Rewriting Canonical Discourses: The Political Subject of Gender-Neutral Freedom

If it seems increasingly difficult to get a purchase on freedom in today’s world, it is worth revisiting its canonical roots with Nancy Hirschmann’s Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory. She intervenes skillfully in the literature on Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Mill to engage contemporary theoretical and popular discourses of freedom that fail to acknowledge their limits. In the United States, at least, we appear content to Chase Freedom^sm into the consumer realm, captivated by the allure of a society where the multinational banking company teams up with the Rolling Stones to reiterate the popular myth: “I’m free/To do what I want/ Any old time.” The commercialized narrative of self-mastery and unlimited opportunity reminds us that ideal of negative liberty, as the absence of external barriers on choice, has not lost its luster. And yet, when we confront the fine print -- a maze of complex specifications, percentage chances, and indecipherable terms -- the chase often renders freedom illusory. The fine print, Hirschmann hopes to prove, is the condition of judgment and action: our everyday lives are interwoven with economic, social, administrative, and discursive powers that not only circumscribe the arenas of choice, but more fundamentally, shape the identities, attitudes, and desires that inform our choices, and not least of all, structure our conceptions of freedom itself. If we try to chase the concept of freedom in the marketplace of ideas, we risk overlooking its political power.

The de-politicization of freedom in theoretical and popular discourse is a primary concern animating Hirschmann’s recent writing, which aims to discursively reconfigure it. In this regard, her new book is logically a prequel to her previous one, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom. That book analyzes women’s concrete experiences with domestic violence, welfare, and Islamic veiling to provide a rich, contextual account of the ways in which discourses of freedom emerge from specific configurations of power and produce the kinds of subjects, relationships, practices, and institutions necessary to sustain them. But such thick social constructivism, she acknowledges, has had limited influence on most contemporary political theories of freedom. Gender, Class, and Freedom thus aims to meet the discipline on more familiar grounds, by carefully tracing the historical contexts, the specific configurations of gender and class power, and the discursive practices that significantly structure the concept of freedom in the works of five key canonical thinkers.

The result is one of those rare books with the potential to bridge a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches. Hirschmann’s close reading of five modern thinkers engages traditional debates on their theories of freedom and stakes out new claims in relation to feminist interpreters and others who read modern political theory against the grain. But she is explicit that the “potentially radical force” of her arguments will be tested by their ability to compel “mainstream” theoretical discourses of freedom to wrestle with questions about context, power, and human subjectivity they so often resist.(17, 2) This is both a crucial and promising challenge, and it is with regard to these stakes that I ultimately question the limits of the book in rewriting canonical discourses of freedom.

Hirschmann’s two books on freedom are best read in conjunction with one another, as evidenced by their interrelated form, arguments, and methods. Formally, Gender, Class, and Freedom reiterates and expands the first two chapters of Subject of Liberty. Those chapters, and the new book, set the conceptual and historical grounds for her contemporary engagements with women’s lived experiences and, finally, for her constructive theory of freedom. Readers interested in Hirschmann’s constructive vision have to read backward in time to reach the punch-line of her argument. (Warning: This review will contain spoilers.)

In terms of argument, both books begin with Isaiah Berlin’s typology of negative and positive liberty, which unfortunately structures much contemporary theoretical discourse on freedom. While...