The Normativity of Nature in Pufendorf and Locke

Dawson, Hannah

doi:10.1017/s0018246x19000359

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Levellers excluded women when they dreamed in Putney of an equal world). These writers, therefore, did not give up on nature in relation to gender, just as writers of the time more generally clung on to nature as a source of normativity (Dawson 2019). However, in certain ways, I argue, the women buck this trend.…”

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XII—Fighting for My Mind: Feminist Logic at the Edge of Enlightenment

Dawson

2018

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

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In the seventeenth century, men stepped out of the pages of political philosophy as equal and free, their subjection to government a matter of artifice, manufactured through the social contract. By contrast, women's subjection to men appeared as the creation of nature. Less rational and less virtuous than their counterparts, so the story went, they were rightfully inferior to them. This article examines some pre-modern writers, including Jane Anger, Rachel Speght, Judith Drake, and Mary Astell, who wanted to re-carve the boundaries of nature. They argued that with regard to reason and virtue, men and women have equal capacities. They proposed that gender is a construct of power, not of nature. In so doing they marked out anti-essentialist territory that has become central to modern feminism. I propose, however, that their interventions become most legible (and no less urgent) if we situate them in their own contexts, and in particular in the context of the discipline of logic-the art of reason and the bedrock of an early modern education. These writers used recognisably logical tactics to prove the reason of women, and in so doing donned the mask of the logician, thereby doubly claiming for themselves the mark of a rational man. But they also turned to logic, as logicians since Aristotle had done, to cure the sickness and sophisms of their minds. They appropriated and refigured the obstacles to knowledge, identifying three impediments that beset women: the constitutive power of words; the internalised focus on a woman's externality; and the mental corruption caused by oppression. I Towards the end of the seventeenth century, political authority was increasingly reenvisaged as the product of human artifice, manufactured through the social contract. However, the power relation between women and men remained stubbornly in the social imaginary as the creation of nature. Men now stepped out of the pages of political philosophy as equal and free, so that-in theorythe only way in which one of them could find themselves legitimately subject to another would be if they wanted it, if they agreed to it. The hierarchy between men and women, by contrast, was often represented, and legitimised, as a result of natural inequality between the sexes. The subordination of women had long been justified on the grounds of their essential inferiority; I do not know if it is customary to quote from the eponymous hero of this Society, but, as Aristotle declared in The Politics, 'the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and other is ruled' (Aristotle 1996, p. 17). QED. 1 I am deeply grateful to Susan James for inviting me to speak to The Aristotelian Society, to Helen Beebee for hosting me so spectacularly when the moment came, to the audience for their imaginative and probing questions, to Guy Longworth for his brilliant, detailed comments subsequently, and to Josephine Salverda for steering me so generously and patiently through to submission. I thank Laura Gowing and Susie Orbach for their transformat...

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confidence: 96%