this writing, would
Berkshire Womenʼs Conference, North Carolina, June
suggest, I think correctly, that they diminished the in-
1996.
trinsically male-dominated structures, practices and
4. Margaret Strobel, in ibid.
discourses of the many differing sectors of the state (S.
5. Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips, eds, Introduction,
Franzway, D. Court and R.W. Connell, Staking a Claim:
Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates,
Feminism, Bureacracy and the State, Paladin, London,
Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992, p. 2.
1989).
6. A few years earlier Michèle Barrett had expressed her
30. Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social
reservations about her own ʻseventiesʼ thinking in Wom-
Family, Verso, London, 1982.
enʼs Oppression Today – in a new preface – indicating
31. Sheila Rowbotham, The Past Is Before Us: Feminism in
(accurately) that recent feminist debate has problem-
Action since the 1960s, Pandora, London, 1989.
atized the notion of ʻwomenʼ and ʻwomanʼ, while sug-
32. Valerie Amos, Gail Lewis, Amina Mama, Pratibha Par-
gesting that the notion of oppression ʻlooks decidedly
mar, Editorial of Many Voices, One Chant: Black Femi-
dated todayʼ.
nist Perspectives, Feminist Review 17, Autumn 1984.
7. Judith Butler and Joan Scott, eds, Feminists Theorize
33. Melissa Benn, ʻWomen and Democracy: Thoughts on
the Political, Routledge, London, 1992.
the Last Ten Yearsʼ, Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 4,
8. Ibid., p. xiii.
no. 3, 1993, p. 237.
9. Butler, ʻContingent Foundationsʼ, in ibid., p. 16.
34. Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts
10. Ibid.
on Contemporary Feminism, Virago, London, 1987.
11. See, for example, Linda Gordon, ʻReview of Gender and
35. Catharine MacKinnon, ʻPornography, Civil Rights and
the Politics of History by Joan Wallach Scottʼ, Signs 15,
Speechʼ, in Catherine Itzin, ed., Pornography, Women,
Summer 1990.
Violence, and Civil Liberties, Oxford University Press,
12. Joan Wallach Scott, ʻResponse to Gordonʼ, Signs 15,
Oxford, 1992, p. 456.
Summer 1990, p. 859. See also the measured and
36. Hélène Cixous, ʻThe Laugh of the Medusaʼ, in E.
thoughtful account of the erasure of feminist theoreti-
Marks & I. de Courtivron, eds, New French Feminisms,
cal heterogeneity in Susan Stanford Friedman, ʻMak-
Schocken Books, New York, 1981, p. 256.
ing Historyʼ, in Diane Elam and Robyn Weigman, eds,
37. Cixous,ʻThe Laugh of the Medusaʼ; Luce Irigaray, This
Feminism Beside Itself, Routledge, London, 1995.
Sex Which Is Not One, Cornell University Press, Ithaca
13. Patricia Clough, Feminist Thought, Blackwell, Oxford,
NY, 1985, p. 32.
1994.
38. See, for example, Laura Kipnis, ʻLooks Good on Paper:
14. Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 354, emphasis
Marxism and Feminism in a Postmodern Woldʼ, in Ec-
added.
15. Ibid., pp. x, 351. stasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthet-
ics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993.
16. Ibid., p. 351.
39. Lynne Segal, ʻWhose Left? Socialism, Feminism and
17. Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor, ʻIn Defence of
the Futureʼ, New Left Review 185, January–February
Patriarchyʼ, in Raphael Samuel, ed., Peopleʼs History
1991.
and Socialist Theory, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London,
40. For imaginative political appropriations of ʻFrench
1981.
feminismʼ, see for example Drucilla Cornell, Beyond
18. Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 353, 2.
Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction
19. Rowbotham, Womanʼs Consciousness, Manʼs World,
and the Law, Routledge, London, 1991; Moira Gattens,
Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, pp. 66, 34. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality,
20. Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 83. Routledge, London, 1996.
21. Ibid., pp. 59, 75. 41. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ʻFrench Feminism in an
22. Ibid., pp. 32–3. International Frameʼ, in In Other Worlds, Routledge,
23. Joan Scott, ʻExperienceʼ, in Butler and Scott, eds., Femi- London, 1988; Barbara Christian, ʻThe Race for Theo-
nists Theorize the Political. ryʼ, in Linda Kaufman, ed., Gender and Theory: Dia-
24. Rowbotham, Womanʼs Consciousness, Manʼs World, logues on Feminist Criticism, Basil Blackwell, New
p. 27. York, 1989; Deborah McDowell, ʻThe “Practice” of
25. Ibid., p. x. Rowbotham prefers, as she writes in 1972, “Theory”ʼ, in Elam and Weigman, eds, Feminism Be-
the idea of ʻconsciousness movingʼ to ʻconsciousness side Itself.
raisingʼ, since ʻyour own perception is continually being 42. See, for example, Alice Jardine, ʻMen in Feminism:
shifted by how other women perceive what has happened Odor di Uomo Or Compagnons de Route?ʼ, in Alice
to them … The main difficulty, still, is that while the Jardine and Paul Smith, eds, Men in Feminism, Methuen,
social composition of womenʼs liberation remains nar- London, 1987, p. 58.
row it isnʼt possible to move naturally beyond certain 43. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching

Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 15

 Machine, Routledge, London, 1993, p. 4.
44. See, for example, Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Femi-
nism and the Subject of ʻWomenʼ in History, Macmillan,
London, 1988.
45. Donna Haraway, ʻA Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science,
Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980sʼ, in
L. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism, Routledge,
London, 1990, pp. 197, 215.
46. Ibid., p. 215.
47. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ʻRemembering the Limits:
Difference, Identity and Practiceʼ, in Peter Osborne, ed.,
Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism, Verso, London,
1991, p. 229, emphasis in original.
48. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Sub-
version of Identity, Routledge, London, 1990, p. 33.
49. See Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture
and Criticism in a ʻPostfeministʼ Age, Routledge, Lon-
don, 1991.
50. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of ʻSexʼ, London, Routledge, 1993, p. 231; see
also Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, ʻGender as Per-
formance: An Interview with Judith Butlerʼ, Radical
Philosophy 67, Summer 1994.
51. See, for example, Gregor McLennan, ʻFeminism,
Epistemology and Postmodernism: Reflections on Cur-
rent Abivalenceʼ, Sociology, vol. 29, no. 3, August 1995,
pp. 391–401.
52. See, for example, Nancy Fraser, ʻFrom Redistribution to
16 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a “Post-Socialist”
Ageʼ, New Left Review 212, July–August 1995.
53. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Black-
well, Oxford, 1996, p. 22.
54. See Sheila Rowbotham, Women in Movement: Femi-
nism and Social Action, Routledge, London, 1992, pp.
8–15.
55. See Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper, eds, Womenʼs Rights
Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives,
Routledge, London, 1995.
56. See Suzanne Gibson, ʻOn Sex, Horror and Human
Rightsʼ, Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 4, no. 3, Winter
1993; Laura Flanders, ʻHard Cases and Human Rights:
C. MacKinnon in the City of Freudʼ, The Nation, 9–16
August 1993, pp. 174–7. For an important and stimu-
lating commentary on the challenge of human-rights
internationalism to the recent philosophical embrace of a
ʻpolitics of differenceʼ, see Bruce Robbins, ʻSad Stories
in the International Public Sphere: Richard Rorty on
Culture and Human Rightsʼ, Public Culture, vol. 9, no.
2, Winter 1997.
57. Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson, ʻ“Womenʼs In-
terests” and the Post-Structuralist Stateʼ, in Barrett and
Phillips, eds, Destabilizing Theory, p. 65.
58. Francis Mulhern (quoting Jonathan Rée) in Francis Mul-
hern, Introduction, The Present Lasts a Long Time: Es-
says in Cultural Politics, Cork University Press, Cork,
forthcoming.
Feminism without nostalgia
Diana Coole
The title of the recent Radical Philosophy conference,
ʻTorn Halves: Theory and Politics in Contemporary
Feminismʼ, implied that two things which should be
joined – theory and politics – have come apart; indeed
have been ripped apart rather violently and now need
stitching back together. Is it, then, the case that two
processes which were, and should be, united, have
been severed? If this is indeed our situation, then
it suggests that some sort of crisis has befallen us,
whereby feminist theory and the womenʼs movement
have moved off in different directions: or even worse,
that one of the pair (and presumably the movement
would be the prime candidate here) has suffered a
premature demise. This certainly raises a number of
pressing questions: what was, or should be, the nature
of this connection? Why has it been broken? Should
we try to repair it, and if so, along what lines?
In trying to respond to these questions, I real-
ized that the very meanings of politics and theory
have become unclear in feminism. So I will begin
by considering each in turn, before addressing their
linkage and suggesting a particular relationship as
exemplary.
Feminism and the political
In considering what feminism might mean by the
political, I have distinguished between two senses,
which I will call the topographical and the dynamic.
In the topographical sense, politics is located within
three different domains, each of whose differential
effects on women have been a source of theory and
of particular practices. Most explicitly, this spatial
understanding of the political concerns the state as the
pinnacle of power, where on the one hand feminists
demand equal representation and where on the other
we regard processes of legislation and policy-making
with a mixture of hope and suspicion. In a rather
obvious way, anything we do in this context can be
regarded as political, and we may well feel that our
interventions and successes have recently fallen short
here, for reasons broadly connected with the ideo-
logical climate and an attenuation of the democratic
process. Paradoxically, the response by many feminist
political theorists – especially in the United States
– has been to focus on processes of a highly idealized
model of discursive democracy, while paying little
attention to how its preconditions for fair and equal
participation might be realized.
At the next level down, feminists identify a series
of structures and processes within civil society – such
as economy and family – which reproduce sex roles
and gender hierarchies in ways that have formerly been
designated oppressive. Intervention is deemed political
here, since its aim is to eliminate various forms of dis-
crimination and injustice. Arguably this space has seen
the major staging of second-wave feminism, where the
state was more obviously targeted by the first.
Now, it is at these two levels, where there is a
massive and resilient institutionalization of more or
less crude and visible patriarchal power, that women
have been able to situate a politics most unequivocally.
It is in these contexts that an earlier discourse was able
to refer to womenʼs oppression and to its opposition
as the Womenʼs Liberation Movement. Here, then, was
a clear and binary confrontation between the massive
power of what Habermas calls steering media – state
and economy – on one hand, and a relatively unified
and militant force on the other. When we lament the
demise of our politics, I suspect that it is on these
levels that we situate its loss.
But as feminists, we also locate politics in a third
realm, that of personal life, and although this is both
re-enforced by, and in turn re-enforces, the other
two levels, the kind of strategies it implies have been
quite different from those recognized conventionally as
political. It is surely here that our analyses and prac-
tices have been most innovative and specific to gender
struggle, although they do not necessarily rely on a
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 17
mass movement since strategies are more individual
and targets more local. Yet my impression is that poli-
tics has recently waned here, too, with confrontations
over, for example, the division of domestic labour and
sexual practices either resuming their personal but
apolitical nature, or being displaced by a crisis in the
household economy.
The alternative, dynamic, model of politics con-
strues it not spatially but as a process of circulat-
ing and unstable power relations. If one were so
inclined, one could trace it to Machiavelli, Nietzsche
and Foucault, but I think it is also encouraged by
feministsʼ own theoretical excavations, which show
the powers reproducing sexual inequality and gender
hierarchy moving through all domains of the politi-
cal and indeed overflowing them into the discursive,
linguistic, aesthetic and psychological. This suggests
that it is never sufficient to pursue inclusion in gov-
ernment or equal treatment in civil society: instead
politics must involve an ongoing engagement wherever
power is present, via deployment of a whole variety of
tactics which cannot be formulated in advance. This
understanding of politics is most appropriate to the
third topographical space of the personal, but it has
tended to politicize culture as such.
There is a certain irony here, since, while many
feminist philosophers have been intellectually enthusi-
astic about this politics, its significance and efficacy for
a womenʼs movement have been difficult to theorize.
The diverse, often aesthetic or performative, strategies,
fragmented support and ambiguous goals deployed
are not obviously connected to a mass movement and
do not self-evidently achieve the sort of outcomes we
might expect from a successful politics. Indeed I would
surmise that it is precisely because this often seems
to be the only politics we are currently engaged in
that some women might wonder whether we still have
a politics at all, or if everything in fact takes place
within the realm of the theoretical.
At this stage, however, I only want to question a
tendency prevalent in this last approach, to collapse
politics into power relations as such. Power is indeed
ubiquitous, but not all power is political. To become
so, it must be structured, conflictual and at least mini-
mally open to change. And, even more importantly, it
must also be articulated in such a way that its presence
engenders some political mobilization. Where power
remains merely habitual and mute, or uncontested, it
is at best only latently political and awaits its theor-
etical disclosure and practical resistance to become
manifestly so. This, then, brings me to the question
of theory in relation to the political.
18 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
Feminism and theory
I find it helpful to begin here with a distinction between
empirical studies, theory and abstract philosophy.
There are limits to how far this is sustainable, but it
allows me to associate theory with a specific politi-
cal task, even if for feminism all three have political
import. Finding out about womenʼs lives and building
up empirical data bases has been an essential task in
overcoming womenʼs social and academic invisibility,
and we have succeeded brilliantly here. At the other end
of the spectrum, engaging in philosophical questions
regarding, for example, epistemology or metaphysics,
has given feminism its own grounds for debating the
foundational nature of gender differentiation. However,
it is in the middle realms of theorizing, where concept-
building and empirical data are brought together, that
the connection between intellectual work and political
intervention is drawn the tightest, and it is here that I
think we must be concerned if the two part company
or if theory collapses into either empiricism or abstract
philosophy.
This does not mean that the only important theory
is political theory, but it does suggest that for feminists,
whose theorizing was from the start directed at chang-
ing the world, theory is oriented to political tasks.
In this sense it is both instrumental in guiding and
inciting practice, and is itself a participant in power
struggles at a discursive level. Feminism is part of a
tradition that never sees ideas as innocent. Political
theory, for example, has both legitimized womenʼs
exclusion from public life and expounded the norms
that have constituted and disciplined gendered subjects,
while it has also been used by feminists as a vehicle
for framing and legitimizing our own demands.
Yet, although theories have often acted as crude
ideologies, masking and sustaining patriarchal inter-
ests, they also work more insidiously to represent
reality in ways that are riddled with gender privileges
and exclusions. This means that their demystification
or deconstruction is a political act. Although it is not
easy to point to concrete results, this is an activity that
many feminist theorists and philosophers have been
engaged in over a long period of time. Presumably
it is an ongoing task we still value, although it may
be helpful to pause every now and then, and to make
explicit the strategic aims it bears.
Where the theory–practice link is more evident,
however, is where theory directs its gaze onto what, for
want of a better phrase, I will call the real world. Now,
I have already argued that power becomes political
only when it is articulated such that conflict becomes
explicit and a spur to action. But thematizing effects
of power that were previously only lived is itself a
political process. For it is not the case, as we for-
merly tended to believe, that inequalities are hidden
truths simply awaiting representation. Power is also
involved in the way – and whether – we problematize
our situation and the conceptual framework we bring
to bear on the myriad experiences of everyday life.
For example, the public/private distinction is not a
self-evident opposition simply spread out before us,
but a wonderfully fecund conceptualization that femi-
nism has developed to structure the real in ways that
explain our exclusions and focus our transgressions.
By representing a complex socio-cultural world from
a particular perspective, we engage in an ideologi-
cal/discursive struggle of reality-construction, whereby
lines of conflict, and hence the political itself, are
configured.
I would not, however, want to claim that this
process is reducible to the exercise of naked power
or sheer fantasy, since thematizations of oppression or
discrimination are only resonant to the extent that they
are already materially and existentially suffered prior
to their discursive representation. The lived world is
sufficiently open to accommodate a variety of interpre-
tations and silencings, and for women the way it is
presented is crucial in giving our politics both a norm-
ative basis and strategic direction. But representation is
never just relative, since it is anchored in experience.
Moreover, the clarity with which the disadvantages
bestowed by gender at any given time can be articu-
lated must have a bearing on womenʼs politicization
and mobilization, since if theory is to inspire action,
it must be felt to be ʻtrueʼ and consequential, not just
abstract or ideological posturing.
Yet this is where I think we do confront a dilemma
today. Our own studies have increasingly shown sexual
inequality to be extremely complex and diffuse, as
well as revealing gender identity as a diverse and
ambiguous phenomenon. In one sense we can use this
knowledge politically, to deconstruct vulgar notions of
binary sexual difference. But at the same time, our
more sophisticated theorizing has tended to dilute a
formerly more incisive representation of opposition
and oppression, which makes collective action difficult
in the political and economic domains – that is, pre-
cisely where the power that sustains sexual inequality
regarding rights and resources is most massive and
consolidated. In part it is true that postmodernization
has rendered those realms more difficult to under-
stand comprehensively, and therefore more immune to
any obvious oppositional strategy. But we have also
been seduced by discourses that distrust structural
analysis and emphasize fragmentation instead. We
are well schooled in antipathy towards Marxian-style
totalizations or reductionism. Yet there has also been
a certain retreat from engagement with the real, in
light of our epistemological scepticism and its politi-
cal intransigence. This needs redressing, whatever its
difficulties, if the material and structural bases for
either equal citizenship, or equal opportunities to be
gender-complex, are to be constructed.
In this sense I think there is a political problem with
the postmodernization of feminism – if I can put it this
way – in that our pursuit of both diversity and consen-
sus has distracted us regarding the nature of political
struggle as requiring risky and audacious acts, where
to theorize politically or to intervene effectively does
ultimately require acts of conflict and closure, even a
certain militancy. For no matter how much we might
aspire to fulfil the ideals of discursive democracy or
to accommodate difference and complexity, we still
occupy a social field where violence and inequality
require definitive responses which do not fade into
impotent openness and multiplicity. These latter may
be, and I believe are, potent strategies on a cultural
level. But in the socio-economic domain, where there
are more or less veiled conflicts of interest, struc-
tured inequalities and zero-sum games, more definitive
analyses and mobilizations are necessary.
So far I have been considering what politics and
theory mean for feminism, and I would now like to
be clear about the conclusions I derive from this.
A topographical approach to the political locates it
in a variety of domains, where the nature of power
and of appropriate strategic engagement with it vary.
In so far as we both sense an eclipse of womenʼs
political practice and feel some urgency regarding
its resuscitation, I would situate these specifically in
the realms of state and civil society, where I have
suggested that highly organized structures of power
sustain more or less experiential, explicit and visible
forms of discrimination which require collective action
and political mobilization on a significant scale if they
are to be effectively challenged.
To render the power that operates here political,
however, its theorization is required, and this involves
both a direct involvement in discursive struggles and
a reading of events that takes their density and inertia
seriously by thematizing a complex field of forces
where different lines of strategy and defence are, if not
determined, at least circumscribed. It follows from this
that a crucial role for feminist theory is to engage in a
dialectical reading of the present in order to formulate
tactics and opportunities and to mobilize its forces.
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 19
Indeed it is here that I want to locate an exemplary
theory–practice relationship, and I would suggest that
it is its demise that has resulted in our current sense
of crisis and torn halves. In order to illustrate what
I have in mind, I want to go back twenty-five years
or so, to a brief reconsideration of one of modern
feminismʼs founding texts: Juliet Mitchellʼs Womanʼs
Estate (1971).
Woman’s Estate
In the preface to this work, Mitchell offered a list of
political actions which provided a legacy for 1960sʼ
feminism. The suffragettes, she recalls, burnt down
houses, smashed shop windows, destroyed buildings,
blew up letter boxes and cut telegraph wires. Here
was an unambiguous confrontation negotiated through
direct action; and although Mitchell never associates
herself with this type of violence against property, she
does present the movement early in its second wave
as comparable and revolutionary. She also explains
its re-emergence and radicalism as a consequence
of two factors: the contemporary situation (in which
women were at the forefront of acute contradictions
within capitalism) and the simultaneous explosion
of other radical political movements which forged
important alliances with feminists. She further traces
the womenʼs movementʼs own political influences in
anarcho-syndicalism, anarchism, the Situationists, the
anti-psychiatry movement and even terrorism, as well
as in Marxist and liberal political thought. In short,
Mitchell is in no doubt that the womenʼs movement is
born out of an activist, even revolutionary, past, and
that it will continue its trajectory.
This does not, however, prevent her from worry-
ing about its politicization. In contrast to our own
anxieties that theory has overtaken practice, she sees
the movement in 1971 as tending towards a practice
which is not yet adequately theorized. ʻThe Womenʼs
Liberation Movementʼ, she writes, ʻis at the stage of
organizing our “instinct” of our oppression as women,
into a consciousness of its meaning.ʼ1 Mitchell insists
that this cannot be done in abstraction but is a his-
torical and dialectical process in which theory and
practice are interwoven at every level.
The renewed movement had, then, begun as series
of complaints, derived from experience but at first
manifest only in spontaneous protest. This aspect
must not be lost: ʻWe do have to experience the
implications of our own oppression.ʼ2 But in order
to render this political, it had to be transformed into
a political challenge to social institutions generally.
The organizational aspect of this challenge was in
20 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
fact crucial, Mitchell argued, in two ways. First, it
was prefigurative: that is, it might be described as a
form of unmediated political engagement in so far as
small womenʼs groups perform a new mode of inter-
subjectivity and a new political style that is consonant
with feminist values – ʻcollective workʼ, as she says,
ʻis part of the processʼ, although it cannot be an end
in itself since then it would be a merely moral, rather
than political, solution.
Secondly, then, it is important that small groups
should coalesce into revolutionary collectives. This
is strategically necessary, but more importantly, as
far as theory is concerned, it is at this level that a
general theorization of womenʼs oppression, as well
as strategies for liberation, are forged. The small
group allows women to discuss personal experience,
and through discussion to recognize that the personal
is political. This does not mean for Mitchell that
politics is a micro-matter, reduced to the level of the
individual, but that personal experiences of oppression
come to be understood as instances of a more general,
structural oppression whose resolution can only be
collective. The broader groups then work on analys-
ing these structures, but it is crucial that they are not
imposing some pre-existent formula. Theory grows out
of personal experience and interprets it by eliciting
generalities which are then related to structural forces.
Politics is strategically guided by such theory, and
theory mobilizes the individuals to whom it speaks
to collective acts. In so far as change occurs, then
the new conditions call for new theorization, different
strategies, and so on.
In this dialectical linkage, there is, then, no question
of having to seek the political implications of a theory
subsequently, or of developing an abstract theory whose
connection with lived experience might remain elusive.
Experience is never taken simply as raw empirical
data; nor does theory seek some complete formulation:
they are continuously and mutually refined through
their interaction. Women are not presupposed as some
latent political agency just waiting to be set in motion,
but nor do they have to be conjured up subsequently
out of the complexities of theory.
My reason for returning to Mitchell is that her work
suggests what I consider to be an exemplary way of
holding theory and practice together. Much of her work
during the 1970s was just such a reading of dominant
structures in terms of their contradictions, articulations
and the weak spots at which they were vulnerable to
change. The details of her analysis, as well as her
commitment to scientific socialism, may seem dated
in the 1990s, but the point is that if we are to act
strategically; if we are to strike a resonance among the
many and diverse women who suffer various forms of
violence, discrimination, exploitation and oppression
and to incite a further wave of feminist politics; then
we too need an ongoing analysis of contemporary
conditions and the political opportunities they allow.
This surely means turning again to the sort of
political economy and sociology we have largely
abandoned. Of course, for us post-poststructuralists
the cultural and discursive structures that construct
gendered identities remain an important site of analysis
and contestation. But we also need to consider afresh
the roles and deprivations that are imposed by a system
which does identify us as female subjects inhabit-
ing womenʼs bodies; and granted the anachronism of
Mitchellʼs analyses, do we not urgently need a new
theorization of where women (as opposed to genders)
stand as the century draws to a close? Should this
not be the central role for our theory as a guide to an
engaged practice in public life?
For example, Mitchell wrote of womenʼs exclusion
from the workforce, but today we witness its feminiz-
ation. Of course women still occupy worse-paid jobs
under worse conditions, but the complexities of our
location in an economy that is both post- and pre-
modern; the growth of a substantial underclass, of
which women constitute a significant proportion; the
effects of information technology on the home/work
distinction that has underpinned capitalism thus far, as
well as our own public/private opposition; the simul-
taneous collapse of the family and a renewed support
for so-called family values; a popular culture that itself
celebrates gender-crossing and which only in its cruder
forms exhibits the sort of blatant sexism bemoaned
by Mitchell – these are all structural changes calling
for new analysis, perhaps new paradigms, regarding
their differential effects on women and the feasibility
of response.
What is needed, then, is an audit of where women,
in our commonality and diversity, stand in the context
of the field of forces which constitutes our situation.
This does not mean relying on unmediated accounts
of everyday life, forgetting that our lives are already
structured by ideology and power, but it does involve
taking account of the specific forms of subordination
and power that strike us, since it is impossible to
mobilize people on the basis of theory alone.
Strategically, then, I am suggesting two levels of
theorizing. First, we need to look once more at womenʼs
actual experiences in order to elicit generalities. This
was once perceived as intrinsically political, when it
took the form of consciousness-raising and organizing
via the proliferation of networks of small groups.
Should we try to reactivate this process (perhaps
via the Internet?), or is it strategic work that might
adequately be undertaken from a distance by research-
ers using interviewing techniques or opinion polls?
The problem with the latter option is that, although it
conveys a sense of objectivity, it ignores a dimension
that was crucial to Mitchellʼs dialectic, where it was
women themselves who collectively articulated the
lacunae they suffered. It is surely not just a matter
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 21
of acquiring knowledge, as if it were already there
but hidden, but of a process of coming-to-knowledge
which also changes us and our (self-) perceptions on
the way. In other words, it is a praxis, not simply an
exercise in data collection.
Second, we need to locate these findings in a broader
structural context, always remembering that this analy-
sis, too, must be resolutely political. Dynamically, the
question of the political is one of strategy: of reading
the present as a shifting field of forces. By this I mean
that power does not just circulate randomly, passing
through players who are its conduits. It is often exer-
cised with hierarchical intent, but in any case it runs
into clots, nodal points, where it undergoes a certain
ossification and closure whereby some groups are
consistently more powerful than others. The field of
forces may be agonistic, but not all players are equal.
A political movement cannot, then, afford to go all
the way with a Nietzschean–Foucauldian description of
power flows: it must also focus on the way techniques
of power are captured by institutions; colonized by
privileged groups whose collective acts may indeed
result in unintended consequences but whose result
is nevertheless the reproduction of inequalities and
exclusions.
A political theorizing must accordingly identify
these concentrations of power: not as congealed centres
of domination that would paralyse opposition, but as
relatively closed (or open) force-fields that must be
engaged with strategically, in light of their strengths
and gaps. It is in this sense that we continue Mitchellʼs
work, if without the language of contradiction or ambi-
tion of liberation. To theorize politically, dialectically,
is to ask where resistance might be effective; where
prefigurative alternatives might leave their mark;
where power is experienced as especially intolerable
and whether it thereby incites refusal or complicity.
If, for example, we conclude that state and economy
are especially closed and oppressive but that any truly
radical negation is impracticable, then we might invoke
our powers as voters and consumers, both having
potentially immense leverage but one dependent on
effective organization.
What this leaves us with is not, at least under
current circumstances, any grand politics. It does not
talk of Patriarchy or Capitalism with capital letters,
because it understands that there is no mobilization
