472 Hypatia

from the constraints of patriarchy, but that women must also be free to create
value and to create meaning. In order for women to have ‘‘freedom to . . .’’ and
not just ‘‘freedom from . . .’’ requires understanding the social-historical context
from which we obtain freedom and use imagination to create value and meaning
(150). Perhaps, the most important part of creating value and meaning is taking
up ambiguity. ‘‘Ethics requires owning up to residing in the ambiguous space
between good and evil’’ (164). Rather than trying to eliminate all evil in order to
take up the good, Oliver understands that people are both good and evil, capable
of peace and violence. Rather than trying to deny our capacity for violence,
Oliver suggests that we need to cultivate our ‘‘ability to imagine, interpret, and
represent our desires and fears’’ (91). For Oliver, the human capacity to interpret
violent impulses prevents acting on those impulses. ‘‘Rather than wallow in
sadomasochistic pleasure in violence toward ourselves and others we transform
bodily pleasures into joy through interpretation’’ (139). The transformation of
pleasure into joy captures the complexity of humans’ ambiguous place in nature
and culture. Whereas bodily pleasure attempts to reside in nature, joy interprets
that bodily pleasure such that it has meaning for the body in society. In our joy,
we acknowledge that we are both natural and cultural beings.
The strength of Women as Weapons of War is Oliver’s use of the torture
photographs from Abu Ghraib as depicting a specific event that gives us insight
into larger contemporary, political, and social practices. She interprets con-
temporary media and critiques the United States’s increasing consumerism and
loss of imagination in order to give a social-historical context for the women in
the Abu Ghraib photographs, women who seem girlish and innocent yet ca-
pable of an astonishing sexualized violence. Although many accounts of the
Abu Ghraib photographs give the impression that the torture is exceptional,
Oliver stresses that the torture depicted in these pictures is part of a larger con-
text of violence and points to a loss of meaning in our world. She emphasizes
that to overcome the violence and to create meaning requires that we actively
witness—both what can be seen and what cannot—what is happening in
the world. Witnessing, then, opens up the possibility for joy that lives in the
ambiguity of nature and culture, body and mind.

Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory. By NANCY J.

HIRSCHMANN. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Michelle Boulous Walker

Nancy J. Hirschmann’s book provides a detailed and perhaps controversial

examination of the concept of freedom in the work of Hobbes, Locke, Rous-
 Book Reviews 473

seau, Kant, and Mill. Hirschmann takes freedom as the ‘‘key concept’’ of mod-
ern political theory (1), and her choice of these theorists over other possible
candidates (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche) means that a certain (liberal) perspec-
tive—questions and orientations—are foregrounded in place of what might
have been a quite different account. Liberalism, Hirschmann claims, is ‘‘the
ideology that has been responsible for translating the political theory of free-
dom into the common collective consciousness of the modern West’’ (1).
While many in France—and elsewhere—may wish to take issue with the force
(if not the substance) of this statement, Hirschmann’s claim will undoubtedly
find a sympathetic audience in English-speaking countries. However, her fur-
ther point that ‘‘the ‘natural freedom’ of the state of nature posited by each
theorist has had profound effects on how we understand, think about, and talk
about freedom in the West today’’ (1) needs to be tempered with (or read
alongside) the radical rethinking of freedom in personal and intersubjective
terms effected in the work of theorists in the middle of the twentieth century,
such as Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and others. Moreover, the work of
Levinas, where notions of freedom are challenged in complex ways with an
understanding of responsibility, would help to further enrich this story. This
point, which we might think of as ‘‘who gets to tell the story of freedom,’’ is an
important one, as it does much to define and authorize a given canon, thus
making ‘‘the selection of these five theorists obvious and central for anyone
writing on freedom’’ (1).
While Hirschmann’s focus on the work of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant,
and Mill may reinforce a certain history of freedom, her approach to these texts
does much to unsettle this. Her careful reading, guided by a particular rework-
ing of Isaiah Berlin’s typology of liberty, social construction, and the centrality
of gender and class, stretches traditional accounts of freedom to their limits,
challenging ‘‘the mainstream to take up a set of issues and questions that it has
tended to resist’’ (2). In this approach lies the heart and real force of Hirschm-
ann’s contribution; a contribution that, for example, does much to undo the
enduring effects of Berlin’s arguably inadequate and misleading account of pos-
itive liberty—and the misrepresentation of theorists that this account has
entailed (4, 8). By focusing on what she sees as Berlin’s real contribution, the
‘‘identification of two different models of the self at work in the history of po-
litical thought’’ (7), Hirschmann develops an account that positions the
ground between the individualist self and the social self at the heart of what
freedom (and being human) comes to mean. This guides her readings through-
out the book.
Hirschmann demonstrates that Berlin’s initial dichotomy—of negative and
positive freedom—fails to do justice to the canonical accounts of liberal theory,
as such accounts entail complex instances of both. Arguing for a dualist
account of freedom that unsettles neat determinations of liberty as either one
474 Hypatia

