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Mary Wollstonecraft and Freedom as Independence

In English

Författare

Redaktör

  • Jacqueline Broad
  • Karen Detlefsen

Summary, in English

Halldenius argues that we should regard Mary Wollstonecraft as a feminist republican, drawing out the implications of reading her in that way for the meaning and role of freedom in Wollstonecraft’s philosophy. Her republicanism directs our attention to the fact that freedom for Wollstonecraft is conceptualized in terms of independence, importantly in two analytically distinct yet heavily interdependent ways. There is a long philosophical tradition of treating moral freedom as an internal phenomenon, as an aspect of freedom of the will. Wollstonecraft makes this inner freedom politically conditioned. Liberty is independence in relation to others and in relation to the law and institutions of society, but also a kind of inner intellectual independence. Attending to the dynamics between the external and internal aspects of independence is crucial for our understanding of Wollstonecraft’s view of society and morality, but also of her philosophical method, which is to reason through lived experience. What liberty is and requires can only be articulated by “poor men, or philosophers”, as she puts it in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 1790. Halldenius argues that the “poor man” here represents the philosophical vantage point. The view of the unprivileged, of those with no wealth or titles to lose, constitutes the disinterested, impartial view. Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on the lived experience of unfreedom and subordination as a valid source of knowledge implies that a crucial question regarding freedom and unfreedom is not only what freedom is, but what it is like.

Publiceringsår

2017

Språk

Engelska

Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie

Women and Liberty, 1600-1800 : Philosophical Essays

Dokumenttyp

Del av eller Kapitel i bok

Förlag

Oxford University Press

Ämne

  • History of Ideas
  • Philosophy

Nyckelord

  • Mary Wollstonecraft
  • freedom
  • independence
  • republicanism

Status

Published

Projekt

  • Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism
  • Lund Human Rights Research Hub

ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt

  • ISBN: 9780198810261