Over the course of the last four decades, William Leon McBride has distinguished himself as one of the most esteemed and accomplished philosophers of his generation. This volume—which celebrates the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday—includes contributions from colleagues, friends, and formers students and pays tribute to McBride’s considerable achievements as a teacher, mentor, and scholar.

This article explores Hannah Arendt's insights into the forms of social control operating especially in democracies, together with the possibility of resistance to such control. Since the way in which one defines freedom informs one's understanding of the techniques that suppress, regulate, and modify behaviour, the article begins by sketching Arendt's notion of freedom, and compares this to its liberal counterpart. That discussion leads to Arendt's conception of power, whose corollary is freedom, and whose suppression amounts to control. The institutional (...) and ideological infrastructure that accompanies the encroachment of ?the social? ? which Arendt links to the hegemony of liberalism ? is conceived as rendering the individual both powerless and apathetic. The article concludes with suggestions regarding resistance to modern forms of control, viewing Arendt's ontology as a source of tenable strategies for the deepening of democracy. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that contemporary democratic theory gives insufficient attention to the important contributions dissenting citizens make to democratic life. Guided by the dissident practices of activist women, I develop a more expansive conception of citizenship that recognizes dissent and an ethic of political courage as vital elements of democratic participation. I illustrate how this perspective on citizenship recasts and reclaims women's courageous dissidence by reconsidering the well-known story of Rosa Parks.

This paper argues that Hannah Arendt's political theory offers key insights into the power that binds together the feminist movement - the power of solidarity. Second-wave feminist notions of solidarity were grounded in notions of shared identity; in recent years, as such conceptions of shared identity have come under attack for being exclusionary and repressive, feminists have been urged to give up the idea of solidarity altogether. However, the choice between (repressive) identity and (fragmented) non-identity is a false opposition, and (...) the Arendtian account of solidarity developed here allows us to move beyond this opposition. Thus, Arendt provides us with a model of solidarity that can stand a post-identity politics feminist theory in good stead. (shrink)

: Although there are important aspects of ecofeminist valuations of women's caring, a greater degree of skepticism than is now found in ecofeminist scholarship is in order. In this article I argue that there are political risks in celebrating women's association with caring, as both an ethic and a practice, and in reducing women's ethico-political life to care. I support this position by drawing on the work of feminist theorists who argue that the positive identification of women with caring ought (...) to be treated cautiously for it obscures some of the negative implications of feminized care and narrows our understanding of women as political actors. I explain why I think ecofeminists would be better served by using feminist theories of citizenship to understand and interpret women's engagement in politics. (shrink)

Drawing from four Arendtian themes-plurality, the public realm, power, and perspective appreciation-I argue for citizenship as a "politics of enlarged mentality." This term suggests an alternative conception of citizenship that surpasses the limits of both the liberal and civic republican traditions. Unlike the masculinized liberal ideal of the citizen and contrary to the gendered universality that defines the civic republican traditions, a politics based on enlarged mentality combines context sensitivity with principled judgments.

Hannah Arendt's early biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an eighteenth-century German-Jew, provides a revolutionary feminist component to her political theory. In it, Arendt grapples with the theoretical constitution of a female subject and relates Jewish alterity, identity, and history to feminist politics. Because she understood the "female condition" of difference as belonging to the political subject rather than an autonomous self, her theory entails a "politics of alterity" with applications for feminist practice.

Although there are important aspects of ecofeminist valuations of women's caring, a greater degree of skepticism than is now found in ecofeminist scholarship is in order. In this article I argue that there are political risks in celebrating women's association with caring, as both an ethic and a practice, and in reducing women's ethico-political life to care. I support this position by drawing on the work of feminist theorists who argue that the positive identification of women with caring ought to (...) be treated cautiously for it obscures some of the negative implications of feminized care and narrows our understanding of women as political actors. I explain why I think ecofeminists would be better served by using feminist theories of citizenship to understand and interpret women's engagement in politics. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's early biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an eighteenth-century German-Jew, provides a revolutionary feminist component to her political theory. In it, Arendt grapples with the theoretical constitution of a female subject and relates Jewish alterity, identity, and history to feminist politics. Because she understood the "female condition" of difference as belonging to the political subject rather than an autonomous self, her theory entails a "politics of alterity" with applications for feminist practice.

In this paper I evaluate the theoretical and normative validity of Arendt's idea of a public sphere. My discussion is organised under three related headings. First, an exploration of the theme of ‘plurality’ in Arendt's work. This is connected, second, with a distinctive account of the role of ‘representation’ in political life. Third, the relation between ethics and politics, and the particular normativity of Arendt's concept of politics. Finally, I go on to a consideration of how Arendt's scheme of plurality (...) and public political life draw our attention to the themes of political capacity and resistance, risk and public encounter, and an account of the frictional, indeed rebarbative, nature of politics. The aim of the paper is to make clear that these themes remain significant for current debates about participatory deficits and about standards of public conduct. (shrink)

In Arendt’s political theory the concept of civil society is often read as an extension of her concept of the social and is therefore dismissed as irrelevant to her political vision. This view leaves Arendtian theory in an exclusivist position with regard to contemporary political contexts and experiences. My aim in this essay is to address this problem by discussing the relationship of Arendtian theory and the concept of civil society in the context of contemporary political experience. This calls for (...) not only a particular reading of the social in Arendt but, more importantly, for a joint reading of Arendt’s concept of the council state and civil society. Here, civil society is defined as the associations institutionalized by the voluntary engagement of active citizens, which definition, I argue, is compatible with Arendt’s concept of politics as action, plurality, and participation. (shrink)

Conceptions of citizenship which rest on an abstract and universal notion of the individual founder on their inability to recognize the political relevance of gender. Such conceptions, because their ‘gender-neutrality’ has the effect of excluding women, are not helpful to the project of promoting the full citizenship of women. The question of citizenship is often reduced to either political citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of political participation, or social citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of economic (in)dependence. (...) The paper argues for the recognition of citizenship as gendered, and as an ethical, that is non-instrumental, social status which is distinct from both political participation and economic (in)dependence. What unites us as citizens, in our equal membership of the political community, need not rely on a conception of us as ‘neutral’ (abstract, universalized, genderless) individuals undertaking one specific activity located in the public realm, but can take account of the diverse ways in which we engage in ethically-grounded activities on the basis of our different genders, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and other differences, in both the public and private realms. A convincing feminist conception of citizenship necessarily involves a radical redefinition of the public/private distinction to accommodate the recognition of citizenship practices in the private realm. The paper builds on the observation that the concept of ‘citizenship’ is broader than the concept of ‘the political’ (or ‘the social/economic’), and contends that feminism provides us with the emancipatory potential of gendered subjectivity, which applies to both men and women. The recognition of gendered subjectivity opens the way to the recognition of the diversity of citizenship practices. It is not that women need to be liberated from the private realm, in order to take part in the public realm as equal citizens, but that women – and men – already undertake responsibilities of citizenship in both the public and the private realms. (shrink)

In the light of a renewed interest today in forms of direct political participation, this paper explores the contributions of Sartre and Arendt to defending direct political action as an intrinsically valuable form of human freedom. Both thinkers note, however, that such forms of action and the ‘spaces of freedom’ in which they become possible are always fleeting and transitory. The paper argues that Sartre's account of the ways in which human action is always mediated and alienated by materiality is (...) important in accounting for this phenomenon. (shrink)