currently powerful enough to negate these structures,
even if theory could pin them down. But it does involve
a critical engagement by locating all our piecemeal and
diverse strategies in a larger field of relatively unstable
relations where sometimes small transgressions, and
22 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
sometimes collective assaults, are effective. For this
sort of theorizing must also be resolutely realistic,
taking into account the status of feminist forces as they
wane or grow; the potential for mass mobilization; the
endurance – or not – of a latent feminism that might
be preserved and reactivated; the existence of small
and piecemeal but nevertheless committed groups of
activists and academics. It has some mobilizing capac-
ity in its explications of oppressive structures, and it
takes an overview of the myriad acts of resistance
women still collectively perform, but it is neither naive
nor unduly pessimistic about the state of womenʼs
organization at any one time, recognizing that, like
all movements, it will go through different cycles
according to its own inner logic and changing external
circumstances. The challenge is to match efficacious
and appropriate strategies to the possibilities of the
times, while recognizing that womenʼs politics and
hardships are themselves constituents of those times,
which do not therefore have to be passively borne. It
is not pragmatism but it is strategic.
Two waves, no nostalgia!
The reason for calling my article ʻFeminism without
Nostalgiaʼ, despite an appeal to a 1960sʼ praxis, was to
insist that when we express concern over our politics
we must not imagine that we are inhabiting the same
world. Mitchell was writing during one of those rare
and privileged moments in history when theory and
practice do seem able to correspond and reinforce
one another. Lived experience, as an experience of
disjunction and discrimination, was relatively homo-
geneous and explicit in a context of systemic oppres-
siveness yet disarray. In other words, there seemed to
be a certain clarity to the situation which was in step
with its articulation by radical groups whom it further
served to mobilize and orientate. Today nothing seems
transparent: there are masks, ambiguities, complexities
and reversals that make the disclosure of oppression
much more complicated and much less immediately
resonant with experience. All this opacity and multi-
plicity makes the dialectical approach, which is what
I do want to relearn from Mitchell, so much more
difficult and mediated, although I am arguing that we
must attempt it both in terms of immediate strategy,
and in order to make sense of the movementʼs fortunes
in a broader historical context.
From this point of view, it seems to me that the
real crisis for feminist politics is that while we are
now passing into a historical situation where our
ʻinstinctsʼ tell us that state and economy – those
spaces where the movement has always arisen most
dramatically – should again be our target, we no
longer have the theory or the political organization to
respond efficaciously, since our models of theory and
practice in these domains are now several decades
old and we do not inhabit a privileged moment in
history. We are suddenly lamenting a loss of politics
not because women have not been acting politically,
but because what we have been doing is not effective
in the upper topographical regions of power where we
now want to engage more dramatically. It would be
much too complicated to try to work out here why
this is, but I would suggest that a worsening economic
situation has reached a tipping point, and also that it
has become evident that what many of us believed
would be a temporary phenomenon that could be
rectified by a change of government is clearly not
after all going to be challenged by parties of the
so-called Left.
As an example of some of these developments, I
would like to cite a recent comment in The New Yorker
by Betty Friedan.3 The authorʼs identity is significant,
since Friedan has long been associated with liberal
feminism and the powerful National Organization of
Women in the United States. She was an icon of
early second-wave feminism alongside Mitchell, since
she identified ʻthe problem with no nameʼ that was
besetting American housewives. But she was also con-
sistently criticized by socialist feminists for ignoring
the economic obstacles to sexual equality. In 1996,
however, we find her supporting a Stand for Children
rally modelled on the Million Man March which had
taken place several months earlier, and writing that
it ʻis likely to bring out some new thinking that has
been quietly bubbling under the surface of the various
and too often fragmented movements for American
social renewalʼ.
The rallyʼs specific target was draconian cuts in
welfare, which critics saw as disproportionately affect-
ing women and children, although its momentum was
by no means exclusively associated with feminism.
Nevertheless, Friedan focuses on the womenʼs move-
ment to argue that among many of its supporters
there is a
growing sense that the time is ripe to go beyond
ʻgender issuesʼ that lately have been the move-
mentʼs prime concerns – abortion, date rape, sexual
harassment, pornography, and the like – to such
larger matters as economic distress and social
disintegration.
Although we might pause at Friedanʼs distinction
between gender issues and social disintegration, or her
implied relegation of them to smaller issues (especially
since in Britain we may well feel that we have become
insufficiently political even here), I think her emphasis
on economic questions is indeed symptomatic of the
times. It is not a question of adopting her as an
icon, but of noting that, significantly for a liberal
feminist, she refers to the limits of an old paradigm
of identity politics and rights, presenting in its place
a new concern for ʻextreme income inequality, and
the concentration of wealth in the top one-half of one
per centʼ. Unsurprisingly, she does not go so far as to
mention class struggle, but she does look to ʻa new
kind of powerʼ wielded by the combined strength of
ʻforces for equalityʼ, which might mobilize support if
government and corporations fail to respond to polling
evidence that the most urgent concerns are those of
families and jobs. In other words, even Friedan is
arguing for a shift in politics from the personal realm
to that of civil society, and she is also anticipating
a new mobilization of forces under the banner of
economic equality.
In the British context, I would like merely to refer to
an article in The New Statesman and Society,4 which
reported an extraordinary 81 per cent of respondents
to a recent Gallup poll agreeing that there is a class
struggle in Britain. Interpreting the responses, the
analysts refer to a common-sense view of class derived
from a sense of increasing conflict, predicated upon
what is happening to people ʻon a day to day basisʼ: an
ʻidea in actionʼ as one calls it, that concerns ʻthe bonds
between people that we experience everyday as realʼ.
The article notes the lack of any political machinery
for reflecting this view, as well as the elusiveness of
the concept of class for theory.
These two articles do not, of course, add up to
any adequate theorization of the times, but they are
symptomatic, I would argue, of a general feeling that
the political question for the millennium is one of
resource distribution, which calls for more radical
responses than the state is willing even to contem-
plate. The growth of an underclass, shifts in the job
market, the decline of welfare support and extensions
of commodification and market relations are all part
of a resurgence of capitalism which affects all women,
regardless of our race or class and despite our different
situations, and which also affects us more generally as
workers and providers. Of course, we have been here
before, but in our post-Marxist climate everything
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 23
surely needs to be thought through again, including
our political responses and interventions which were
clearly inadequate the first time round.
Finally, I would also like to situate this problem
more historically, and to do so let me take up feminist
historiansʼ metaphor of waves. This is quite appro-
priate, because the two explosive moments of the
womenʼs movement – in the latter part of the nine-
teenth century and again in the late 1960s – were
indeed what I am calling privileged moments, when
women rode the crest of a wave and theory and
practice were in sync. But between waves there must
be troughs – times such as our own, when solidarity
wanes because lines of oppression are too complex
and dispersed or invisible to allow experience and
theory to gel sufficiently to mobilize mass response.
In this context, the small but multiple transgressions
and resistances, the defences and refusals that diverse
women have sustained, are appropriate to the con-
figuration of forces; and our recent cultural bias is
also strategically sensible (although perhaps it is a
lack of theory we suffer here, in its inability or refusal
to represent these fragments in terms of an overall
political significance).
But the movement itself shifts into crisis when the
situation changes, as the previously cited evidence
suggests it has: when a more organized confronta-
tion with the massive forces of the steering media is
called for, yet where the kind of organized practices
that might be efficacious are barely evident in the
current field of forces. To put all this in a different
language: we might associate the crests of waves with
a politics of liberation, and the responses appropriate
to troughs with what Foucault calls practices of liberty.
Or, alternatively, we might align the language of libera-
tion and oppression with the sort of mass politics that
economy and state require, and the more individualist
or grouplet idea of practices of liberty with small
resistances and experiments that sustain cultural gains
during periods of reaction and closure.
It is interesting that, although Foucault himself
saw a weakness of liberation struggles lying in their
inability to establish the practices of liberty which
would succeed them, he also conceded that liberation
struggles may well be their precondition – specifically,
under conditions of domination such as those of nine-
teenth-century patriarchy5 – because they open up the
requisite spaces. Under patriarchal domination, women
could not reverse the situation. Their limited freedom
to resist allowed only ʻtricksʼ: ʻthe problem is in fact
to find out where resistance is going to organize.ʼ In
24 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
other words, the question is how to move from tricks
to tactics; from domination to agonism, where the
ethics Foucault associates with practices of liberty are
replaced by collective, political acts.
In a sense this is only repeating what I have already
said, but, since I am broadly trying to synthesis Marx
and Foucault within a dialectical approach to history,
it is important to realize that Foucault also supports
organized struggle under certain historical conditions.
While it appears to be true that women in the West
no longer suffer the degree of oppression evident in
previous centuries, we might surely claim nevertheless
that our escape from domination remains hazardous
since we have achieved only an incomplete liberation,
where power is neither wholly closed nor open and
reversible. Accordingly, our dialectical approach to
history is also needed to tell us what sort of historical
cycle we are entering and what kind of strategies are
appropriate. It is not necessarily an approach unique
to women (since we are not claiming to be historyʼs
privileged agents in any teleological sense), but it does
summon a reading of the present which might locate
allies. Moreover, it avoids the false universalizing that
was a tendency criticized in previous, more overtly
political, feminisms, in so far as it is an approach
applicable to diverse groups of women as well as to
women in general, although its focus is on connections
and overlappings between them, since it is here that
a general theory is constituted out of (and alongside)
difference.
If we are indeed entering a new period where civil
society is again experienced as the most significant,
then we need to think about how to mobilize and how
to act as women. We cannot just assume that new
forms of power will incite their own counter-forces,
but we can read peopleʼs experiences in the context
of our objective situation and begin to theorize and
mobilize on this basis. We can re-politicize our theory.
Bringing theory and practice back into a dialectical
rapport and inciting an efficacious politics in the real
world will be no easy task, but if we do want to repair
the tear, then this is where we must begin.
Notes
1. Juliet Mitchell, Womanʼs Estate, Penguin, Harmonds-
worth, 1971, p. 92.
2. Ibid., p. 93.
3. Betty Friedan, The New Yorker, 3 June 1996. pp. 5–6.
4. The New Statesman and Society, August 1996, pp.
12–14.
5. Michel Foucault, ʻThe Ethic of Care for the Self as a
Practice of Freedomʼ, Philosophy and Social Criticism,
vol. 12, no. 1, Spring 1987, p. 123.
Feminist activism and
presidential politics
Theorizing the costs of the
‘insider strategy’
Anne-Marie Smith
The 1996 presidential election will be remembered by
political analysts in the USA for its ʻgender gapʼ. Polls
show that women backed Clinton over Dole by 59 to
35 per cent, while men split their vote almost evenly,
43 to 44 per cent. Many assume that this gap emerged
because Dole and the Christian Coalition that shapes
much of Republican policy are viciously opposed to
reproductive choice for women, while Clinton is a
staunch defender of womenʼs rights. Prominent fem-
inists such as Gloria Steinem called on women to
cast their vote for Clinton, declaring that there were
significant differences between his positions and those
of Dole, and that it is our job as feminists to move
Clinton to the left.
The situation, however, is much more complicated
than this. We will only be able to deal with the chal-
lenge of pursuing feminist activism in a world that is
profoundly shaped by transnational capital and hybrid
racist sexisms to the extent that we develop much
more sophisticated theories about power, identity and
ideology. Clintonʼs Centre-Right has succeeded in part
because it has effectively deployed strategies of neutral-
ization, appropriation, co-optation and colonization.
Feminist rhetoric was used by the Clinton camp to
sell his Centre-Right agenda, in spite of the fact that it
includes several major anti-feminist elements. Clinton
himself was skilfully constructed as pro-feminist while
his campaign deliberately pre-empted and censored his
feminist critics. American feminists have almost com-
pletely lost the power to define their own discourse and
to explore what Eisenstein once optimistically called
the ʻradical future of liberal feminismʼ.1 Now, more
than ever, we need to develop feminist theories that
can analyse the neutralizing articulation of feminist
discourse, for this operation is threatening to eliminate
the very possibility of a truly subversive form of
feminist activism.
Representational strategies and feminist
discourse
Clinton was not, of course, the only presidential candi-
date who deployed complex ideological strategies.
When the Republican campaign learned during the
summer of 1996 that many voters were offended by
the extremism of the religious Right, they adopted a
fundamentally contradictory strategy. Within the party,
every effort was made to accommodate the extremist
demands of the Christian Coalition into the official
party platform. In this moment, the Republican Party
constructed America as an all-out war between two
great chains of equivalence, the ʻgoodʼ versus the
ʻevilʼ.
While the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA)
found its most eloquent opponent in Mexico among the
Zapatistas, that same role was claimed by right-wing
figures in the USA. Republican presidential primary
candidate Pat Buchanan blended his religious funda-
mentalist, racist and xenophobic discourse together
with explicit attacks on corporate greed. Buchananʼs
specific version of the ʻgoodʼ versus ʻevilʼ antagonism
constructed a chain of equivalence that united right-
wing moral authoritarians with unemployed white
working-class males in opposition against not only the
usual enemies of the religious Right – feminists, homo-
sexuals, ʻpermissiveʼ liberal officials, the so-called
leftist news media, and so on – but blacks, immi-
grants, and the chief executive officers of Americaʼs
largest corporations as well. Buchananʼs bid enjoyed
a substantial groundswell of popular support among
white workers until the Republican leadership and
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 25
the politically astute Christian Coalition leadership
ensured his defeat.2
When addressing audiences outside the party, how-
ever, Republican discourse took the form of the logic
of difference. Dole attempted to take the moral high
ground as he constructed the Republican Party as a
site in which Americans from all ʻwalks of lifeʼ were
welcome and respected. Dole worked for months, with
limited success, to include in the partyʼs extremist
platform language that recognized the legitimacy of
pro-choice Republicans. Explicit extremist language
about abortion and gay rights was almost completely
dropped from Doleʼs public discourse,3 and he waited
until his defeat was certain before emphasizing his
anti-affirmative action and anti-immigration positions.
Women, people of colour and the handicapped were
prominently featured in the partyʼs convention and
campaign materials.
We should mention in passing that religious-Right
activists are clearly frustrated with the Republicansʼ
dual strategy because it failed to work for Dole. The
religious Right, unlike the neo-conservative Republic-
ans, cannot take any solace in the fact that Clinton
has embraced a basically neo-conservative approach
to social policy. Their priority remains the imposition
of a right-wing moral agenda, and they view Clinton
as a dogmatic defender of leftist permissiveness and
secular humanism. We should anticipate more ten-
sions within the coalition between the religious Right
and the neo-conservatives; tensions between the more
pragmatic leadership of the religious Right and its
more dogmatic grassroots membership; an enormous
surge in grassroots religious-Right activity in school
boards, local and state government, petition drives, and
ballot initiatives; and the expansion of new extremist
social movements such as the right-wing militias and
the all-male Promise Keepers.4
Although the Republicans made at least some attempt
to juxtapose their exclusionary logic of discourse with
an inclusionary logic of difference, the Clinton camp
deployed much more effective techniques with respect
to the centring of right-wing extremism. Eisenstein
contends that Clintonʼs articulation of feminine and
feminist signifiers played a key role in his campaign.
Clinton was constructed as a ʻcaring and sharingʼ
voter-friendly leader for the 1990s: he promised that
he ʻfelt the painʼ of the voters, and struck a responsible
pose by pledging action on popular symbolic issues
such as teen smoking, school uniforms, violence on
television and crime. The Republicans themselves
laid much of the groundwork for this construction of
Clinton as Doleʼs feminine ʻotherʼ; they created the
26 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
room for the blatant extremism of Newt Gingrich,
Pat Buchanan, the Christian Coalition and right-wing
terrorists; they shut down the government during their
1995 budget standoff with Clinton; and they chose a
stiff and elderly Washington insider as their presiden-
tial candidate.
Eisenstein argues that Clinton, by positioning him-
self as the spouse of an empowered woman, and by
staking out the pro-choice position, won pseudo-femi-
nist credentials. She offers a fascinating analysis of
the way in which Hillary Rodham Clinton has been
masculinized to symbolize feminist excess precisely to
create a safe space for the construction of Bill Clinton
as her compassionate feminine counterpart.5 Women of
all races are less likely than men to view the budget
deficit as an urgent priority, and they are more likely
than men to support education spending, affirmative
action, civil rights, gay rights, health-care reform, and
welfare programmes.6 Through his symbolic promises,
and his appropriation of feminist discourse on abor-
tion, Clinton won just enough support from women
voters.
Clinton also masterfully transformed his small set
of progressive accomplishments into solid evidence of
his principled leadership against the Gingrich–Dole
Republican Congress. He vetoed the ban on late-
term abortions, and saw that the act that provides
for unpaid family leave was passed, along with the
Violence Against Women Act and the ban on assault
weapons. Pollitt nevertheless described these accom-
plishments as a ʻshort, narrowly tailored listʼ.7 Clinton
also established an impressive record with respect
to the appointment of women and minorities to his
administration. Underneath his apparent inclusiveness,
however, Clinton actually abandoned many of these
candidates and appointees – such as Zoë Baird, Lani
Guinier and Jocelyn Elders – when they threatened to
interrupt his Centre-Right agenda. Throughout his first
term, and in the early days of his second, Clinton has
chosen to establish a traditional male-dominated work
environment and to surround himself with increasingly
right-wing advisors.8 While Clinton did speak out in
support of affirmative action, he carefully qualified
that support to allow himself plenty of room for future
capitulations. During the campaign, he and his party
remained almost completely silent about the anti-
affirmative-action ballot initiative in California until
he had obtained a safe lead over Dole in the state.9
The initiative passed with 54 per cent support.
As the Republicans gave more and more authority
to the Christian Coalition, Clinton and the conservative
Democrats knew very well that they offered the only
credible discourse that could articulate the pro-choice
position. Cockburn points out that this situation gave
Clinton enormous leeway in his judicial appointments.
He was assured of feminist support for his appointees
simply because they were pro-choice; he knew in
advance that the fact that they were extremely pro-
business would be ignored.10
Clinton had already made significant efforts to
foreclose feminist criticism before the final days of
the campaign. Progressive advocates had been lured
by government appointments and access to the White
House to the extent that they had already abandoned
the option of expressing oppositional dissent.11 Marian
Wright Edelman, leader of the Childrenʼs Defence
Fund, remained silent after Clinton signed the dra-
conian welfare bill; environmentalists praised the
administration, in spite of its anti-green record; and
gay rights groups endorsed Clinton even after months
of Democratic heterosexist nuclear-family rhetoric and
Clintonʼs signing of the bill that allows states to ban
gay marriages. Feminists and progressives who did
criticize Clinton were marginalized and censored at
the Democratic Convention by Clintonʼs campaign
machinery.12
The effects of these strategies are profound. We
should consider, first, the ways in which Clintonʼs
political tactics have reconstituted feminist activism.
Feminists have been encouraged to seek gains for
narrowly defined single-issue campaigns, such as abor-
tion, without any consideration of broad-based coali-
tion-building. Further, they have been ʻrewardedʼ for
choosing to work within the terms established by the
Clinton administration; those who fail to do so have
been excluded. Piven argues that womenʼs groups and
social-welfare advocacy groups chose to pursue what
she calls the ʻinsider strategyʼ, even though they knew
very well that it entailed the surrender of their right
to autonomous critique and oppositional activism.13
Pollitt contends that these developments have seriously
weakened the feminist movement, as more and more
feminist leaders succumb to the ʻfantasy of access and
influence: to the siphoning off of energies into wishy-
washy “advocacy,” Beltway schmooze [Washington
lobbying] and fundraising for “moderate” Democrats
who happen to be women or minorities.ʼ14
Eisenstein, Piven or Pollitt do not ignore the fact
that feminists must deploy a complex combination of
struggles both within and against the predominant
structures of electoral politics in the United States.
Feminist activism must continue to take the form of
a mobile war of position that shifts back and forth
between infiltration, constructive engagement and sub-
version from within dominant institutions on the one
hand, and vigorous principled opposition on the other,
where the price of normalization and institutional-
ization is too high. They are not, in other words,
calling for a feminist activism that would occupy a
position of pure exteriority; at this point in the strug-
gle, serious feminist activists no longer think politics
in terms of a simple choice between pure insider and
pure outsider positions. What they are recognizing,
however, is that the Clinton forces, and much of the
neo-conservative Centre-Right and Right in general,
have ʻhegemonizedʼ feminist discourse. They have
learned how to appropriate key feminist slogans and
turn them to their advantage, even though they have
done little to advance concrete feminist struggles,
and have actually pursued many specific policies that
contradict feminist principles. The Clinton Democrats
and other neo-conservatives have also learned how to
construct their colonized version of feminism as the
only legitimate form – such that it seems to exhaust
the totality of acceptable feminist discourse.
The rightward migration of Clinton’s
‘Centre’
The charge that Clinton engaged not only in an attempt
to redefine feminist positions, but in a bid to hegemo-
nize feminist activism while pursuing a fundamentally
reactionary agenda, can only be substantiated by exam-
ining his concrete policies in detail. While Clinton did
veto the ban on late-term abortions, his policies left
the status quo on abortion largely intact. That status
quo is structured according to a class-differentiated
system of access. As many as 84 per cent of American
counties have no abortion providers. States are free
to impose mandatory counselling, waiting periods
and parental approval for women under the age of
eighteen. In a country in which there is no national
health service, the states are also allowed to exclude
coverage for abortions by Medicaid, the health-care
plan for the poor.15
Clintonʼs articulation of conservative ʻfamily valuesʼ
rhetoric has also contradicted the broader feminist goal
of securing not just abortion rights for the wealthy, but
the right for every women to determine her reproduc-
tive choices freely. In contemporary American politics,
the pursuit of this goal must include the defence
of poor womenʼs right to have children in the first
place. Clintonʼs claim that ʻteen pregnancyʼ consti-
tutes nothing less than an ʻepidemicʼ that threatens
the ʻnational interestʼ corresponds too neatly with
right-wing anxieties about the ʻexcessiveʼ fertility of
the poor. Poor single mothers on welfare have been
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 27
grossly demonized; they are widely portrayed as hedon-
istic agents of a dysgenic population boom among
the mostly black and Latino ʻunderclassʼ. Allegations
of this nature by the media and mainstream politi-
cal figures alike have remained immune to empirical
refutation. The reproduction rate among black teenage
women has actually declined, and it only appears
to be growing because the reproduction rate among
older black women has declined more rapidly. Under
the current law, the states are free to experiment
with any number of official welfare measures that
interfere with poor womenʼs right to have children.
In some localities, teenage mothers are being charged
with fornication or coerced by public officials into
marriages. While right-wing commentators such as
Murray express – in pseudo-feminist terms – a deep
concern about the availability of abortion, birth control
and adoption services for ʻunderclassʼ mothers,16 the
eugenicist spectre of women on welfare being forced
to take Norplant lies on the horizon. Clintonʼs own
discourse has only exacerbated these assaults on the
reproductive freedoms of all but the most wealthy
women.
Clintonʼs support for free trade is devastating for
American workers; his anti-terrorist legislation marks
a significant setback for civil liberties; his pledges of
