Rethinking Obligation

Provides an innovative analysis of liberal obligation theory that uses feminism as a theoretical method for rethinking political obligations from the bottom up.

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.

PrefaceIntroduction1. The Problem of Women in Political Obligation2. Contemporary Obligation Theory: Renewed or Recycled?3. The Argument from Psychology4. Implications for a Feminist Epistemology5. Feminist Epistemology and Political Obligation6. Feminist Obligation and Feminist Theory: A Method for Political TheoryAfterword: Democracy, Difference, and DeconstructionBibliography
Index