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In the various conversations, deliberations, postings, panels, and forums in which I have participated, I confess that I often have felt like Admiral James Stockdale, who ran for Vice President on Ross Perot's independent ticket in 1992. In the vice-presidential debate with Al Gore and Dan Quayle, he began his opening remarks with the questions: "Who am I? And why am I here?" Less metaphorically, the question I must confront is: What is a political theorist doing in these deliberations over Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT)? What does DA-RT have to do with political theory? We may recall that Admiral Stockdale's question, profound in its existential implications, and elegant in its practical simplicity, was responded to with laughter and turned into a joke, as Stockdale was read as a nice, but confused, old man. He was considered irrelevant to the election. Political theory, similarly, has been sidelined, dismissed, as irrelevant to this discussion, indeed, perhaps to the entire discipline, because we don't deal with "data." We may be nice colleagues, and some colleagues may begrudgingly acknowledge that perhaps political theory needs to be taught to our students, but we are often not seen as serious participants in the conversation called political science, and that has extended to the DA-RT debates.

In Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory, Nancy Hirschmann demonstrates not merely that modern theories of freedom are susceptible to gender and class analysis but that they must be analyzed in terms of gender and class in order to be understood at all. Through rigorous close readings of major and minor works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Mill, Hirschmann establishes and examines the gender and class foundations of the modern understanding of freedom. Building on a social constructivist model of freedom that she developed in her award-winning book The Subject of Liberty

This book reconsiders the dominant Western understandings of freedom through the lens of women's real-life experiences of domestic violence, welfare, and Islamic veiling. Nancy Hirschmann argues that the typical approach to freedom found in political philosophy severely reduces the concept's complexity, which is more fully revealed by taking such practical issues into account. Hirschmann begins by arguing that the dominant Western understanding of freedom does not provide a conceptual vocabulary for accurately characterizing women's experiences. Often, free choice is assumed when women are i

In Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory, Nancy Hirschmann demonstrates not merely that modern theories of freedom are susceptible to gender and class analysis but that they must be analyzed in terms of gender and class in order to be understood at all. Through rigorous close readings of major and minor works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Mill, Hirschmann establishes and examines the gender and class foundations of the modern understanding of freedom. Building on a social constructivist model of freedom that she developed in her award-winning book The Subject of Liberty.

This book reconsiders the dominant Western understandings of freedom through the lens of women's real-life experiences of domestic violence, welfare, and Islamic veiling. Nancy Hirschmann argues that the typical approach to freedom found in political philosophy severely reduces the concept's complexity, which is more fully revealed by taking such practical issues into account. Hirschmann begins by arguing that the dominant Western understanding of freedom does not provide a conceptual vocabulary for accurately characterizing women's experiences. Often, free choice is assumed when women are in f.

In Rethinking Obligation, Nancy J. Hirschmann provides an innovative analysis of liberal obligation theory that uses feminism as a theoretical method for rethinking political obligations from the bottom up. In articulating a feminist method for political theory, Hirschmann skillfully brings together theoretical categories and methods previously seen as opposed: feminist standpoint and postmodernism, gender psychology and anti-essentialism, empiricism and interpretivism. Rethinking Obligation mounts a vital challenge to central aspects of liberal theory. Students and scholars of political philosophy, political theory, feminist theory, and women's studies will want to read it.

The essay considers populism in the present moment in relation to Black Lives Matter as a popular protest movement. Popular protest movements demand that government change; populism in the present moment seeks to act extra-governmentally, and to this end relies on violence in the face of peace protest movement. This violence demonstrates the white patriarchalism of contemporary populism. I argue that peaceful, popular protest is an important tool to resist white patriarchal populist authoritarianism.

This essay considers Denis Diderot's Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See as a work that can contribute to a disability political theory. By recounting the experiences of visually impaired persons in their own words, Diderot opens up possibilities for a disability politics of self-representation, maintaining that sighted persons should listen to blind persons' accounts of their own experience rather than relying on their own imaginings and assumptions. By using blind experiences to challenge a philosophical problem that intrigued philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries amid often-unsuccessful efforts to "cure" blindness through cataract surgeries, Diderot develops a powerful critique of the empiricist stress on vision as the primary source of perception and provides a remarkably forward-looking critique of disablist attitudes toward the blind. Through this philosophical discourse, he engages a political argument about the way knowledge is gathered, evaluated, and interpreted through relationships of power.

This essay takes up an apparently minor idea of Susan Moller Okin'sJustice, Gender, and the Family—that employers should split the paycheck of wage‐earning husbands between employees and their stay‐at‐home spouses—and suggests that it actually threatens to undermine Okin's entire argument by perpetuating the most central cause of women's inequality by Okin's own account: the sexual division of labor. Recognizing the vital contributions that Okin's seminal work made and the impact that it had on the field of feminist philosophy and political theory, the essay explores the ethical, political, and philosophical problems with this solution to the dire problems of gender inequality and injustice that Okin correctly identifies. The essay suggests that her commitment to liberalism may have resulted in a commitment to an inadequate vision of how to solve the problems of gender inequality, and offers other possibilities that Okin could have pursued instead that sustain her strong commitment to liberalism.

In this essay, I seek to problematize the notion of rights as they have often been applied to persons with disabilities, and particularly in the framework of "social rights." Although social rights have been important in articulating demands by and for disabled persons, they also have fallen prey to a problem with "rights discourse" more generally, which is that they are thought of in terms of justice rather than freedom. Such a framing has led to inadequate implementation of the concept of rights to disabled persons and has unforeseen consequences, including the ways in which the Americans with Disabilities Act and other disability rights have been conceived along terms of US "welfare reform" rather than those of civil rights.

I have long been a puzzled admirer of Jean Elshtain's work, going back to graduate school whenPublic Man, Private Woman(Elshtain 1981) first came out, and I read it for a class in feminist theory taught by Nancy Hartsock. I remember another student, a Marxist, wrinkling her nose and saying about the author, "she's really pretty conservative, don't you think?" I had a hard time understanding this question. As a newcomer to feminism in the early 1980s, I perhaps naively thought that anyone who recognized that gender was an important category for political analysis, that it was a realm of inequality, and that canonical political theory actually had a lot to say about it despite the fact that most of our professors always blithely ignored it, was, by definition, pretty radical.