support for the inner cities are meaningless without a
substantial jobs creation programme; his inaction on
campaign finance reform perpetuates the corporate
grip on Washington;17 his record on the environment
is appalling;18 his pandering to conservative Cuban-
Americans has resulted in the strengthening of the
Cuban blockade;19 and the much-hyped increase in
28 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
the minimum wage still leaves a family of four under
the poverty line. Through his policies, fundraising
practices and personal conduct he encourages voters to
lower their expectations about what governments can
accomplish.20 He has normalized the right-wing cam-
paign against illegal immigration with escalated border
patrols and harsh legislation.21 He has abandoned his
own moderate proposals to reform health care; not
only will he not promote a single payer scheme, he
will not even take on the for-profit Health Maintenance
Organizations (HMOs) that now dominate the health-
care industry. He promised to support gay rights,
but capitulated on the issue of gays in the military,
gave no power to his AIDS ʻczarʼ, distanced himself
from his gay supporters, enthusiastically embraced
the ideology that children should only be raised by
married heterosexual couples, and signed a bill that
allows states to ban gay marriages.22
Eisenstein, Piven and Pollitt view Clintonʼs approval
of the welfare law that was passed in August 1996
as his greatest betrayal of feminist principles. This
law changes welfare from a national entitlement pro-
gramme to a system of block grants that allows the
states to decide how to spend the funds. It eliminates
the right of the poor to federal assistance, and gives
a free rein to the very level of government that is
notorious for its exclusionary policies and closed-door
deal-making. No state will be able to provide benefits
after two years, or to provide benefits to a recipient
who has been on welfare for more than five years
during her entire lifetime. The bill does not include
any new provisions for job creation, job training or
child-care.
The United States
already had the great-
est, as well as the fastest
growing, gap between the
rich and the poor, and
the worst record for aid
to the poor in the entire
ʻWesternʼ world before
this bill was passed. Poor
people will be forced to
seek work in a country in
which the Federal Reserve
is deliberately controlling
interest rates to maintain
a high un-employment
level, which currently
stands at seven million.
In Americaʼs inner
cities, there are fourteen
applicants for every job in a fast-food restaurant.
Automation, globalization, specialization according
to comparative advantage, and government cutbacks
are rapidly eliminating the jobs in the industrial manu-
facturing and government service sectors. These are
precisely the sectors in which Americans with only
a high-school education could find a skilled or semi-
skilled unionized job that paid a living wage. Today,
these same Americans are experiencing a dramatic
decrease in wealth as they become massively grouped
in the low-paying, unskilled and non-unionized service
sector. As the August 1996 welfare law is put into
effect, 3.5 million children will be dropped from
public assistance by 2001, and a million more children
will be thrown into poverty. This will take place in a
country in which one out of four children already lived
under the poverty line in 1994; in which over 4,200
babies below twelve months of age already died every
year as of 1996 because of low birth weight and other
problems related to the poverty of their mothers.
For reasons stemming directly from historical tra-
ditions in which blacks, Latinos and some Asians
were systematically excluded from accumulating the
resources necessary for upward class mobility, racial
minorities remain overrepresented among the popu-
lation that is experiencing the greatest decreases in
family income. In 1991, the typical white household
was ten times more wealthy than the typical black
household. Compared to whites, African-Americans
have a 100 per cent greater infant mortality rate, a
176 per cent greater unemployment rate, and a 300
per cent greater poverty rate.23
Clintonʼs repeal of welfare rights coincides with
other public policies that have only exacerbated the
growing inequalities in the distribution of wealth.
With its strict time limits, the implementation of the
welfare law will require extensive inter-state record-
keeping, which will in turn open up a huge new
market for the capital-intensive information technology
sector. Keynesianism is not entirely dead, even though
the Reagan administrations made the maintenance of
government programmes impossible by deliberately
running up huge deficits. There is a covert boom in
the military, policing, penitentiary and public-surveil-
lance sectors within the budgets of the federal, state
and local governments, while overt campaigns against
governmental health, education, poverty and housing
expenditures have been launched with full force. In
the first days of his second term, Clinton attempted to
construct himself as a pro-public-education president,
but his major initiative in this area was a tax break
that will mostly benefit the middle class. While the
repeal of welfare rights was justified in terms of bal-
anced-budget rhetoric, private corporations have never
paid such a small share of federal taxes, and they
have never received more public subsidies; corporate
welfare is four times greater than aid to the poor;
middle-class home-owners continue to receive non-
means-tested mortgage subsidies; and little is said
about the savings-and-loan bail-outs and the bloated
Pentagon budget.24
Meanwhile wealthy Americans – a class in which
whites are vastly overrepresented – are pursuing an
increasingly segregationist agenda which fundamen-
tally erodes the notion of collective responsibility.
Federal taxes for the rich are cut, necessitating not
only massive cuts in government programmes but
also increases in the state and local taxes that are
less fair for the lower middle class, workers and the
poor. Public transportation cuts reduce the mobility
of the poor, school zoning boundaries are drawn to
isolate the middle class, school voucher programmes
that would use public funds to subsidize wealthy chil-
drenʼs private school tuition are proposed, while gated
suburban communities cut themselves off from the
inner-city tax base. The Republican Congress approved
an experimental plan that sets up government subsidies
for individuals who want to opt out of private group
health insurance to obtain their own personal cover-
age. More and more corporations are eliminating the
pension plans that used to cover their entire workforce
and replacing them with generous tax-subsidized plans
for the highest-paid managers.25 For the rich, privatiz-
ation is not enough; they are now demanding explicitly
segregationist forms of privatization.
Passive revolution and expansive
hegemony
Our analysis of the Democratic Partyʼs bid to hege-
monize feminism can be clarified with reference to
Gramsciʼs distinction between the ʻpassive revolutionʼ
and ʻexpansive hegemonyʼ. A ʻpassive revolutionʼ por-
trays itself as a popular and democratic movement,
but it actually engages in profoundly anti-democratic
strategies. It neutralizes social movements by satisfy-
ing some of their demands in a symbolic and reform-
ist manner, and shifts authority towards disciplinary
apparatuses. Strictly speaking, Gramsci makes a clear
distinction between ʻpassiveʼ revolution and hegemony,
for a traditional ʻpassiveʼ moment is largely statist and
bureaucratic; the ʻmassesʼ do not take an active part,
and brute force, rather than the organization of consent,
becomes predominant. Further, Gramsci insists that
the ʻpassive revolutionʼ includes substantial economic
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 29
intervention by the state, a dimen-
sion that is almost anachronis-
tic in contemporary globalizing
economies. Gramsciʼs conception
of the ʻpassiveʼ revolution never-
theless contains the provocative
image of a pseudo-popular move-
ment that wins some small degree
of consent by responding to some
of the popular demands from the
grassroots, but uses that appear-
ance of popular consent only
to gain strategic ground for its
fundamentally anti-democratic
project. It seeks to absorb and
to assimilate democratic forces
by appropriating key elements of
alternative popular world-views,
neutralizing their critical poten-
tial by redefining them, and then
articulating these colonized ele-
ments into its world-view.26
Authoritarian forms of hegemony remain funda-
mentally contradictory, for they attempt to represent
themselves as popular democratic movements, even
though they engage in all sorts of containment strate-
gies, and pursue initiatives that perpetuate the unequal
distribution of power. While maintaining the façade
of a popular mobilizing force, they do not hesitate to
demobilize key sectors of the populace by engaging in
blatant disenfranchisement tactics, or by dragging the
political centre so far to the right that more and more
people have no reason to participate in the political
system. We are now witnessing extensive efforts to
lower political participation in the United States. The
Clinton Democrats have worked together with the
other forces on the right to lower popular expectations
about what governments ought to achieve. Clinton
has also indirectly benefited from the promotion, on
the part of the far Right and the religious Right, of a
popular paranoia about the evil forces that lurk within
state apparatuses. In spite of their different rhetoric,
the far Right, the religious Right, the neo-conservative
Right, and the neo-conservative Centre-Right have
constructed a lasting consensus: public programmes
– with the exception of the military, the police, public
surveillance and the penitentiary system – are suspect;
concepts of collective responsibility are obsolete.
There is nothing in the contradictions within authori-
tarian hegemonies, however, that will by themselves
lead to their self-destruction. Not only can contra-
dictory political discourses remain brutally effective;
30 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
they can also make their contradictions a source of
strength. As Hall argued with respect to Thatcherism,
an authoritarian hegemonic project does not actu-
ally need to construct a fully mobilized majority of
enthusiastic supporters. It only needs to achieve the
disorganization of the potential opposition and the
minimum degree of mobilization necessary for the
construction of a ʻpopularʼ façade for the regime.27
Gramsci contends that where authoritarian ʻpassive
revolutionsʼ have become institutionalized, democratic
forces will have to wage a protracted ʻwar of positionʼ
and struggle to advance an ʻexpansive hegemonyʼ.
Multiple struggles that are plural and contextually
sensitive in form will have to be deployed at each of
the various sites throughout the social in which the
ʻpassive revolutionʼ has become entrenched. Where a
ʻpassive revolutionʼ seeks to neutralize the democratic
opposition and to construct a simulacrum popular
movement while perpetuating structural inequality, an
ʻexpansive hegemonyʼ seeks to promote a genuinely
democratic mobilization of progressive social move-
ments.28 Authoritarian hegemony aims to achieve a
maximum disciplining of difference; even as it pre-
tends to endorse pluralism, it can only promote a fake
multiculturalism. By contrast, the radical democratic
pluralist approach – expansive hegemony – attempts
to construct the sorts of unifying discourses that
enhance and promote democratic forms of plurality
and difference. Confronted with a plurality of progres-
sive struggles already in motion, it seeks to release
the democratic potential within each of them, while
bringing them into mutually constitutive articulatory
relations. It values the autonomy of each democratic
struggle as a good in itself, and in a pragmatic sense:
autonomy facilitates the sort of contextually specific
contestation of oppression and exploitation that is
needed in todayʼs complex and hybrid social forma-
tions. Where authoritarian hegemony strictly regu-
lates the development of political contestation, radical
democratic pluralist hegemony multiplies the points of
contestation and seeks to broaden the terrain of polit-
icization or reactivation.29 The relatively universalistic
effects of the radical democratic pluralist horizon seeks
to institutionalize deeper and deeper recognition of the
plurality and autonomy of the public spaces created
by democratic struggles, while perpetually postponing
the final definition of the good.30 To the extent that
the specific discourses of the relatively autonomous
progressive struggles are successfully articulated with
a radical civic sense, the multiplication of these public
spaces becomes a source of strength for democratic
society.31
Passive revolution and
feminist strategy
Clintonʼs political linkages with the Democratic
Leadership Council situated him squarely within the
part of the Democratic Party that has traditionally
embraced a ʻpassive-revolutionʼ strategy. The direc-
tion and structure of his leadership did nevertheless
seem to be open to alternative possibilities when he
defeated Bush in 1992. Throughout his first term,
however, Clinton distanced himself more and more
from progressive positions and prioritized neo-con-
servative policies.
Feminist leaders, for the most part, failed to adjust
their strategies accordingly. In a key article that was
published in Ms., the flagship feminist magazine, just
before the 1996 election, Steinem declared that women
ought to vote for Clinton and then work hard to make
his positions more progressive. She rightly pointed out
that right-wing victories depend on a contradictory
populism: the mobilization of right-wing voters and the
demobilization of everyone else. She could have also
pointed out that the rich vote in overwhelmingly larger
numbers than the poor in the USA.32 But Steinem
also claimed that the Republicans gain whenever we
argue that there is little difference between them
and the Democrats, because this argument makes the
Republicans appear more moderate and discourages
Democratic voters from going to the polls. To her
credit, she did argue that Clinton failed on welfare,
gays in the military and gay marriage, but she asserted
that Clinton will only differ from the Republicans
where he has the popular support to do so, and that
it is the task of progressive movements to create that
support.33
Steinem assumed that the prevailing political struc-
ture actually does correspond to the pluralist interest
group modelʼs predictions; that the system remains
ready to respond to a feminist popular mobilization.
She depicted Clintonʼs capitulation to the neo-con-
servative Right not as the fruit of his own convictions
but as the product of the Republican-weighted balance
of power. In this and other similar representations,
Clinton is figured as a vulnerable victim of Republican
power who reluctantly supports right-wing positions
when he would secretly prefer to take a much more
progressive stance. Considerations about co-optation,
neutralizing articulations and colonization were absent
from her argument. Steinem therefore laid most of the
burden with respect to the advance of the feminist
struggle at the door of feminists. Because the existing
system ʻworksʼ, we feminists only have to redouble our
efforts. New strategies and radical transformations of
the entire political structure are not required.
The article reproduced the arguments used by Con-
gresswoman Waters, Smeal, Steinem, Abzug, and other
leading feminists at the 1996 Democratic Convention.
They called for feminists to vote for Clinton. They
also argued that Clinton was forced into signing the
welfare bill; they contended that because of the elec-
toral strength of the Republicans, his bid for a second
term would have failed if he had opposed the repeal
of welfare rights. From their perspective, feminists had
to campaign to put Clinton back into office so that he
would be able to reverse the welfare bill during his
second term.34
Clintonʼs feminist supporters, however, ignored the
fact that Clinton had maintained a substantial and
steady lead over a Republican contender since the
Republicans had shut down the government during the
budget stalemate in 1995.35 Clinton had nevertheless
vetoed two other welfare bills during that period.
Some of the Democrats who were up for re-election
in the House and the Senate voted against the welfare
bill and then easily won their races. There is also
substantial evidence that Clinton agreed with the basic
provisions in the bill. Not only had he adopted the
Republican terms of the welfare debate years before he
signed it; he had joined with other neo-conservatives
in a consistent campaign to get the attack on welfare
rights onto the mainstream political agenda. On the
1996 campaign trail, Clinton explicitly championed the
repeal of welfare rights before conservative audiences.
In other campaign venues, he promised to ʻfixʼ some
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 31
of the bill during his second term, especially the
provisions that stop legal immigrants from receiving
benefits. Welfare policy experts predicted, however,
that Clinton would fail if he attempted to change the
fundamental aspect of the bill, namely the basic repeal
of welfare rights.36 In any event, Clinton reversed his
position after his re-election; he now promises merely
to introduce small changes to the new welfare policy.
Behind the scenes, conservative Democrats are plan-
ning to privatize social security.37
The most damning evidence about Clintonʼs deci-
sion-making process on the bill comes from a par-
ticipant in a White House advisorsʼ meeting that took
place in August 1996. He states that when Morris,
Clintonʼs infamous pollster, argued that the president
needed to sign the welfare bill to win the November
1996 election, everyone else completely disagreed with
him. Morrisʼs pro-welfare-repeal side ultimately won
the debate in the White House, but its prevailing argu-
ment was based on Clintonʼs political values, rather
than reluctantly deployed electoral tactics. Writing
on the eve of the election, Hitchens concluded that,
ʻThe Clinton Administration does not do what it does
because it is constrained, by a first term or an impend-
ing election or anything of the kind, to do so. It does
these things out of conviction.ʼ38
Women voters who chose Clinton over Dole because
they believed that he would be a staunch defender of
the welfare safety net were therefore misled. Clintonʼs
ʻgender gapʼ was built on his neutralizing appro-
priation of feminist and feminine symbols, rather than
his underlying convictions. But Patricia Ireland, the
president of the National Organization of Women
(NOW), stood virtually alone as a major feminist
leader when she called for massive opposition against
Clintonʼs support for the welfare bill. To her credit,
she went on a well-publicized hunger strike after
the bill was passed, and declared that, although she
would vote for Clinton, she would not campaign for
him in any way. NOW directed its campaign support
exclusively behind the House Democrats and the one
senator running for re-election, Paul Wellstone, who
voted against it.39 NOW also worked with civil rightsʼ
organizations, progressive unions and radical students
in the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to defeat the
anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 in California.
When Ireland tried to bring her oppositional campaign
to the Democratic Convention, she was prevented by
party officials from launching a significant protest.40
Pollitt, like Eisenstein, fundamentally questions the
assumption held by Steinem and other pro-Clinton fem-
inists that Clintonʼs decisions are merely the product
32 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
of tactical decision-making in the face of Republican
power. She states that instead of blaming Clintonʼs
neo-conservatism on the Republican Congress, we
should see the leading politicians of both parties as
symptoms of a global phenomenon: ʻthe slashing of
the welfare state, the lowering of the working classʼs
standard of living and the upward transfer of wealthʼ.
She asserts that we can ʻplausibly argue that Clinton
prepared [the] way [for the Republican Congress] by
accepting Republican terms of debateʼ. Pollitt concludes
that although a second Bush administration might have
introduced worse measures in some policy areas, only
Clinton had the strategic position that allowed him to
neutralize democratic opposition within and outside
Congress with such a devastating effect.41
Many progressive feminists are rejecting Steinemʼs
approach, and are advocating a much more sceptical
approach towards the Democratic Party. They are
exploring alternative strategies such as third parties
and more autonomous oppositional movements. Burk
and Hartmann, for example, contend that American
feminist activism has concentrated too exclusively on
the single-issue campaign to defend the status quo on
abortion; that it must do more to link abortion rights
to economic rights; and that it must pay more attention
to the issues that concern women the most – namely,
pay equity, pensions, health care and violence. Burk
and Hartmann point out that feminist leaders have
not done enough to construct feminism as one of the
transnational sites of resistance against the escalation
in economic exploitation in the globalizing economy.
They claim that this shift in strategy would make the
womenʼs movement more relevant to working-class
women of colour.42
Popular feminist intellectuals and neo-
conservatism
Neo-conservative discourse often successfully seizes
upon the weaknesses of single-issue reformist feminist
identity politics. Many right-wing forces subversively
borrow identity-politics strategies from the Left and
either promote right-wing elements within existing
social movements or invent their own versions of
grassroots activism and ʻdiversityʼ. Anti-feminist
women intellectuals, for example, are celebrated as
the spokespersons for the attack on womenʼs studies
that is launched in the name of vague pseudo-feminist
principles. Blacks and non-Anglo immigrants have
emerged as the prominent leaders for anti-affirmative
action and anti-multiculturalism movements. Identity-
politics discourse legitimated the validity of discourse
that is located with respect to the experience of women
and minorities. This argument undoubtedly had a pro-
gressive effect in so far as it promoted a critique of
sexist and racist discourse that passed itself off as uni-
versal. But neo-conservatives have begun to turn the
logic of identity-politics discourse to their advantage.
Speaking from what they call their special black and
ethnic-minority perspectives, these right-wing women
and people of colour condemn affirmative action and
multiculturalism for promoting racist divisions, thereby
identifying the anti-racists as the worst racists. These
tactics not only contribute to the legitimation of right-
wing policies, but also threaten to redefine the entire
terrain of feminist and anti-racist politics.
Further, neo-conservative politicians and corporate
marketing strategies have successfully normalized an
astonishingly reactionary definition of feminism in the
United States. Feminist success is now widely equated
with any socio-economic gain that is achieved by any
individual woman by any means necessary. Two recent
popular films, First Wivesʼ Club and Waiting to Exhale,
portray womenʼs liberation in crassly consumeristic
terms. Nikeʼs sports shoe advertisements embrace
womenʼs athletics on explicitly feminist grounds, while
their $140 shoes are made by women in Indonesia
working for $2.20 a day, and by women in China and
Vietnam working for $30 a month.43 A recent notice
on Cornell Universityʼs Womenʼs Studies Programmeʼs
list-serve advertised an event that was simply called
ʻWomenʼs Leadership Seminarʼ. The notice described
the women speakers only in terms of their affiliations
with the World Bank and private corporations. The
term ʻfeministʼ was noticeably absent.
Among middle-class girls and young women, there
are ambiguous signs of backlash and rebellion. In her
excellent book, Reviving Ophelia,44 Piper, a therapist
who works with young teenage women, reports on
the extremely hostile environments that they confront
on a daily basis in their schools, relationships and
families. I myself am seeing more and more intel-
ligent young middle-class women struggle against the
cultural forces that encourage them to ʻdumb downʼ
their public speaking performance; sometimes, their
brilliance comes through only obliquely or only in
their writing.
If we wade carefully through the Disney–ABC/ Time
Warner–Turner–CNN/General Electric–NBC/Westing-
house–CBS/Murdoch–Fox/Viacom–Paramount–MTV/
Bertellsman swamp of media oligopolies that almost
completely defines American ʻpopular cultureʼ,45 we can
find promising moments of young womenʼs rebellion. It
is the anger of Courtney Love, Queen Latifah, Alanis
Morissette and Ani di Franco, and not the co-depend-
ence of Janis Joplin, that turns these women on. But
their tattoos and piercings are barely healed before
they are stolen from them by powerful media interests.
They may find their way into political activism through
indirect and unconventional routes; they are more likely
to enter progressive activist discourse via animal rights
and vegetarianism than via feminism, for they can more
easily identify with the innocence and helplessness
of small animals, or the beauty and dignity of an old
growth forest, than they can insist on their own rights.
Some of my women students are participating in new
and exciting multiracial coalitions to fight the attack on
affirmative action; others are going to the new labour
organizing summer schools. But these young women are
confronted with something that we never had to deal
with – namely, the false image that we already inhabit a
post-feminist terrain, as feminist demands are appropri-
ated by right-wing forces and private corporations and
bent to serve their reactionary interests.46
If feminist leaders have, for the most part, failed
to grasp the dynamics of contemporary politics in
which the possibilities for the genuine advance of
feminist struggle have been sharply curtailed, and
ʻfeminismʼ has been given a reactionary and anti-femi-
nist meaning, popular feminist intellectuals have not,
on the whole, done much better. The idea that ʻfeminist
successʼ means virtually any socio-economic gain for
any individual woman that is achieved by any means
necessary is explicitly promoted by Wolf. In her ind-
ividualist ʻpower feminismʼ theory, she attacks radical
feminism for its portrayal of women as ʻvictimsʼ and
contends that ʻweʼ – read wealthy, healthy, white,
straight, college-educated women – should construct a
ʻfeminismʼ that celebrates ʻourʼ power.47 The structural
analysis of oppression, exploitation and the respon-
sibility of the overempowered to the disempowered is
entirely foreclosed. This evisceration of feminism will
only encourage more and more white wealthy women
to look out for their own interests – and to invoke the
name of ʻfeminismʼ when it suits them in doing so
– and to forget the needs of disadvantaged women.
In concrete terms, we should remember that several
of the women elected to the House of Representatives
with support from feminist political action committees
voted for the welfare bill that is going to condemn
over a million additional children to poverty and throw
millions of poor mothers with no childcare, no job
training, and no job prospects off the welfare rolls.48
This displacement of radical democratic feminism by
non-feminisms or even anti-feminisms that masquerade
as feminism could not be more disastrous, especially
now as automation and globalization ensure economic
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 33
opportunities for a small highly educated elite – which
includes many college-educated white women – and
increasing exploitation for the rest.
The anti-feminist feminism of Paglia, Hoff Sommers,
and Roiphe49 has also emerged as a popular intellectual
school. These ʻtheoriesʼ attack virtually every femi-
nist position but borrow liberal individualist feminist
rhetoric such that they can represent themselves as
more ʻdemocraticʼ and more ʻfeministʼ than feminism.
Many younger women are strongly attracted to them,
and to Wolfʼs so-called ʻpower feminismʼ, because of
their apparent irreverence. These discourses have been
masterfully constructed as the rebellious underdog
voices against an omnipotent ʻGoliathʼ – the mythical
ʻfeminist establishmentʼ – when they are, of course,