or the other, Hirschmann focuses ‘‘on the way in which positive and negative
liberty elements work together in their theories to construct a particular un-
derstanding of the concept of freedom’’ (8–9).
Hirschmann’s particular understanding of social constructivism—an inter-
active dynamic of ideology, materialization, and discourse—lends further
weight to this work, and this, along with the centrality she accords to gender,
provides the major themes that structure her discussion of freedom. Gender, for
Hirschmann, is central to any understanding of freedom, and it provides her
with a way of analyzing the curious relationship of women to philosophical and
political concepts. An analysis of gender provides Hirschmann with a link be-
tween questions of freedom and the real conditions of women. ‘‘Women’s
unfreedom is thus in some ways a precondition for men’s freedom. . . . Gender
relates not only to the material conditions of freedom, but to the ways in which
discourse and ideology operate to construct modern understandings of freedom
as a concept and as a lived experience’’ (23). Chapter by chapter, Hirschmann
demonstrates how the question of women is related to particular constructions
and practices of freedom—indeed how central (though not necessarily funda-
mental) gender is to the (liberal) concept of freedom itself (24), and, as well,
the important ways gender intersects with issues of class and race, and how this,
in turn, affects the notions of freedom it helps to (negatively) sustain.
For example, in relation to Hobbes, Hirschmann begins by pointing out that
he is among the first of the early modern political theorists to position freedom
(liberty) at the center of discussions involving human nature and politics (29).
‘‘A FREE-MAN is he, that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is
able to do, is not hindered to doe what he has a will to’’ (Hobbes, Leviathan,
chapter 21, 262; cited in Hirschmann, 30). What is interesting in Hirschm-
ann’s engagement with Hobbes is her contention that gender actually works
through his theory to unsettle negative liberty (or external restraint) as a
central force. This reading questions the canonical way in which Hobbes
is positioned as an archetypical negative libertarian, pointing to an under-
appreciated ambivalence in his argument—one that manifests in a pull be-
tween positive and negative accounts (77).
When it comes to Locke, Hirschmann notes that, although many consider
him to be the ‘‘father’’ of liberalism and the arch proponent of negative liberty
ideals, this depiction once again obscures a more ambivalent truth. She suggests
that the meaning of freedom is somewhat fluid in Locke’s account, giving rise
to a dual theory: ‘‘In particular, the primacy of reason in Locke’s conception of
freedom and, relatedly, the importance of natural law create certain tensions
that complicate and compromise a negative liberty reading of Locke’’ (79).
Hirschmann points to Locke’s focus on self-mastery in his work Education as
evidence in support of a competing theme in his ideas on freedom. Here
positive liberty finds voice in Locke’s recognition that self-mastery requires
 Book Reviews 475