serving the hegemonic neo-conservative and anti-femi-
nist forces quite nicely. And, because neo-conservative
values predominate in American academia, students
are not being given the critical tools that are needed
to evaluate these texts and are therefore vulnerable to
their false promises of rebellion.
In an instrumentalist sense – and I donʼt think
that our instrumentalist interests should be used to
define the totality of legitimate feminist discourse
– I have argued that we need to develop much more
sophisticated analyses of power and the neutralizing
effects of ideological appropriations. Since Britainʼs
Labour Party leadership has distanced itself from its
progressive grassroots and the trade-union movement
at every opportunity, this theoretical and political
problem has now become an urgent priority on both
sides of the Atlantic.
Notes
I would like to thank Zillah Eisenstein for her inspirational
work, Peter Osborne for editorial assistance, and Patty Zim-
mermann for mapping out the monopolistic patterns of owner-
ship that are predominant in American popular culture.
1. Z. Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism,
Longman, New York, 1981.
2. F. Rich, ʻDoleʼs Unpaid Debtʼ, New York Times, 9 March
1996, p. 23; ʻHappy New Year?ʼ, New York Times, 18
September 1996, p. 23.
3. A. Nagourney, ʻOn Volatile Social and Cultural Issues,
Silenceʼ, New York Times, 9 October 1996, p. 1.
4. F. Rich, ʻThank God Iʼm a Manʼ, New York Times, 25
September 1996, p. A21; J. Conason, A. Ross and L.
Cokorinos, ʻThe Promise Keepers Are Comingʼ, The
Nation, 7 October 1996, pp. 11–15.
5. Z. Eisenstein, ʻTheorizing and Politicizing the 1996
Electionʼ, in Clarence Lo, ed., Clinton and the Con-
servative Agenda, Blackwell, Oxford, forthcoming.
6. G. Steinem, ʻVoting as Rebellionʼ, Ms., September/Oc-
tober 1996, p. 61; C. Goldberg, ʻSoccer Moms Step
onto Political Playing Fieldʼ, New York Times, 6 October
1996, p. 24; A. Nagourney, ʻDemocrats Seek Votes of
Women with a Focus on their Familiesʼ, New York Times,
34 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
29 August 1996, p. B13.
7. K. Pollitt, ʻWe Were Wrong: Why Iʼm Not Voting for
Clintonʼ, The Nation, 7 October 1996, p. 9.
8. T. Purdum, ʻThe Second Clinton Term: Promise, Pitfalls
and Perilsʼ, New York Times, 6 November 1996, p. B2.
9. M. Cooper, ʻLetter From California: What Cost, Vic-
tory?ʼ, The Nation, 4 November 1996, pp. 12–14; B.
Ayres, ʻAffirmative Action Measure Nears a High-Profile
Finishʼ, New York Times, 4 November 1996, p. B6.
10. A. Cockburn, ʻDonʼt be Fooled Againʼ, The Progressive,
November 1996, p. 20.
11. Ibid., p. 21.
12. D. Corn, ʻWhatʼs Left in the Party?ʼ, The Nation, 23
September 1996, p. 20.
13. B. Ehrenreich, ʻFrances Fox Pivenʼ, The Progressive,
November 1996, p. 34.
14. Pollitt, ʻWe Were Wrongʼ, p. 9.
15. New York Times, ʻStatesʼ Wrongs on Abortionʼ, editorial,
3 September 1996, p. 22.
16. R. Herrnstein and C. Murray, The Bell Curve: Intel-
ligence and Class Structure in American Life, The Free
Press, New York, 1994.
17. Election experts estimate that a record amount of $1.6
billion was raised and spent on the 1996 election. Some
$800 million was spent on the presidential election
alone, a figure that is three times greater than the 1992
spending level (The Nation, ʻMoney Votesʼ, editorial,
11 November 1996, p. 5). A recent poll found that the
largest political donors were more supportive of free
trade and large corporate interests, and more opposed to
government spending and government regulation, than
the electorate as a whole (B. Borosage and R. Teixeira,
ʻThe Politics of Moneyʼ, The Nation, 21 October 1996,
pp. 21–2).
18. A. Cockburn, ʻLadies and Gentlemen, I Give You the
Presidentʼ, The Nation, 9–16 September 1996, p. 10; A.
Cockburn, ʻThe Kevorkian in the White Houseʼ, The
Nation, 14 October 1996, p. 9.
19. S. Erlanger, ʻTough Talk Aside, Helms Barely Alters
Foreign Policyʼ, New York Times, 3 November 1996,
p. 18.
20. J. Nichols, ʻJoel Rogersʼ, The Progressive, October
1996, p. 30.
21. E. Schmitt, ʻMilestones and Missteps on Immigrationʼ,
New York Times, 26 October 1996, p. 1.
22. D. Kirp, ʻPolitics Out of the Closetʼ, The Nation, 9–16
September 1996, pp. 3–4.
23. K. Bradsher, ʻGap in Wealth in U.S. Called Widest in
Westʼ, New York Times, 17 April 1995, p. 1; B. Herbert,
ʻThe Issue is Jobsʼ, New York Times, 6 May 1996, p.
23; B. Herbert, ʻSupply Side Seducerʼ, New York Times,
12 August 1996, p. 25; M. Marable, How Capitalism
Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Po-
litical Economy and Society, South End Press, Boston
MA, 1983; R. Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History
of Multicultural America, Little, Brown, Boston MA,
1993; R.M. Williams, ʻAccumulation as Evisceration:
Urban Rebellion and the New Growth Dynamicsʼ, in
R. Gooding-Williams, ed., Reading Rodney King, Read-
ing Urban Uprising, New York, Routledge, 1993; M.
Harrington, Socialism: Past and Future, Pluto Press,
London, 1993; Justice For All, Straight Talk About the
Real Issues, pamphlet, 1996; B. Herbert, ʻOne in Fourʼ,
New York Times, 16 December 1996, p. 25; Cockburn,
ʻThe Kevorkian in the White Houseʼ, p. 9; Z. Eisenstein,
The Color of Gender, University of California Press,
 Berkeley, 1994, p. 183; M. Parenti, Democracy for The
Few, St Martinʼs Press, New York, 1995, p. 27.
24. T. Weiner, ʻClinton as a Military Leader: Tough On-the-
job Trainingʼ, New York Times, 28 October 1996, p. 1;
The Nation, editorial, 8 April 1996, p. 7.
25. New York Times, ʻThe Secret Attack on Have-Notsʼ,
editorial, 20 October 1996, p. 24.
26. C. Buci-Glucksmann, ʻState, Transition and Passive
Revolutionʼ, in C. Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist
Theory, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1979, pp.
216–17, 224; C. Mouffe, ʻHegemony and Ideology in
Gramsciʼ, in Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theo-
ry, p. 182; E. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist
Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism, Verso, London,
1977, p. 161; A.M. Smith, ʻWhy Did Armey Apologize?
Hegemony, Homophobia and the Religious Rightʼ, in A.
Ansell, ed., Discourses of Divisiveness: The Agenda of
the Conservative Movement, Westview Press, New York,
forthcoming.
27. S. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and
the Crisis of the Left, Verso, London, 1988.
28. Buci-Glucksmann, ʻState, Transition and Passive Revo-
lutionʼ, pp. 228–9; Mouffe, ʻHegemony and Ideology in
Gramsciʼ, pp. 182–3.
29. E. Laclau, ʻPower and Representationʼ, in E. Laclau,
Emancipation(s), Verso, London, 1996, p. 99.
30. Ibid., p. 100; C. Mouffe, The Return of the Political,
Verso, London, 1993, pp. 4, 6.
31. E. Laclau, ʻCommunity and Its Paradoxesʼ, in Laclau,
Emancipation(s), pp. 120–21.
32. With voting participation rates of about 45 per cent in
non-presidential elections, and between 48.8 per cent
(1996) and 55.2 per cent (1992) in presidential elec-
tions, the USA is the least participatory democracy in the
world. Steinem notes that 70–80 per cent of the members
of right-wing extremist groups cast ballots in every elec-
tion, and that American voters routinely make up their
minds based on their vague perceptions of a candidateʼs
image rather than accurate knowledge about his or her
actual positions. Fewer than 10 per cent of the voters in
1994 had even heard of Gingrichʼs extremist Contract
With America, and fewer than 1 per cent could identify
one of its goals (Steinem, ʻVoting as Rebellionʼ, p. 56).
In the 1994 election, there was a sharp decline in the
turnout of low-income voters. Sixty per cent of Ameri-
can voters with incomes of more than $50,000 went to
the polls, an increase of almost one percentage point
from the turnout in 1990. For voters with incomes under
$5,000, the turnout was only 19.9 per cent, down from
32.2 per cent. The decrease in turn-out of voters with
incomes between $5,000 and $10,000 was from 30.9 per
cent in 1990 to 23.3 per cent in 1994. The proportion of
voters from the highest income groups as compared to
the total voting population rose from 18 per cent in 1990
to 23.4 per cent in 1994. Turnout rates for the eligible
electorate as a whole in congressional elections that do
not include a presidential race are relatively stable – 46
per cent in 1986, 45 per cent in 1990 and 44.6 per cent in
1994. It is only in the distribution of voters according to
income that sharp transitions in turnout are taking place.
According to Gans of the Committee for the Study of
the American Electorate, the data suggests that upper-
income voters ʻsaw an opportunity for the Republicans
to get inʼ and responded (ʻLow-Income Votersʼ Turnout
Fell in 1994, Census Reportsʼ, New York Times, 11 June
1995, p. 22). Only 27 per cent of eligible voters with
incomes less than $15,000 voted in 1994 (A. Keyssar,
ʻKeep Out the Voteʼ, The Nation, 11 November 1996,
p. 6). In 1992, 54 per cent of participating voters were
women, as opposed to 51 per cent in 1994 (R. Toner,
ʻParties Pressing to Raise Turnout as Election Nearsʼ,
New York Times, 27 October 1996, p. 28). The voter
turnout in 1996, 48.8 per cent, was the lowest since
1924. Analysts are divided as to whether Clintonʼs com-
manding lead over Dole or the nature of the campaign
itself is to blame for voter apathy.
33. Steinem, ʻVoting as Rebellionʼ, pp. 58–61.
34. R. Coniff, ʻNo More Angry Feministsʼ, The Progressive,
October 1996, p. 23.
35. New York Times/CBS News, ʻTrial Heats Throughout
the Campaignʼ, New York Times, 4 November 1996,
p. B8.
36. D. Corn, ʻThe Fix Ainʼt Inʼ, The Nation, 7 October 1996,
p. 5.
37. ʻGrapes of Wrathʼ, editorial, The Nation, 26 August–2
September 1996, p. 3; Cockburn, ʻDonʼt be Fooled
Againʼ, p. 19.
38. C. Hitchens, ʻThe Greater Evilʼ, The Nation, 18 Novem-
ber 1996, p. 8.
39. R. Borosage, ʻToward Democratic Renewalʼ, The Na-
tion, 9–16 September 1996, p. 20.
40. Corn, ʻWhatʼs Left in the Party?ʼ p. 20.
41. Pollitt, ʻWe Were Wrongʼ, p. 9.
42. M. Burk and H. Hartmann, ʻBeyond the Gender Gapʼ,
The Nation, 10 June 1996, p. 20.
43. Z. Eisenstein, ʻTransnationalismʼs New Politics: Re-
structuring Work, Family and Stateʼ, work in progress.
44. M. Piper, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Ado-
lescent Girls, Putnam, New York, 1993.
45. A. Miller and J. Biden, ʻThe National Entertainment
Stateʼ, The Nation, 3 June 1996, pp. 10–14.
46. Z. Eisenstein, Hatreds, Routledge, New York, 1996.
47. N. Wolf, Fire With Fire, Random House, New York,
1993.
48. K. Pollitt, ʻThe Strange Death of Liberal Americaʼ, The
Nation, 26 August–2 September 1996, p. 9.
49. C. Paglia, Sexual Personae, Yale University Press, New
Haven CT, 1990; C. Paglia, Sex, Art and American Cul-
ture, Vintage, New York, 1992; C. Paglia, Vamps and
Tramps, Vintage, New York, 1994; C. Hoff Sommers,
Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed
Women, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1994; K. Roiphe,
The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism, Little,
Brown, Boston MA, 1993.
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 35
Thinking naturally
John O’Neill
The richness of the debates about the environment
has its source not just in the importance of the issue,
and the significance for the future of radical politics
of dialogues between socialists and greens, but also in
the fact that it lies at a point of convergence between
a number of other arguments: between realism and
constructivism, Enlightenment and its critics, human-
ism and anti-humanism; on the relation of economy,
culture and nature; on the future direction of feminist
thought and action. This richness is represented in Tim
Haywardʼs and Kate Soperʼs recent books.* Both are
important contributions. Both are likely to have a wide
readership and a large influence on current debates in
environmental politics. Both certainly deserve to do
so. They combine intellectual clarity and rigour with
political commitment and purpose. The arguments
amongst socialists and greens about the political and
social implications of our current environmental crisis
will be the richer for them.
Kate Soperʼs What is Nature? is engaged in a
project of reconciliation between two conflicting per-
spectives on nature to be found in social theory. On
the one side stand broadly ʻnaturalistʼ or ʻrealistʼ
approaches which take the concept of nature to refer
to a concept-independent reality – a natural world
that has been the object of human exploitation and
destruction, and which we have good reason to protect
from further spoliation. On the other side stand post-
modernist and post-structuralist approaches that are
standardly anti-realist and relativist in orientation,
and that focus upon the ways in which different con-
ceptions of ʻnatureʼ are culturally constructed and
employed to legitimate a variety of social and sexual
hierarchies and cultural norms. As Soper notes in
outlining these conflicting perspectives, they do not
map directly onto two theoretically and politically
self-contained oppositional blocs. Green, Marxist and
feminist positions exist which both reject the anti-
*
Tim Hayward, Ecological Thought, Polity Press, Cambridge,
1995; Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the
Non-Human, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995.
36 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
realism of postmodernism and accept the significance
of the ways in which the concept of ʻnatureʼ has been
used for ideological purpose.
Soperʼs own position occupies that political space.
Her strategy is to carve out more clearly this posi-
tion between the ʻnature-endorsingʼ perspectives of
naturalists and the ʻnature-scepticalʼ perspectives of
constructivists, by exploiting what are taken to be the
strengths in one position to highlight the weaknesses
in the other. In general, against the postmodernist
focus on cultural construction of nature, she insists
upon the importance of recognizing the existence
of a discourse-independent natural world on which
humans have real impacts that have to be addressed,
and defends critical realism as the necessary basis for
a coherent political project of social change. At the
same time, she criticizes the tendency of the nature-
endorsing positions for their insensitivity to the ways
in which the concept of nature has been historically
shaped for ideological effects, some of which have
implications for the environmental cause itself. The
argument is played out over a wide range of topics,
from the use of the concept of nature to exclude or
downgrade those associated with the natural – the
primitive, corporeal, feminine – through to examina-
tion of the ways in which the modern conservation
movement appeals to an ideological representation of
the ʻruralʼ. In each case the anti-naturalist tendencies
in constructivism are set against what is defensible in
the ecological naturalist and realist positions.
The discussion is always rich, and much of the
argument it will engender will concern the detail. To
take just one example, Soper makes a useful demarc-
ation between different levels of nature, pointing out
that the source of aesthetic pleasure and value is the
ʻsurfaceʼ lay nature of our everyday encounters and
not the ʻdeepʼ level of causal powers and processes to
which the scientific realist refers. The point is an impor-
tant one and is broadly right. However, the two-way
contrast between surface and deep tends to invoke a
picture of natural science as physics. There are more
layers to the nature we encounter than the division of
surface and deep might suggest: it is not clear to me
where the work of the biologist, geologist or ecologist
fits. To the extent that their work generates knowledge
of the deeper structures, it can transform our ways of
experiencing the surface order. For example, when I
walk in marshland with one of my botanist friends
I am constantly aware of how much more she sees,
and am rewarded by the details she can add to my
experience: what is initially aesthetically dull becomes
a more interesting place.
While part of the strength of the book lies in the
detail, its distinctiveness resides in the general project
of reconciling the different approaches. Judgements
about its success will tend to be different depending
upon oneʼs starting point. In a footnote to the first
chapter Soper notes that some on the realist side of
the divide in radical theory might find the argument
too even-handed: ʻThey will object that postmod-
ernist theory is the vehicle of reactionary forms of
neo-liberalism which have nothing to offer a green
movement committed to radical social changeʼ (p.13).
The passage captures my own initial reaction exactly,
and my worries were not entirely allayed by the rest of
the book. To some extent, I think postmodernism gets
an easy ride. My worry is not what is said but what
is left out – in particular, the degree to which some
forms of postmodernism have ended up as celebrations
of market capitalism and the modes of consumption it
fosters, which are incompatible with ecological impera-
tives. This said, Soperʼs openness to what is valuable
in the specific claims made about the cultural construc-
tion of ʻnatureʼ from within postmodern theory is to
be welcomed.
What is Nature? is a book I would recommend to
constructivist friends and colleagues who would be
less inclined to listen to realists like myself because
we are less inclined to listen to them. It conveys the
strong sense of having seriously considered what both
sides have to say. Relatedly, while I think there is
nothing in realism that rules out an acknowledgement
of the ways in which the concept of nature has been
historically employed for ideological functions, there
has been a fault of omission from within the realist
framework which Soper rightly identifies. I suspect
that part of the reason for this is that the argument
between realists and constructivists is to some extent
a sublimated version of an old argument about the
relative significance of political economy and culture
in understanding the forms of social oppression and
ecological crisis that beset us. While there is no reason
why one shouldnʼt be an ontological realist, and hold
that the main determinants of social life are cultural
rather than economic, it is the case that those who are
realist tend to hold on to materialist explanations of
social life, which constructivists tend to reject. Now
while I would be in the same camp both in respect
of realism against constructivism, and the emphasis
on the explanatory importance of the material and
economic against the cultural turn in much recent
social and political theory, there is a need for more
clarity in separating out the different components of
the argument.
Ecological humanism
In the terms that Soper uses, Tim Haywardʼs Eco-
logical Thought belongs in the main within the realist
camp. However, it also illustrates the complexities in
the possible positions that can be taken, and the book
occupies a portion of the intellectual and political
space between nature-endorsing and nature-sceptical
positions. Whilst realist, and conscious of the very sub-
stantial damage done to the environment, normatively
it develops a sophisticated anthropocentric approach
to the natural world. The book defends an ecological
humanism according to which the full development of
the human good is bound up with the good of non-
human nature. Our environmental crisis requires not
the rejection of humanism for an ecocentric position,
but rather a rejection of the impoverished Promethean
forms that humanism has taken. Haywardʼs ecological
humanism attempts to defend the position that humans
are at once natural and cultural beings. Haywardʼs
book is also in many ways an exercise in reconcil-
iation. It aims to show that the defensible core of
the radical ecological critique of modern societies
can be stated without abandoning the emancipatory
values of the Enlightenment. The proper response to
tensions within the Enlightenment project highlighted
by the environmental crisis is not to give up on it,
but to renew it. In the end the radical ecological
critiques of Enlightenment themselves depend upon
the emancipatory values of the Enlightenment. The
defence of that thesis calls upon and contributes to
recent work within the Frankfurt tradition, especially
by Benhabib and Habermas. In developing the theme,
the book also provides a clear and accessible overview
of most of the major recent currents in ecological
ethics, economics and politics. To the student and the
general reader it will prove an invaluable introduction
to recent ecological thought.
The enterprise in which Hayward is engaged is to
be welcomed against recent anti-Enlightenment trends
in social theory. One of the virtues of his book is
that it deals with the Enlightenment in its historic
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 37
complexity, and not as a slogan on which a variety
of either banal or implausible-looking claims are set
up for praise or condemnation. Consider, for example,
the question that has long been at the centre of much
radical social theory: whether the language of rights
is the appropriate discourse in which to express the
emancipatory aims of radical politics. Hayward claims
that the language of rights is one part of the Enlight-
enment legacy which we can and ought to retain. We
ought to retain ʻrightsʼ because they secure protec-
tion of individuals from abuse – protection that will
always be necessary, in so far as the circumstances
of justice cannot be overcome. We can hold on to
the rights discourse since, while their specific liberal
and individualist form may be open to criticism, it
is possible to defend a conception of rights which
recognizes with socialist, feminist and communitarian
critics that we are embodied beings constituted by
relationships to other persons and ecological condi-
tions. However, I remain unconvinced that these kinds
of move do justice to the traditional radical worries
about the very use of rights language to express basic
ethical and political concerns. While the significance
of the content of the rights claims can be accepted
– they are used, as Hayward notes, to formulate basic
requirements of justice – there remain real issues about
the normative adequacy of the language employed to
express them. While I think the issue is still open,
there is a thinness and abstractness to rights discourse
and an implicit possessive individualism which lend
weight to the traditional radical scepticism.
Where, however, I have the greatest problems with
Haywardʼs position is just where it most explicitly
and self-consciously converges with Soperʼs – that
is, in their common criticism of naturalism about the
human good. Both Hayward and Soper reject the kind
of naturalism defended, for example, by Ted Benton.
This insists upon an account of the specific species
powers and needs of humans as natural beings that will
allow us both to criticize various social practices and
structures as incompatible with a flourishing human
life, and to recognize that other animals have their
own essential species powers and needs, enabling us
to criticize conditions and modes of life imposed upon
them. Hayward argues against such naturalism that its
reproach to non-naturalist theories of human nature
– namely, that they lack a determinate characterization
of human nature which would provide ʻa normative
standpoint to criticize late capitalist society and envis-
age a preferable futureʼ – could be turned against
naturalism itself: it fails to provide any clearer guid-
ance for social critique (p.82). The problem is taken
38 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
to be particularly acute given the additional claim that
human powers and needs have developed in the course
of human history. Soper concurs with Haywardʼs criti-
cism of naturalism. To it she adds an additional point.
Not only can we not expect a naturalistic theory of
the human good to provide a determinate answer to
the question of what the good life should be. Given
our ecological constraints, such an answer is not even
helpful to an ecological politics: ʻ“Flourishing” is what
we ought to be re-thinking in the light of current and
future resources; it is not an a priori given of human
nature whose “true” needs nature can be expected to
fulfilʼ (p.168).
A flourishing life
Both Haywardʼs and Soperʼs criticisms point to a real
difficulty with any universalist conception of human
flourishing of the kind offered by the naturalist – that
it has to steer a course between vacuity on the one
hand, and an implausibly narrow specification of
flourishing on the other. Yet that is a difficulty, not
an impossibility: a course can be steered. The objec-
tions of Hayward and Soper play on an implausibly
overdeterministic account of what a naturalistic theory
of human flourishing has to deliver in order to avoid
vacuity: they assume that a naturalistic account of
human flourishing must provide ʻdeterminateʼ answers
to the nature of particular social forms and provi-
sions. However, no account of our human powers and
needs could determine an answer to the details of a
flourishing life. As Martha Nussbaum has noted, any
defensible theory of the human good should be thick,
but ʻvague in a good senseʼ: it will allow that there
are a variety of different specifications of ways in
which humans can lead a flourishing life.1 However,
an account of the powers, capacities and needs that
make us the kind of being we are does delimit the
target of what a flourishing life can be. As such
it still has real work to do. For example, to take a
standard (and I think true) claim found in naturalistic
theories of the human good dating back to Aristotle, as
humans we are beings that need intimate relations to
particular others. That claim does not determine some
particular form such relations have to take: it allows of
variability. The relations can take a variety of specific
forms in different social and cultural settings. As such
it might provide one part of what Michael Sandel calls
a substantive justification of homosexual relations,
which appeals not just to the value of autonomy, but
to the specific goods and virtues of intimate relations
that homosexual unions can realize, in contrast to
a liberal-voluntarist justification appealing solely to
free choice.2
At the same time, the existence of a variety of
specific cultural forms in which intimate relations can
be realized does not entail that the account has no
negative work to do. If we have a society like our own,
in which those who are old and without wealth are
excluded from ties of affiliation with others, then there
is room for criticism from within a naturalist account
of the good. Naturalist accounts of our human powers
and predicaments have work to do of both a positive
and negative kind, without providing a ʻdeterminateʼ
answer to particular questions. Similarly, the indeter-
minacy of the kinds of historicized naturalismʼ3 that
are to be found in Hegel and Marx can be overplayed,
by assuming that a theory of the human good has the
job of providing ʻdeterminateʼ specification of the
human good. There is a danger in any historicized
naturalism of setting history against biology, and
seeing our powers as completely open, while ignoring
those features of our nature as biological beings that
are fixed and which put real limits on what counts
as the development of our human powers. This said,
it might be, as Marx and Hegel have it, that specific
powers have developed through human history which
entail new needs. For example, the development of
certain kinds of power for autonomous choice might
be peculiarly modern. Given the beings we are with
the history we have, these become necessary for our
flourishing; and where the possibility for their exercise
is denied, there are needs, and not just wants, that are
being denied. This is compatible with the claim that
there are a variety of ways in which the powers of
autonomous choice can be realized.
It is quite consistent with a naturalist theory to
ask what modes of realizing a flourishing human life
are compatible with real ecological constraints. In
particular, one needs to question theories of the human
good that tie it too closely to the high consumption
of material goods. The claim that specific modes
of flourishing might need reconsideration should be
kept distinct, however, from the claim that we can
and should redefine the concept of flourishing itself,
to fit whatever ecological constraints there happen
to be. Taken in the second sense, Soperʼs claim that
ʻ“flourishing” is what we ought to be re-thinking in
the light of current and future resources … not an a
priori given of human natureʼ, gets things the wrong
way round. If we are considering our relations to
future generations, it would be an ethical mistake to
think that the concept of flourishing can be redefined
to fit any constraints: it is because we know now
that there are givens of human nature – discovered
empirically and not a priori – that we have room to
criticize the consequences of current social arrange-
ments. If we could not say now that a flourishing
human life requires clean air and water, topsoil for
sustainable agriculture, conditions for literacy and
human companionship, and so on, we would have
no place from which to criticize the unsustainable
nature of capitalist society. Humans may be able to
survive amidst poison and natural squalor – witness
life in the worst shanty towns in the Third World.
They cannot flourish in such conditions. We need an
account of flourishing, grounded in our nature, that
is able to transcend our immediate place and time, if
we are to make sense of our specific obligations to
future humans and distant strangers. It is the forms a
flourishing life can take that need rethinking, not the
concept of human flourishing as such.
None of this is to claim that there isnʼt a danger in
naturalist theories. Consider Kant, a major source of
the historicized naturalism of Hegel and Marx: ʻthe
history of the human race as a whole can be regarded
as the realisation of the hidden plan of nature to bring
about an internally … perfect political constitution as
the only possible state within which all the natural
capacities of mankind can be developed completely.ʼ4
The picture of history as a hidden plan bringing the
full realization of human development can and has
served as a justification for the colonization of ʻpre-
historical peoplesʼ; and the story of inevitable human
progress certainly looks much less plausible today
than it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
However, the aims of the Enlightenment as a social
ideal can be divorced from such progressivism and the
generalization of local conceptions of the good. As
Hayward notes, it is from within its own emancipatory
values that much of the criticism of these features of
the Enlightenment can be made.
Notes
1. M. Nussbaum, ʻAristotelian Social Democracyʼ, in R.
Douglass, G. Mara and H. Richardson, eds, Liberalism
and the Good, Routledge, London, 1990, p. 217 and
passim.
2. M. Sandel, ʻMoral Argument and Liberal Toleration:
Abortion and Homosexualityʼ, in G. Dworkin, ed., Mo-
rality, Harm and the Law, Westview Press, Boulder CO,
1994.
3. I borrow the phrase from Allan Wood, Hegelʼs Ethical
Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990,
pp. 33–5.
4. Kant, ʻIdea for a Universal History with a Cosmopoli-
tan Purposeʼ, in Political Writings, edited by H. Reiss,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977, p. 50.
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 39
40 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
REVIEWS
A political philosophy that is honest,
decent and true
Michael J. Sandel, Democracyʼs Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1996. xi + 417 pp., £16.50 hb., 0 674 19744 5.
Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society, translated by Naomi Goldblum, Harvard University Press, Cambridge
MA and London, 1996. xi + 304 pp., £21.95 hb., 0 674 19436 5.
In Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) Michael
Sandel offered an influential critique of John Rawlsʼs
A Theory of Justice which constitutes one strand in
the ʻcommunitarianʼ challenge to contemporary Anglo-
phone philosophical liberalism. Notoriously, Sandel,
along with other communitarians, was charged with
a failure to spell out the political implications of his
philosophical views, or of doing no more than gestur-
ing towards an illiberal politics of the common good
which ignored the painfully acquired rights of individ-
ual citizens. In his new book Sandel recapitulates his
critique of Rawlsianism. But he does so by construing
a political philosophy as the public philosophy implicit
in a set of institutions and practices. His concern is
to expose the failure of the liberal public philosophy
which animates contemporary American political life,
and to contrast this inadequate philosophy with that
earlier, authentically republican public philosophy
which liberalism has supplanted.
Sandelʼs previous critique was largely an ʻinternalʼ
one. It sought to show that Rawlsʼs philosophical
project failed on its own assumptions and ideals. Thus,
for instance, a Rawlsian self, defined as one which
could exist prior to its ends, could not choose the
terms of its political relations with others in its society.
Such a self could not, properly speaking, be said to
choose anything. Or, again, Rawlsʼs difference princi-
ple required that everyone regard the natural assets of
each as communally owned. But the principle operated
within a context that not only lacked any sense of
community, but precluded its very possibility.
The new critique is more of an ʻexternalʼ one. It
seeks to expose the gap between theory and reality,
between that which a given political philosophy prom-
ises and the reality which its instantiation in a particu-
lar society delivers. Sandel starts from the American
publicʼs current discontent – with its lack of political
control over its life and with the erosion of moral
community. He ascribes this discontent to the failure
of the liberal political philosophy by which America
presently lives. That philosophyʼs defining – and rec-
ognizably Rawlsian – ideal is that government should
be neutral between the lives that its citizens endorse,
thereby giving proper (and equal) respect to these
citizensʼ free choices, as autonomous ʻunencumberedʼ
selves. ʻUnencumberedʼ here means without communal
or moral ties which have not been chosen.
This understanding of liberalism is familiar from
Sandelʼs earlier work. But he now seeks to show how
such a liberalism became Americaʼs public philosophy.
He does so by tracing its increasing influence in
the judgements of the Supreme Court on religious
liberty, freedom of speech, privacy and family. At
the same time he strives to retrieve an earlier public
philosophy, that of the republican tradition, which
emphasizes the interdependence of individual liberty
and self-government, the need to cultivate the virtues
of citizenship, a concern with the common good, and
the importance of acknowledging the ties and loyalties
– the ʻencumbrancesʼ – of selves. In the part on ʻThe
Political Economy of Citizenshipʼ, Sandel displays the
fundamental shift in discussion of wage labour, employ-
eesʼ rights, manufacturing, and consumersʼ interests,
from arguments couched in terms of the civic good
and the dangers of concentrated economic power for
self-government, to ones that speak only of prosperity
and the fair distribution of its fruits. The shift is from
civic republicanism to liberal Keynesianism.
The discussion is masterful. Sandel yokes his
defence of the main philosophical claim to a seem-
ingly effortless command, and clear presentation, of
the broad historical developments he thinks significant.
Moreover, his conclusion could not be clearer or more
unequivocal. The liberal public philosophy is deeply
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 41
flawed and inadequate to the tasks of contemporary
American political life. The republican tradition must
be restored. However, as he recognizes towards the
end of his book, the doubts about his claim will be
both practical and moral. Whilst acknowledging these,
Sandelʼs response to them is not entirely convincing.
The moral concern is that the republican tradition
could be revived only at the cost of a loss of individual
freedom and tolerance of difference. Republicanism
sees a place for ʻsoulcraft in statecraftʼ, to use Sandelʼs
suggestive language – that is, according the government
the formative role of encouraging certain civic virtues
and moulding people to the living of certain kinds of
lives. He is certainly right to insist – and the point is
an important, often neglected one – that such a politics
inclines to coercion not on account of its formative
ambition alone, but because of an assumption that the
common good is single and agreed. But then the clear
onus is on Sandel to specify the range of virtues and
kinds of worthwhile lives that a republican government
should play its part in forming. Instead, he merely
repeats that the liberal account of free citizenship is
empty and lists the ʻgropings, however partial and
inchoateʼ in recent American political debate which
gesture towards some revival of republican themes. It
is all rather insubstantial and unpersuasive.
The practical concern is how to revive a republican
tradition of confident moral community and robust
self-government in the modern world, marked by a
hugely increased scale and complexity of interaction at
all levels. Here Sandelʼs reply seems even more vague
and thin. He cautions against finding the appropri-
ate basis for a new democratic politics in either the
national or global community. He is right to insist that
a globalized economy and politics is eroding the role
of the nation-state at the same time as it is failing
to realize a plausible cosmopolitan citizenship. But
then the game might seem to be up for any kind of
realistic politics of morally assured, popular self-rule.
Sandel talks of the possibility of a revitalized civic
life in the more particular communities in which we
live, and of the increased importance of the ʻpolitics
of neighbourhoodʼ. But this sounds and looks like a
retreat from – not a rediscovery of – real politics.
Insisting on community and urban projects, when even
the most powerful of the worldʼs states must submit to
the imperatives of a world economy, does appear to be
a case of urging the tending of oneʼs own back garden
whilst the new enlarged highway is built out front.
Notwithstanding these difficulties, there is a further
worry about Sandelʼs project. This is that he offers no
account of why the republican tradition was supplanted
42 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
by the liberal public philosophy. It surely cannot be
merely an unhappy accidental outcome of the vagar-
ies of Supreme Court jurisprudential reasoning. One
would like to think that the Courtʼs judges have given
expression, in their own way and in their own time, to
ideas and ideals, however partial and inchoate, forming
in the American public mind. It is tempting to see
the republican public philosophy as appropriate to the
formation of a young republicʼs social, economic and
political institutions, when such a society was striving
to give itself a clear, assured identity robust enough to
cope with the various interests and competing forces it
recognized as inhabiting its boundaries. Liberalism is
the philosophy of a polity that has learned to live with
difference, that is confident of its ability to tolerate
the varied lifestyles which are the inevitable outcome
of an individual freedom it has also learned to value
and encourage. This may be too simple a story. But it
would suggest that there is no going back (and Sandel
acknowledges the dangerous lure of nostalgic republic-
anism). It might also suggest that the way forward is
unattractive, as liberalismʼs very success has destroyed
the conditions for a revival of a successful democratic
public philosophy.
Whatever is the case, Sandel needs to tell some sort
of plausible story as to why (and not just how) America
has travelled from the civic to the merely ʻproceduralʼ
republic. He needs to do so not least because other-
wise Americaʼs search for a public philosophy will
be aimless and fuel the very discontent with politics
his book seeks to address. He also needs to do so
because otherwise communitarism will continue to be
stigmatized – not unfairly – as a political philosophy
of protest, parasitic on the limits of liberalism, and not
itself a constructive vision of an alternative politics.
Avishai Margalitʼs The Decent Society also starts
from a worry with Rawlsianism: is justice enough?
At the outset of A Theory Rawls famously described
justice as the first virtue of society and left his readers
with the impression that it is probably the only virtue.
Critics have wondered whether a society that is merely
just need be ideal. Margalit suggests one possible
alternative measure of evaluation: a societyʼs decency.
Decency is characterized as not humiliating people,
and humiliating people is defined as excluding them
from the ʻfamily of manʼ. The defence of this claim is
made by a philosopher who is undoubtedly decent, in
every sense of that word. There are many worthwhile
discussions of important distinctions – between self-
respect and self-esteem, dishonouring and humiliating,
decent and civilized, and so on. There is much to
commend in Margalitʼs treatment of decency in the
provision of welfare, punishment, employment, protec-
tion of privacy, and multiculturalism. One suspects
that there are societal virtues, beyond justice, which
need to be assured by a societyʼs institutions, and that
something very like decency is certainly one of them,
if not the main one.
Yet if Margalitʼs account is largely unexceptionable,
this may be due to the fact that there just is little to
which exception can be taken. It really is hard to disa-
gree with sentiments like, ʻA decent society is … one
that provides all its members with the opportunity to
find at least one reasonably meaningful occupationʼ (p.
254); or, ʻA decent society cares about the dignity of
its prisonersʼ (p. 270). Much of the discussion is at this
Collective intentions
John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, Allen Lane, London, 1995. xiii + 241 pp., £20.00 hb,
0 713 99112 7.
If, as John Searle remarks, ʻWe live in exactly one
world, not two or three or seventeenʼ, and if the basic
features of that world are physical in nature, how can
it also contain, as it seems to do, objective phenom-
ena that are not obviously physical? Searleʼs previous
work attempted to answer this question in respect of
consciousness, intentionality and language. Here he
turns his attention to the existence of institutional facts
such as money, property, governments and marriage.
Institutional facts are characterized as those which are
dependent on human agreement for their existence, in
contrast to ʻbrute factsʼ such as Mount Everest having
snow and ice near its summit, or hydrogen atoms
having one electron, which are true independently of
what anyone says or thinks.
Searleʼs basic theory of institutional facts is sum-
marized in the formula ʻX counts as Y in context Cʼ,
where X may be some physical object such as a lump
of gold or a piece of printed paper, Y its assigned
functional status as money, and C will presumably
restrict how it is produced and how and where it can
be used. In general, the assigned status of such an
object cannot be explained entirely in terms of its
physical properties alone. In addition to the assign-
ment of status, the creation of institutional facts also
requires collective intentionality and constitutive rules.
The latter are the kind of rules that define a particular
practice, rather than merely regulating it, such as those
of chess. Collective intentionality entails that people
kind of level, and unfortunately oneʼs confidence in the
authorʼs understanding of the real world of politics is
not helped by finding the ʻBogsideʼ transported from
Derry to Belfast (p. 133).
Both Sandel and Margalit are writing in the shadow
of Rawls and both are acutely conscious of the need to
make political philosophy politically adequate – that
is, to construct a public philosophy that can, as well
as should, animate the institutions of actually exist-
ing societies. In their own ways each reveals how far
English-speaking political philosophy has travelled
since the publication of A Theory, and yet how much
road there still is to cover.
David Archard
intend and do things collectively, and understand what
they are doing in that way: it cannot be reduced to a
mere aggregate of individual actions and intentions.
The basic theory of the creation and structure of
institutional facts is set out in the initial chapters, and
largely illustrated by the example of money. Searle
next examines the dependence of institutional facts
on language, and completes his preliminary account
of institutional ontology. This is then elaborated to
describe the logical structure, interdependence, hier-
archy and maintenance of a much wider range of
institutional facts, including politics, power, property,
marriage and war. Searle next deals with the problem
of how, if institutions are structured by constitutive
rules, and if the social agents who participate in
institutions are unaware of or mistaken about those
rules, the latter can have any causal role to play in the
behaviour of those agents. He rejects the suggestion
that agents somehow follow the rules unconsciously,
and argues instead that in learning to operate in social
institutions (whether playing baseball or using a bank
account) agents acquire dispositions or background
abilities that are sensitive to the rules, enabling them to
operate skilfully within institutions without conscious
(or unconscious) intentions to follow rules.
Searleʼs analysis of institutional facts is clear and
meticulous throughout and supported by clear argu-
ments and examples. But the arguments and examples
are very much of his own choosing, and little attempt
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 43
is made to relate them to wider arguments about
method and ontology in the social sciences. This is
odd, since the claim that institutional facts rest on
some form of collective acceptance is hardly new,
and Searleʼs arguments about background capacities
are, as he acknowledges, clearly related to well-known
work in the hermeneutic tradition. The overall impres-
sion given is that the enterprise is one of tidying up
the ontological details of Searleʼs own metaphysical
world-view and assuming that their relevance will be
apparent to others. The assumption of shared wonder
at metaphysical mystery is no doubt justified in respect
of those problems about mind, body and language
which have been the subjects of Searleʼs previous
work. Yet if those problems are set aside, much of
the metaphysical mystery he perceives in the social
world will, I think, have been discarded with them.
The real mysteries of the social world have to do with
why we have the kinds of social arrangements we do
rather than others we can imagine – what possibilities
are open to us for change and what possibilities are
denied us. Perhaps Searleʼs model of institutional facts
can throw some light on these problems, but he makes
no attempt to do so.
There are, nevertheless, some points at which Searle
does touch on substantive disagreements within the
social sciences, and these are indicative of serious
difficulties with his analysis. Searleʼs claim that all
institutional facts count as such only if they have a
functional status assigned them by collective intention-
ality – in other words, that money, power, property,
war and so on only count as such if people con-
tinuously believe and accept that that is what they are
– leads him to argue that the armed
might of the state in democratic
societies ʻdepends on the accept-
ance of constitutive rules much
more than converselyʼ (p. 90). We
cannot assume, Searle thinks, that
a system of acceptance is backed
by a system of force, since the
system of force presupposes other
systems of collectively accepted
status functions. This is chicken-
and-egg stuff. What is required
for people to cease to recognize
or accept a system of status func-
tions such as the state, the army
or the police is that they can see
some alternative to it, and can see
themselves as having the collective
power to resist and overcome the
system of force with which they are
44 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
confronted. In the absence of such realistic alterna-
tives, the state is no more dependent on acceptance
than are the laws of thermodynamics. Likewise with
money: in a trivial sense it is true that for money to
be money people must believe that it is; but if most
people cannot realistically hope to bring it about that
money is no longer regarded as such, it is nonsense
to suggest that the status or value of money rests on
some form of common intention or acceptance on
their part. Moreover, even for governments, bankers
and currency speculators who have some degree of
control over the value of money, there are objective
constraints on their control over it. No one has the
power to determine for any significant length of time
that a hard currency has whatever value they see fit to
give it; and no one, collectively or individually, has the
power intentionally to bring about an enduring state
of affairs in which money does not exist. The crucial
questions for social scientists and political agents alike
are about how alternatives to existing institutions can
occur and how they can be recognized or foreseen; and
it is difficult to see how Searleʼs model provides even
the beginnings of answers to such questions.
It is a fundamental assumption of Searleʼs analysis
of institutional facts that there is a real distinction
between the class of institutional facts, which are
dependent on human thought and language, and the
unproblematic class of brute facts which are indepen-
dent of what anyone thinks or says. This distinction is
threatened, according to Searle, by contemporary rela-
tivist arguments which deny the existence of a reality
independent of human representations. In response,
Searle sets out and defends what he describes as ʻexter-
nal realismʼ (ʻthe world … exists independently of our
representations of itʼ [p. 150]) and a version of the
correspondence theory of truth. Defending the valid-
ity of the distinction between institutional and brute
facts is the only substantive reason given for includ-
ing these chapters, and their arguments add nothing
of substance to the real subject of the book. (Searle
does also say that he has presupposed throughout that
in general our statements, when true, correspond to
the facts: one shudders at the thought that everyone
who presupposes this should feel obliged to include a
treatise on the correspondence theory of truth in their
books.) The anti-realist claims opposed by Searle are
familiar enough, but as with the earlier chapters, and
beyond the odd fleeting reference to Goodman, Rorty
and Derrida, there is little sense of engagement with
real opponents, other than Putnam – himself a kind
of realist – who, in Searleʼs view, makes the mistake
of treating realism as an epistemological thesis, rather
than an ontological one.
Kevin Magill
Meandering in a
moral maze
John Keane, Reflections on Violence, Verso, London
and New York, 1996. 200 pp., £39.95 hb., £9.95 pb.,
1 85984 115 5 hb., 1 85984 979 2 pb.
We have lived through what John Keane reasonably
calls ʻa long century of violenceʼ, which, as far as
killing, cruelty and suffering are concerned, is by
no means over. Indeed, Keane cites estimates which
suggest that internal (un)civil wars are currently much
more widespread than they were, say, thirty years
ago. The post-Communist disintegration of Yugoslavia
has brought such conflicts into Europe on a scale of
destruction and brutality not seen here for nearly half
a century.
Yet political theory, as he points out, has been
oddly – indeed, scandalously – reluctant to investi-
gate violence, whether the concept or its nature and
causes. Academics have generally preferred to analyse
ʻtheories of justice, communitarianism or the history
of half-dead political languagesʼ (p. 6). If political
theory avoids the difficult and disturbing, it merely
confirms the popular judgement that it is an irrelevant
pursuit. What Adrian Mitchell once said about poetry
could all too easily be said about political theory
(not to mention a few other academic disciplines):
ʻMost people ignore most poetry, because/ Most poetry
ignores most people.ʼ
So all credit to John Keane for venturing onto this
treacherous terrain. And he is right to see that his own
cherished project of a ʻcivil societyʼ is imperilled if it
is continually threatened by a resurgence of violence,
or of the plurality of groups within civil society adopt-
ing violent means to conduct their disputes.
But his analysis of the problem is far from clear.
He is at great pains to dissociate himself from any-
thing ʻteleologicalʼ, like the idea of a gradual progress
towards civility involving a steady decline in levels
of violence and disorder. This he regards as a cosy
myth, which denies the uneven dialectic of civility
and aggression that is the real history of humanity.
Keane may well be right. But then we have to ask,
why does violence persist? Is it an ineradicable feature
of social life or of human nature, as some pessimistic
commentators suggest? For his part, Keane rejects any
ʻessentialistʼ thesis which proposes, à la Hobbes, that
human beings are incorrigibly egoistic and competitive.
Fine. But he doesnʼt get a lot further when it comes
to offering alternative explanations for the alarming
persistence of cruelty, aggression and violence.
There are, I think, reasons for this. The first is
that, in the best postmodern manner, Keane is all
too anxious to disown any kind of comprehensive or
fundamental explanation as being ʻessentialistʼ and
ʻclosedʼ. Otherwise, he would surely have paid some
attention to Freudʼs argument, in Civilization and its
Discontents, that civilized social life is based upon the
repression of basic urges – a repression that may, in
turn, generate tensions which sometimes explode into
violence. Or he might have considered a more limited
version of the same dichotomy which connects, say,
the violence associated with football matches with
the dreary, routinized, unfulfilling character of daily
working life.
Surprisingly, Keane pays little or no attention to
the mechanization of violence – a development which
allows not only those who instigate it, but even its
direct perpetrators, to remain at a distance from the
sufferings they cause. Studies of violent individuals
– murderers, torturers and sadists – cast little light
on the psychology of men like Adolf Eichmann, as
Hannah Arendt well understood, or on those who, in
Stanley Milgramʼs famous experiments, were willing
to obey orders (or even authoritative requests) to inflict
pain on their fellow human beings. No study of what
makes violence possible will get very far unless it
takes into account the structural factors which enable
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 45
individuals to evade both the actual consequences of
what they do, and any sense of responsibility for doing
it (ʻI was only obeying ordersʼ).
If Keaneʼs title – borrowed from Sorel – suggests
something a bit meandering, rather than a rigorously
pursued argument, that, regrettably, is not misleading.
There are odd hiatuses, and there are too many digres-
sions. We are a third of the way through the book (p.
65) before he turns to the definition of violence, and
the ensuing brief discussion is far from satisfactory.
Keane wants to hold on to the traditional concep-
tion of violence as ʻthe unwanted physical interfer-
ence by groups and/or individuals with the bodies
of othersʼ (p. 67). But while he dislikes attempts to
extend the meaning of the term, he does not discuss
the problem raised by his narrow definition. What
constitutes ʻphysical interferenceʼ? Are policies which
result in death by starvation or hypothermia examples
of such interference? If not, why not? And why are
ʻbodiesʼ the only object of violence? Modern methods
of torture, as employed by British forces in Northern
Ireland in the 1970s, may involve no direct physical
assault on their victims, yet can do terrible damage to
the mind and personality, as well as the body. If this is
not violence, then the adequacy of Keaneʼs definition
is called into question. Given the huge emotive power
of the word ʻviolenceʼ, these cannot be regarded as
merely semantic questions.
Nor, I think, does Keane do sufficient justice to
the pacifist case against all violence. Personally, I
The first Hegelian Marxist
Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism: A Critical Study, University of Illinois Press, Urbana
and Chicago, 1995. xviii + 311 pp., $49.95 hb., $15.95 pb., 0 252 02167 3 hb., 0 252 06503 4 pb.
Thanks to its impressive argumentation and wide scholar-
ship, this book brings to life a new and unexpected
Lenin, poles apart from both wooden ʻMarxism-Len-
inismʼ and dismissive Western scholarship. A fol-
lower of the Hegelian Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya,
Kevin Anderson gives us a sympathetic but critical
assessment of Leninʼs attempt to assimilate Hegelian
dialectics into revolutionary politics.
The starting point for Andersonʼs argument is
Leninʼs Notebooks on Hegel of 1914–15, a series
of abstracts, summaries and comments, mainly on