outside assistance: ‘‘Though Locke presents a gloss of liberal toleration,

natural freedom and equality, and a concept of reason consonant with
individual choice, underneath this gloss would seem to lie a notion
of a divided will, a higher truth, and a ‘true’ path to reason and happiness’’
(106). This dual nature of Locke’s theory of freedom is important, Hirschmann
claims, in acknowledging that ‘‘a coherent theory of freedom must borrow el-
ements of both models [positive and negative]’’ (117). However, what remains
troubling in Locke’s account is the structural inequality his thought accords to
gender and class: ‘‘his theory of freedom is made possible only by virtue of its
uneven distribution, such that freedom for propertied white men is based
on the unfreedom, or at least lesser freedom, of women and unpropertied
males’’ (116).
In the case of Rousseau, Hirschmann finds yet again an instance of man’s
freedom being based on woman’s restriction. However, while this is structural in
Locke’s account, Hirschmann claims that in Rousseau’s case ‘‘his theory could be
reconstructed to accommodate women without sacrificing theoretical consis-
tency’’ (166). Leaving open the intriguingly superficial nature of Rousseau’s
sexism, Hirschmann points out that in his theory we have yet another instance of
the intertwining of positive and negative liberty themes. In Rousseau’s work, the
complex play between virtue and choice points to the manner in which he un-
derstands freedom as an intricate web of (individual) possibilities enhanced by
‘‘the right social institutions and practices that will encourage us and others to
make the right choices’’ (167). Indeed, for Rousseau, this freedom is human-
kind’s ‘‘noblest faculty,’’ superior even to reason (119).
Kant, Hirschmann reminds us, is the philosopher credited with introducing
the terminology of ‘‘positive’’ and ‘‘negative’’ liberty that we retrospectively
attribute to theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau before him.
Although, in his focus on positive liberty, Kant shares something with Rous-
seau, Hirschmann contends that his rather metaphysical account of freedom
differs in its emphasis on the individual (169). It differs, too, in his focus on
freedom’s relation to reason, where ‘‘freedom is possible only in and through
the noumenal realm through a priori knowledge and the use of reason to un-
derstand things-in-themselves . . . the mind, and specifically the reasoning
mind, is the way in which freedom is achieved’’ (172). From here, Hirschmann
investigates Kant’s now notorious statements on women and reason, arguing
that these hold the key to understanding Kant’s entire theory. She contends
that, even more than Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, Kant’s theory of freedom is
gendered: ‘‘gender is built into the structure of meaning that he deploys in de-
fining freedom in the way he does. Freedom itself is socially constructed. But
this structure is dependent on factors that, despite Kant’s treating them as nat-
ural or even a priori, we can see as contingent’’ (196–97). In short,
Kant’s freedom is far from ‘‘transcendental,’’ located as it is ‘‘within specific
476 Hypatia

economies of power along the vectors of gender in particular, as well as race and
class’’ (210). Structurally, the noumenal freedom Kant accords (certain privi-
leged) men rests upon the phenomenal, everyday location of women
(and others), and it is in this sense that Kant follows Hobbes, Locke, and
Rousseau (211).
With Mill we return, in a certain sense, to Hobbes and Locke—back to an
understanding of freedom as doing what one pleases, back to a classical expres-
sion of negative liberty as the removal of negative barriers (213–14). Yet
Hirschmann is quick to demonstrate that this aspect of Mill’s thought is chal-
lenged by his own views both on gender and class, and the social construction
this entails (249–50). The tension between negative and positive liberty ideals
is thus a product of his own deliberations whereby his views on the position of
women, both lower- and upper-class, unsettle the solely negative structure of
freedom in his thought (267, 273).
In all, Hirschmann’s readings offer us an alternative to Berlin’s initial cat-
egorization of these theorists, demonstrating, in particular, the complex work of
gender in the play between positive and negative liberty ideals. Indeed, in Hi-
rschmann’s terms, ‘‘gender becomes part of the conceptual structure of
freedom’’ (284), accounting for the structural and/or contingent fact of
women’s subordination in these particular theoretical accounts.

Women, Philosophy, and Literature. By JANE DURAN. Hampshire, UK:

Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007.

Carolyn Korsmeyer

Although the number of notable women philosophers is notoriously small,

the number of distinguished women novelists is large. Jane Duran seeks to
close the gap by inquiring about the philosophy that might be discerned in
certain fiction by women. Her inquiry combines an analysis of philosophical
ideas conveyed in novels and stories with a study of style and worldview
in the works of five authors whose works span the early twentieth century to
the present: Margaret Drabble, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir,
Toni Cade Bambara, and Elena Poniatowska. The work of Woolf and Beau-
voir will be familiar to most readers. Duran’s presentation of the less well-
known authors will likely provoke interest in their books to see the compari-
sons of style and content that she examines, as well as to appreciate their
artistry and insight.
Duran proposes three ways that literature can be philosophical: Texts
can depict alternate realities, they may use narrative voices to raise ques-