Hegelʼs Science of Logic. In spite of their fragmen-
tary and unfinished nature, these constitute Leninʼs
philosophical and methodological break with Second
International ʻorthodoxʼ Marxism, and, therefore, with
his own earlier views, as codified in his crude and
46 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
agree with him that there are occasions when recourse
to violence is justified as having less terrible conse-
quences than passive resistance. But the argument that
justifiable violence can breed unjustifiable violence
is not taken seriously enough. Keane slips too easily
into calling violence of which he approves ʻcounter-
violenceʼ or ʻcivil violenceʼ. But it is one thing to
regard violence as a sometimes regrettable necessity
and quite another to claim that the killing or injuring
of people can be dignified as ʻcivilʼ.
Keaneʼs Reflections, though manifestly serious and
enterprising, lack rigour and thoroughness, and the
book shows many signs of having been hastily com-
posed. A diatribe against nationalism, which he claims
has ʻa fanatical coreʼ (p. 126), is quite inadequate in
dealing with such a complex subject, and, significantly,
makes no mention of any of the British nationalisms.
Are Scottish nationalists really ʻdriven by the feeling
that all nations are caught up in the animal struggle for
survivalʼ (p. 127)? I think the question answers itself.
There are many unnecessarily long and convoluted
sentences – the section on the definition of violence
(pp. 65–7) is particularly bedevilled by them; and too
many throw-away asides and unexplained references.
What, for instance, is the ʻnear dominant Westphal-
ian model of interstate powerʼ which we suddenly
encounter on page 45? Or am I the only reader of
Radical Philosophy not to know?
Anthony Arblaster
dogmatic polemical piece of 1908, Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism. The Lenin who emerges from the
Notebooks – a Marxist fascinated with Hegelian logic
– eludes the usual distinction between ʻWesternʼ and
ʻEasternʼ (or Russian) Marxism.
Closely following Leninʼs extracts and comments,
Anderson persuasively shows how his attitude changes
with his reading of Hegel: from an initial ʻmaterial-
istʼ diffidence, to a growing interest in subjectivity
and self-movement, finally coming to the surprising
conclusion that ʻan intelligent (dialectical) idealism is
superior to a stupid (vulgar) materialismʼ. Even if he
did not take into account the plenitude of Hegelʼs dia-
lectic, the Lenin of the Notebooks can be considered
the first ʻHegelian Marxistʼ of the twentieth century,
and the first to emphasize the Hegelianism of Marxʼs
Capital: ʻIt is impossible fully to grasp Marxʼs Capital
and especially its first chapter, if you have not studied
through and understood the whole of Hegelʼs Logic.
Consequently, none of the Marxists for the past half
century have understood Marx!ʼ – a famous aphorism
with quite obvious ʻself-criticalʼ implications.
Leninʼs public writings on dialectics were much
less explicit than the Notebooks: shot through with
philosophical ambivalence (Raya Dunayevskayaʼs
expression), they refuse to choose between Hegel and
Plekhanov. The call, in 1922, for a ʻsystematic study
of Hegelian dialectics from a materialist standpointʼ is
the nearest Lenin came to a public expression of the
ideas advanced in the Notebooks. On the other hand,
the reissuing of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
in 1920, without a critical introduction, indicates the
extent of his ʻambivalenceʼ.
However, if one goes beyond Leninʼs strictly philo-
sophical statements, one will discover, according to
Anderson, that some of his most significant post-
1914 theoretical and political writings were variously
grounded in his Hegel Notebooks. His interest in
subjectivity and self-movement, as well as in the dia-
lectical transformation into opposites, contributed to
his understanding of national liberation movements
as new revolutionary subjects produced by imperial-
ism, and of grassroots spontaneous democracy (the
soviets) as the alternative to the centralized bureau-
cratic state.
Curiously enough, Anderson fails to mention a more
obvious example of the impact of the Hegel Notebooks
on Leninʼs dialectics of revolution: the ʻApril Thesesʼ
of 1917, where, for the first time, he called for the
transformation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution
into a socialist one. This major turn – a radical break
with the Russian Marxist tradition, common to Men-
sheviks and Bolsheviks – was only possible because
of Leninʼs emancipation, thanks to Hegel, from the
strait-jacket of Plekhanovite Marxism, with its rigid,
pre-dialectical notion of ʻstagesʼ prescribed by the
ʻlawsʼ of historical ʻevolutionʼ. The idea at the heart of
the ʻApril Thesesʼ of revolution as a dialectical process
owes much to the Notebooks.
The last section of the book deals with Leninʼs
Notebooks and Western Marxism – a category that
Anderson does not challenge, even though his data
show that the opposition between dialectical and
vulgar-materialist Marxism does not coincide with any
geographical distinction between ʻEastʼ and ʻWestʼ.
Leninʼs Notebooks were published in the USSR in
1929, but Soviet Marxism nearly buried them, canon-
izing Materialism and Empirio-Criticism instead.
While some Western Marxists, such as Lukács, Bloch,
Goldmann, Lefebvre, Marcuse and, above all, Dunay-
evskaya, showed interest in them, others (e.g. Colletti
and Althusser) either ignored or misinterpreted them,
from a materialist/positivist standpoint, hoping to drive
Hegelʼs shadow ʻback into the nightʼ (Althusser).
Henri Lefebvre is an interesting example: having
discovered Hegelʼs Science of Logic thanks to André
Breton – whose place in the history of Hegelian
Marxism deserves to be studied one day – he became
very much attracted by Leninʼs Notebooks, which
he translated into French (1938). However, as long
as he remained a member of the French Communist
Party, he tried to reconcile Leninʼs Hegelianism with
the mechanistic views of Materialism and Empirio-
Criticism. Only in 1959, after his expulsion from the
Party, did he dare to state that up to 1914 Lenin did
not understand dialectics.
Of all Western Marxists, only Dunayevskaya made
the Notebooks central to her overall theoretical project,
with an extensive – and increasingly critical – series
of writings, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Her Marxism
and Freedom (1958) is the first serious discussion
in English of the Notebooks, and the first to try to
relate them to Leninʼs views on imperialism, national
liberation, state and revolution. In Philosophy and
Revolution (1973) the issue is taken up again, but
this time emphasizing Leninʼs philosophical ambiva-
lence. Finally, in a new preface for this book (her
last writing), Dunayevskaya insisted on Leninʼs too
narrowly materialist reading of Hegel.
A similar conclusion is drawn by Anderson in
conclusion: while Leninʼs study of dialectics took
him well beyond the limits of Second International
materialism, in spite of occasional critiques of Engels
in the Notebooks, he still remained imprisoned within
the confines of Engelsian Marxism.
Michael Löwy
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 47
An existentialist Jew
Richard J. Bernstein: Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996. xv + 233 pp.,
£45.00 hb., £13.95 pb., 0 7456 1706 9 hb., 0 7456 1707 7 pb.
This is an extremely readable book which advances
a straightforward and ungainsayable thesis: Hannah
Arendtʼs concern with the Jewish question was central
to the development of her theories. It is thus an interpre-
tation of Arendt through the lens of her Jewish experi-
ence and has the freshness and vitality that Bernstein
claims to have felt when he read her from such a
perspective.
That said, there is the question of what precisely
this reading has to offer. I completely agree that
many interpretations of Arendt miss the mark precisely
because they fail to take account of her Jewish experi-
ence. For example, a way of beginning to understand
her distinction between the social and the political
is to read about her frustration with the Parisian
Jewish community in the 1930s, which persisted in
both renouncing political action and disassociating
itself from the growing émigré population, because
48 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
they feared that its unFrench manners and dress
would prompt xenophobia and jeopardize their social
standing. They saw only a combination of beggars,
left-wing troublemakers and backward peasants at a
time when they needed to build Jewish solidarity and
become ʻconscious pariahsʼ. But that is only part of
the story: Arendtʼs evaluation of political action is also
heavily informed by her particular reading of German
existentialism. According to this, human beings can
act in the political sphere, initiate new beginnings,
be together in all their plurality and hence be fully
human, while in the social sphere they merely behave
or conform. Of course, Bernstein knows this, but he
is not writing a book about Arendtʼs determination to
come to terms with being Jewish and the long history
of Jewish victimhood in Europe, without abandoning
her fundamental belief in responsibility and freedom
of action as the basic conditions of our humanity. If he
were, it would probably be a more difficult
volume. So is this a fair criticism, espe-
cially given that his study is the outcome
of an invitation to think about Judaism and
Jewishness?
Yes and no. Yes, because Bernstein
goes on to explain Arendtʼs commitment
to freedom as rooted in her reflections on
the concentration camps, which attempted
to eliminate plurality and action and to
destroy not just human bodies, but human
beings. This is undoubtedly one of Arendtʼs
crucial and original insights into the totali-
tarian machine, but I suspect she saw it
not just because she was concerned about
Jews, but because she was a Jew whose
existentialist orientation made her look in
a certain way. No, because again, that is a
different book. Yes, because of one of the
main sub-texts of the book: what does it
mean to be a secular Jew, one who affirms
their Jewishness but rejects Judaism, as
both Arendt and Bernstein do? Existen-
tialist concepts of being-in-the-world and
being-with-others might begin to provide an
answer: perhaps one is a Jew by consciously
affirming certain facts of birth and social
position. The category of ʻconscious pariahʼ
appealed not only to Arendtʼs Jewishness,
but to her existentialism. Yet Bernstein sidesteps all of
this, seeking something that almost looks like essen-
tialism. Arendt speaks of her Jewishness as a given for
which she can only be grateful, and Bernstein finds his
and her Jewishness in this gratitude ʻfor every thing
that isʼ, in her care for the world and the people in it.
But this is unpersuasive, for it equally characterizes
many non-Jewish people. Indeed, one can find in this
gratitude and love for the world something very akin
to what I would call a religious or spiritual attitude,
which is certainly not confined to Jews. I am not a Jew,
but, thinking about comparable questions of identity
without belief, I find a far more plausible answer in
terms of simply being a member of the family: a given
that you can walk away from or affirm in a variety of
ways. Membership is not constitutive of identity and
most of us belong to many such ʻfamiliesʼ. When that
Fiction as fiction
Maurice Blanchot, The Most High (Le Très-Haut), translated by Allan Stoekl, University of Nebraska Press,
Lincoln NE and London, 1996. xxxii + 254 pp., £32.95 hb., 0 8032 1240 2.
Blanchot the novelist has suffered at least partial
eclipse by Blanchot the theorist, so it is good to have
a new translation of his third novel Le Très-Haut
(1948). Translator Allan Stoekl makes it clear in his
introduction that this is a ʻdifficultʼ novel; the nature of
the difficulty is evidently not linguistic, but pertains to
establishing appropriate grounds for interpretation.
The story is easily summarized. Although it lacks
specific details of time and place, the book is in effect
a journal, written in the first person by Henri Sorge,
a minor bureaucrat who aspires to conform to the
norms of a totalitarian state. He returns to work after
illness, finds his commitment weakened, and leaves
the job to recuperate further. The narrative focus
broadens to reveal a city hit by plague, the efforts of
the authorities to stop the epidemic spreading, and the
attempt by insurgents to seize the opportunity offered
by this increasingly chaotic situation. The tenement
where Sorge resides becomes, in effect, a clinic. The
revolutionaries engineer their own rise within the state
apparatus, only to be absorbed by the system they
sought to overthrow. Finally, Sorge meets his death at
the hands of the woman who has nursed him.
In an essay, ʻSur Maurice Blanchotʼ, published in
Les Temps modernes in 1949, Pierre Klossowski noted
the German meaning of Sorgeʼs name, and linked it
directly to the novelʼs title: ʻGod deprived of his name,
or existence deprived of being because it is deprived
of Godʼs name, would become “anxiety”.ʼ From this
lexical clue, Klossowski pursued the textʼs ʻnegative
particular identity is under attack, however, it tends
to become the most important identity we have. As
Arendt says: ʻWhen I am attacked as a Jew, I must
respond as a Jew.ʼ
This is not carping. Bernsteinʼs book is a fascinating
read, and I have raised these questions because one of
its pleasures is the way that it opens the discussion. It
does much else besides – for example, a re-examina-
tion of Arendtʼs concepts of the banality of evil and
radical evil. Whatever you think of the arguments, you
will enjoy the read, whether you are using the book
as an introduction to her thought, or are looking for
fresh insights into Arendt. It is a real accomplishment
to have written a study that works on both levels.
Anne Seller
theophanyʼ. In a rather less complex reading, Leon
Roudiez, in French Fiction Revisited (1991), suggests
that ʻthe narrator has become the metaphor of God,
whose creation has become his illness or perhaps
his sin, and whose disappearance is suggested at the
end.ʼ
Such an interpretation is tenable in much the same
way that comparable readings of Kafka are tenable.
But Stoekl signals that an overtly political reading
(of the kind Roudiez explicitly rejects) is appropriate;
for him Camusʼ The Plague and Orwellʼs 1984 (both
exactly contemporaneous) provide more ready terms
of comparison. Roudiez notes a surreal ambience;
Stoekl recognizes the realities of postwar Europe in
a landscape of ruins and collapsing buildings, peopled
by the homeless, prostitutes and black marketeers.
Still, beyond this, Sorge the civil servant is simultan-
eously, and paradoxically, the embodiment of living
death, and God, the Most High.
At the end of the novelʼs first chapter, Sorge
writes:
So, I asked myself, what is this State? Itʼs in me, I
feel its existence in everything I do, through every
fiber of my body. I was certain then that all I had
to do was write, hour by hour, a commentary on
my activities, in order to find in them the blossom-
ing of a supreme truth, the same one that circulated
actively between all of us, a truth that public life
constantly relaunched, watched over, reabsorbed,
and threw back in an obsessive and deliberate game.
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 49
 In his 1966 essay ʻThe Thought from Outsideʼ,
Foucault manoeuvres deftly through the entanglement
of paradox, noting that ʻwhen Sorge leaves state service
… he does not go outside the law.ʼ Rather, ʻhe forces it
to manifest itself at the empty place he just abandoned.
The movement by which he effaces his singular exist-
ence and removes it from the universality of the law in
fact exalts the law.ʼ Indeed, ʻhe has become one with
the law.ʼ The real significance of the novelʼs opening
declaration (ʻI wasnʼt alone, I was anybodyʼ) becomes
apparent in this light: the singularity of that ʻIʼ is
converted into ʻthe gray monotony of the universalʼ.
John Gregg, in Maurice Blanchot and the Lit-
erature of Transgression (1994), devotes a chapter
to analysis of Le Très-Haut. Stoekl cites it as an
excellent discussion, while taking issue with some of
its fundamental claims. Greggʼs account ends with the
More than a charming rhetorical cloud
Régis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technical Transmission of Cultural Forms, translated by Eric
Rauth, Verso, London and New York, 1996. viii + 179 pp., £39.95 hb., £12.95 pb., 1 85984 972 5 hb.,
1 85984 087 6 pb.
Régis Debray is arguably one of the most stimulating
current French thinkers on media analysis and the
problems of French society. Perhaps still best known
in and outside France as the sometime friend of Castro
and Che, and as a left-wing intellectual troubled by
the usual difficulties that affiliation entailed in Mit-
terrandʼs France, since the late 1970s he has elabor-
ated a complex approach to the interrelations between
dominant modes of communication and cultural and
intellectual activities. The discipline has been created
cumulatively through works such as Teachers, Writers,
Celebrities (1979), The Scribe (1980), Critique of
Political Reason (1983), Courses in General Medi-
ology (1991), A History of the Western Eye (1992), and
The Seducer State (1993). To further this approach,
Debray has recently created a new journal, Les Cahiers
de médiologie, which promises to catalyse further
mediological research.
Media Manifestos is a translation of part of
Debrayʼs submission to obtain the authority to direct
research in French universities, presented at the
Sorbonne in 1994. In reflection of this very French
procedure, it is itself very – perhaps too – French in
style and structure for what Debray and his co-nation-
50 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
helpful observation that those opening words are actu-
ally preceded by the narratorʼs ʻincomplete deathʼ, a
structural loop feeding the repetitious and fragmentary
journal back into itself:
Sorge the user of language fails to gain possession
of himself through his literary creation. If his book
gets away from him, which means in turn that he
gets away from himself, it is because their com-
mon denominator of language is also a victim of an
incomplete death.
Gregg aptly names his chapter ʻWriting the Disasterʼ;
Blanchotʼs enduring theoretical concerns clearly inform
this fiction. Stoekl reminds us of Kojèveʼs legacy to
Blanchot and his contemporaries; this is apt, but the
larger challenge raised by this publication is to read
the philosopherʼs fiction as fiction, with the distinctive
mode of understanding that entails.
Julian Cowley
als persist in describing as ʻAnglo-Saxonʼ readers.
Thus Debray makes many allusive attempts to explain
what mediology is and is not, claiming that it is to
do with replacing the word ʻcommunicationʼ with
ʻmediationʼ in the study of the power of signs; that
it is the study of the ways and means of symbolic
efficacy, not a version of the history of ideas tweaked
to cover ʻcommunicationʼ. Although a short glos-
sary is provided at the end of the book because ʻa
commitment must be made to being preciseʼ, and ʻa
rudimentary lexicon will always prove a less grievous
flaw than a charming rhetorical cloudʼ, there is no
entry for ʻmediologyʼ. We learn that mediology draws
selectively from sociology, the history of mentalities,
historical psychology, the history of symbolism and
cultural history, to become ʻa discipline that treats
of the higher social functions in their relations with
the technical structures of transmissionʼ – a discipline
whose ʻmethodʼ determines correlations between the
ideology, religion, art, literature and other symbolic
activities of a society and its structures and methods
of using and storing ʻtracesʼ or signs. Charming
rhetoric with an important message.
 Debrayʼs innovation is to have subverted tradi-
tional approaches to the history of ideas, aiming at a
cultural meta-history of the visible (A History of the
Western Eye), and of verbal communication (Courses
in General Mediology), in which attention focuses on
ʻthe “becoming-material” forces of symbolic formsʼ.
This is, of course, where the importance of ʻtechnical
transmissionʼ arises, in the analysis of interactions
between culture and the technologies which trans-
mit and structure it. Technical transmission is the
ʻmediumʼ (procedure of symbolizing, code, supporting
material system or recording device) in an expanded
sense, building on McLuhanʼs construction of ʻthe
ground floorʼ of an understanding of historically and
geographically defined ʻmediaspheresʼ. This analysis
draws inspiration from Benjamin, Barthes, Eco, Peirce,
Foucault and Althusser, identifying the three primary
mediaspheres of ʻlogosphereʼ (diffusion by writing and
orality), ʻgraphosphereʼ (diffusion by printed text), and
ʻvideosphereʼ (diffusion by audiovisual media). Media
Manifestos and mediology in general are more than
another contribution to ʻmedia studiesʼ, since Debrayʼs
new discipline implies a historical and philosophical
perspective on communication/mediation necessary
to trace developments in dominant forms of techni-
cal transmission. This is more than a postmodern
celebration of the endless possibilities of technology,
offering fruitful insights into current developments in
virtuality and multi-media.
Hugh Dauncey
Changing the subject
Simon Critchley and Peter Dews, eds, Deconstructive
Subjectivities, SUNY Press, Albany NY, 1996. vii +
257 pp., $64.50 hb., $21.95 pb., 0 7914 2723 4 hb.,
0 7914 2724 2 pb.
One way of looking at the modern history of the idea
of subjectivity reduces it to a simple opposition. Either
you are for ʻthe subjectʼ – the fixed, stable, rational
self that was just the place from which to build the
edifice of metaphysics for Descartes and Kant – or you
are against it. Continental thinking since structural-
ism has come up with more and more reasons for
being against it. Hence the widespread urge to kick
over the last traces of the unifying Cartesian subject
and celebrate the unpindownability of difference and
the very impossibility of subjectivity as conceived in
Enlightenment humanist discourse.
It is this sort of easy dichotomy (subject bad, no
subject good) that Deconstructive Subjectivities sets
out to undermine. Though broadly sympathetic to the
critique of the subject in Heidegger and in so much
recent continental philosophy, its various contributors
reject the conclusion that the topic is thereby somehow
exhausted, or deconstructed out of meaningful exist-
ence. This rejection need not mean, as Critchley and
Dews put it in their useful introduction, ʻa naive
attempt to return to a pre-deconstructive, pre-Heideg-
gerian, or, indeed, pre-Kantian positionʼ. But it does
demand that subjectivity be taken with the sort of
seriousness befitting an issue which, far from being
outmoded, arises with new urgency just as the
traditional, foundational philosophical quest
comes up against its limits.
As a collection the essays have, I think,
two main points to make. One is that recent
thinking in (for example) post-structuralism,
psychoanalysis and Frankfurt Critical Theory
has been just as fixated as the ʻmainstreamʼ
philosophical tradition with a certain view of
the subject: as autonomous, rational, world-
objectifying, and thus as the universal ground
for epistemic certainty, the very starting point
of all philosophy. So it is this Cartesian heritage
– sustained by Kant and, ironically enough, by
its supposed gravediggers in twentieth-century
continental thought – that has been thrown into
question, rather than the notion of subjectivity
itself.
What has largely been ignored is another,
less familiar current, to be found in early
responses to the Enlightenment (in Friedrich
Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 51
Heinrich Jacobi, for example, and in Schelling) which
subverted the Cartesian model and disrupted the sure
path of metaphysics long before Heidegger wrote Being
and Time. According to the pieces by Andrew Bowie
and Manfred Frank, Schelling in particular invoked
a subjectivity quite divorced from that which pro-
vides the simplistic target of postmodernist critiques,
one ranging beyond the Kantian model of thought
as representation and the ideal of the self-grounding
philosophical system.
The other main theme, already suggested, is that
there is a real imperative, existential and ethical,
to avoid simply dropping all talk of the subject as
necessarily wrongheaded, reactionary or oppressive.
This registers itself in various ways. In his own piece
Simon Critchley presents Levinasʼs work as a response
to the post-structuralist and anti-humanist critique,
rooting subjectivity in material lived experience (and
in the relation to alterity), rather than in abstract,
deconstructable models of consciousness or rationality.
Peter Dews argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis can
be seen as a return to the good old philosophical ques-
tions of who we are and what we ultimately desire, and
involves a model of intersubjectivity which defies the
fashionable tendency to presume that ʻcontext is allʼ
when it comes to questions of truth. Meanwhile, half
the essays explore the legacy of Heideggerʼs critique
of the subject, concentrating for the most part on the
general question of whether Heidegger is (as he called
Nietzsche) the ʻlast metaphysicianʼ, or whether Being
and Time should rather be treated as the very start-
ing point for any post-metaphysical subjectivity. The
pieces by Dominique Janicaud and Rudolf Bernet are
especially helpful, the former demonstrating the failure
of Heideggerʼs attempt to destroy the subject, and the
latter incorporating insights from psychoanalysis and
Derrida into a fresh account of self-experience. In
common, they seek to show that ʻthinking the subjectʼ
after Heidegger, though fraught with ambiguities, is by
no means a simple contradiction in terms.
This collection is for specialists, and for those who
already have some sympathy with its purpose. Anyone
approaching it with reservations about the force of
the anti-humanist critique of the subject in the first
place is not likely to be persuaded of the need to
ʻrethink the subjectʼ in its wake. But that is probably
beside the point: the agenda here seems set precisely
for those who are by and large convinced by the
post-structuralist angle, but wonder what is left once
traditional views of the subject have been overcome, or
52 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)
have deconstructed themselves. And on this score the
book provides a rich resource, with many of the essays
finding illuminating links between otherwise incongru-
ous thinkers, most of them providing valuable insight
in mapping the resultant new terrain, and almost all of
them displaying a refreshingly reconstructive approach
to the topic. All of this adds up to a valuable diagnosis,
as well as a useful prognosis.
Gideon Calder
Quirky
Philip Goodchild, Gilles Deleuze and the Question of
Philosophy, Associated University Presses, Cranbury
NJ and London, 1996. 194 pp., £25.00 hb., 08 386
3634 9.
Interpretation is translation. For it to work, the distance
between the source language and the target must be
maximal. An interpretation of Heidegger in Heidegger-
ese is about as much use as A.L. Rowseʼs transla-
tion of Shakespeareʼs sonnets into English prose, for
the American market. In the case of Gilles Deleuze,
the main interpretive danger is stylistic mimicry, for
the result is not clarification, but obfuscation. One
dreams of an interpretation that would wrongfoot the
master and proceed more geometrico, in the manner
of Spinoza or the early Wittgenstein.
At first it seems that Philip Goodchildʼs account
provides just that. The first three chapters expound the
early Deleuzeʼs basic concepts with admirable vigour
and clarity. I have long wished for a short and methodi-
cal introduction to Deleuze for my non-specialist stu-
dents, and I thought I had found it. Unfortunately, the
book gets bogged down in the fourth chapter, where
mimicry takes over and the exposition becomes convo-
luted and unconvincing. By contrast, the final chapter
is a translation of Deleuze into another language, but
since that language is the language of theology, one
cannot help thinking the translation misguided: there
is a vast difference between pointing out Deleuzeʼs
vitalism, in the line of Bergson, and crowning oneʼs
exposition of Deleuzeʼs conception of philosophy with
the category of ʻspiritʼ, whatever the contents one
seeks to impose upon it. The book turns out to be a
highly interesting, but quirky and idiosyncratic version
of Deleuze, in which, to speak like the French, the
Deleuzian cat will fail to recognize her offspring.
Jean-Jacques Lecercle
NEWS

A funny thing happened…

The Forum for European Philosophy

T
he last few years have seen some signs of a significant historical shift in the intel-
lectual posture and self-understanding of analytical philosophy in Britain. One such
indication has been the recent spate of publications and conferences concerned with
the origins of analytical philosophy as a distinctive theoretical tradition – a belated, albeit
implicit, recognition of cultural relativity. Another is the increasing openness among less
parochially minded analytical philosophers towards other traditions of European philosophy.
Institutionally (or proto-institutionally) this second development has recently been reflected in
the announcement of the creation of a ʻForum for European Philosophyʼ. The proclaimed aim
of the Forum, which as yet has no formal organization or constitution, is to ʻpromote dialogue
between philosophers in Britain and the rest of Europeʼ. Its inaugural meeting was held on
the premises of the Royal Institute of Philosophy in London on 20 February this year.
Alan Montefiore of Balliol College, Oxford, one of the founders of the Forum, opened
the proceedings by announcing that the Collège Internationale de Philosophie in Paris
had generously donated the sum of £1,500 to assist the formation of an organization in
Britain devoted to aims similar to its own. He introduced François Jullien, President of
the Collège Internationale, who spoke about the origins of his own institution, its aims and
modus operandi, as a locus of philosophical discussion outside the established framework
of the university. Jullien then spoke interestingly about his own philosophical work, which
involves in-depth comparisons of the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions, with
the aim of elucidating what is distinctive about our own European modes of thought. Brief
responses by Alison Denham (Oxford) and Garbis Kortian (Paris and Vienna) were fol-
lowed by François Jullienʼs replies and some questions from the audience. Monsieur Jullien
spoke in French – as was of course his privilege – but unfortunately, as the evening wore
on, the arrangements for periodic translation began to break down. This must have left a
considerable proportion of the audience without much clue as to what was happening in the
discussion, which was unfortunate for an inaugural meeting intended to draw people in.
The evening concluded, as intended, with a general debate on the future format and role
of the European Forum. Alan Montefiore and the other organizers present (Nick Bunnin,
Marion Hobson and Jonathan Rée) welcomed the written submission of suggestions and
proposals from all interested parties.
During the concluding debate high passions were aroused. Some of those hoping that the
Forum might function as a gathering place for the dispersed and often beleaguered com-
mmunity of non-analytical philosophers in Britain were disappointed as it became apparent
that the crucial interface of the Forum would be between British analytical and European
non-analytical philosophy. As a result, by the end of the evening, two organizations were
being proposed: an organization of ʻcontinentalʼ philosophers in Britain, part of whose
aim would be to combat the institutional hegemony of analytical philosophy in Britain
and its intellectual consequences (see the advertisment on p.5, above), plus the European
Forum, whose membership and goals would be more inclusive. As one member of the
audience remarked, the notion of two organizations in Britain devoted to European phil-

Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 53

osophy seemed rather lavish, given that only half an hour previously there had been
none. It remains to be seen how these projects will develop, and how they will inter-
relate.
It seems clear that there is now a need for some kind of association in Britain for
teachers and research students working in the various non-analytical traditions of
European philosophy. It is time for some assertion of collective self-confidence – a
confidence which must surely be boosted by the increasing pressure from students for
courses on these philosophical traditions, which even staunchly analytical departments
are now finding it difficult to ignore. At the same time, an organization – such as the
Forum – with the financial resources to stage significant encounters between British
philosophers and their European counterparts may also be able to play a role in the
pluralization of philosophical voices. However, the fact that the Forum is being estab-
lished under the aegis of the Royal Institute of Philosophy will debar it from being a
single-member organization with a democratic structure.
Clearly, some potentially positive developments are on the horizon. But how long
will it be before the power-brokers of the analytical establishment feel ashamed to
announce – as Ted Honderich did when introducing Donald Davidson to an audience in
London a couple of years ago – that analytical philosophy is the ʻonly philosophy that
mattersʼ?

Peter Dews

Honouring Levinas
‘Visage et Sinaï ’, Collège International de
Philosophie, 8–9 December 1996

Since Emmanuel Levinasʼs death in December 1995, the philosophical community has
mourned one of its most fecund thinkers. A memorial symposium in Paris, organized
by the Collège International de Philosophie on 8–9 December 1996, brought together a
number of speakers to reflect on Levinasʼs most important contributions to contempo-
rary philosophy. It was organized around the theme of ʻVisage et Sinaïʼ.
In his opening remarks, Jacques Derrida revisited his readings of Levinas, reorgan-
izing them around an ʻethics of hospitalityʼ or the ʻwelcome of the otherʼ (lʼacceuil de
lʼautre). He followed the thread of Levinasʼs reflections on subjectivity, from the image
of the subject as host/guest in Totality and Infinity to that of the hostage in Otherwise
than Being. The figure par excellence of receptivity and hospitality – he suggested – is
the figure of the feminine, a theme that will be familiar to Derridaʼs readers. Finally,
in turning to Levinasʼs ʻTalmudicʼ texts, Derrida linked the question of hospitality to
the question of peace and considered the possibility of an ʻethical politicsʼ, a politics
that would be founded on the irreducible and unthematizable welcome of the other
in hospitality – a politics of mourning, then, because the other welcomed has always
already been thematized (cannibalized, said Derrida, recalling his seminar title,
ʻManger lʼautreʼ, of a few years ago).
In contrast to Derridaʼs emphasis on the feminine, Jean-Luc Marionʼs presentation,
ʻLa voix sans nomʼ, focused on the question of God the Father. Arguing that the face-
to-face relation between Father and son is the philosophical nucleus of Levinasʼs work,
Marion examined the questions of fecundity, transcendence, infinity and the ethical
relation developed in Totality and Infinity, and their reinscription in Otherwise than

54 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)

Being, and attempted to link them to his own project outlined in his study Réduction
et donation. For Marion, the paternal relation of Father to son is structurally the same
as that of infinity to the finite; the voice of the Father remains as a trace, an echo, of
the originary donation. The Father, however, remains inexorably withdrawn from that
which is given by Him, and hence cannot be said.
Paul Ricoeur traced the path of Levinasʼs hermeneutics of language in his presen-
tation ʻDire et Dedireʼ. Following the path opened in Totality and Infinity, Ricoeur
concentrated on the important transitional essays ʻMeaning and Senseʼ and ʻLanguage
and Proximityʼ, where Levinas first articulates the notion of ʻsubstitutionʼ. This notion
is taken up again in an important chapter of the same title in Otherwise than Being,
which Ricoeur considered at length, especially in relation to Levinasʼs thought of
ʻilleityʼ. The infinite substitution of oneself for an other is the ethical itself, and as
such is the condition of possibility of all ʻcommunicationʼ
and hermeneutics, precisely because in substitution ʻthe
destitution and desituation of the subject do not remain
without significationʼ. Signification – language – continues to
modulate and moderate the relation of the subject to alterity,
and my relation to the other, a relationship of responsibility,
is always a hermeneutical one.
Developing a theme implicit in Derridaʼs presentation,
Simon Critchley sought to situate ʻLevinas avec la psy-
chanalyseʼ in his contribution. The welcome of the other, the
impingement of the other upon me – what Derrida names
ʻhostipitalityʼ – was analysed by Critchley in terms of the
ʻoriginal traumaʼ. As with psychoanalysis, where the ego is
a secondary process of the id suffering the traumatic experi-
ence of civilization, so too is the subject in Levinas the
result of a trauma, and hence epiphenomenal to something
more fundamental.
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben devoted his lecture
to a reading of Levinasʼs first published essay – not ʻDe
Lʼévasionʼ, as one might suspect, but rather a little-known
piece on the sense and meaning of Nazism in Europe. His
own ongoing project concerning the question of concentra-
tion camps and political refugees was already sketched out,
albeit differently, by Levinasʼs short meditation, in which he argues that the polit-
icization of life is the hidden agenda of the modern state, here the Nazi state. For
Agamben, this agenda – the technologization of bio-power by the oppressive state
– was already clearly foreseen by Levinas, and remains a paradigm that crosses all
modern sovereign spaces, be they totalitarian or democratic.
Thus Levinasʼs oeuvre was appropriately honoured in its richness and diversity.
Memorials were also offered by Catherine Chalier, Pierre Bouretz, Miguel Abensour,
Jacques Colleony, Jacques Rolland, Shmuel Trigano and Stephane Moses. The papers
of the colloquium will appear in a volume published by the Collège International,
though no publication date has yet been set. They should be read in conjunction with
Derridaʼs recently published essay ʻÁ-dieuʼ, the text of the oration he pronounced at
Levinasʼs funeral.
Another conference devoted to Levinas is scheduled to take place on 20–22 May
1997 in Namur, Belgium. Organized by the Faculté Universitaire Notre-Dame-de-la-
Paix in Namur, the colloquium is devoted to ʻLevinas et lʼhistoireʼ, and will welcome
Jacques Taminiaux and Catherine Chalier, among other scholars of note.

Robert Vallier

Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 55

Cogito humana: dynamics of knowledge
and values
XVIIth German Conference for Philosophy, University of Leipzig,
23–27 September 1996

With this conference the Society for Philosophy in Germany honoured the historical contribution of Leib-
nizʼs Rationalism to modern philosophy and science – his birth in Leipzig 350 years ago, the time he spent
there at the university – as well as the birth of his French Rationalist counterpart Descartes. However, the
conference was not primarily of a historical nature and did not focus exclusively on these two important
figures. Where they did feature, it was not in the context of unchanging, or even past, constructs. Thus, for
example, workshops devoted to Descartesʼ morale provisoire emphasized the provisional nature of ethics
under the pressure of rapid changes in knowledge and technology, foregrounding the contemporary orienta-
tion and subtitle of the conference – the dynamics of knowledge and values.
Problems of legitimation were considered in the context of the pressures exerted by globalization and
intercultural encounters. In his treatment of Hannah Arendt, Albrecht Wellmer praised the importance of
freedom and the possibility of starting afresh, which are inherent in action as a central concept in her politi-
cal philosophy, but was sceptical of the applicability of her version of republicanism in the modern world,
Changes in the international activity of multinational companies, NGOs and communications networks led
Onora OʼNeill to argue in favour of legitimation processes which are not restricted to a Hobbesian fixation
on the state.
Friedrich Kambartel held that it is the hermeneutic problem of understanding in the face of polysemy
which is of prime importance in ever-expanding and intensifying intercultural encounters. Bernard Williams
argued against Kambartel on the grounds that the latterʼs reliance on Wittgenstein resulted in him buying
into a problematic hermetic relativism. Williamsʼs own position was that modernity has produced a legiti-
mation demand on states, which means that they have to ʻhave a story to tellʼ as to why their actions are
legitimate; and that this story has to be acceptable to each and every person whose welfare is influenced by
these actions. Williams expressed serious doubt as to whether the booming efficiency economies can meet
this demand. Jürgen Habermas also dealt with the ʻefficiency economiesʼ in Asia, and the encounter between
religious fundamentalism and the postmetaphysical state. He asked whether the modern Occidental form of
legitimation and its accompanying entrenchment of human rights are a European idiosyncrasy, and whether
a demand that these be internationally respected is consequently masked imperialism. According to him,
they are one possible solution to the problems typical of modernity which non-European cultures also have
to deal with in the face of their increasing involvement with modern technologies and economy.
The choice of Leipzig University as the first place in the former GDR to host this conference is signifi-
cant. It was one of the centres of popular uprising leading to the German Wende, or turnabout, in 1989. The
university takes pride in its fully refurbished philosophy department. At the same time it was from within
this department that the still-raging debate about the winding up (Abwicklung) of former GDR philosophy
departments arose. These growing pains are reminiscent of the period after the war when Hans-Georg
Gadamer was briefly rector of the university. In this context, his award of an honorary doctorate could not
avoid the ambivalent tension of a troubled relation to a fractured past.
Stephan Meyer

56 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)