Search

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY The feminist critique of commercial modernity CATHERINE PACKHAM 302pp. Cambridge University Press. 85 [pounds sterling] (US $110). Mary Wollstonecraft--an unmarried, middleclass Englishwoman without a formal [...]

Beginning with a historical perspective on the long and short past of political theory, I argue for three priorities for the field's future: (1) theorizing why and how constitutional democracies corrode and die, and what might be done to stop rising authoritarianism and fascism, as well as racism and misogyny, in liberal egalitarian political systems; (2) the advancement of more predictive and future-oriented forms of political theory to address democratic corruption, democratic backsliding into authoritarianism, and other urgent political problems; and (3) the need to diversify the field and the wider discipline of political science by advancing women and people of color. To stay true to its own history, political theory should lend a helping hand to politics and society when democracy is in crisis., Author(s): Eileen M. Hunt [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.131063.6, 0000 0001 2168 0066, University of Notre Dame, , Notre Dame, IN, USA Introduction > In 1999, I took my first [...]

Oliver Lewis's letter (September 8) about my review of new books on Orwell--including his own, The Orwell Tour--unwittingly proves my point that Orwell studies has a long way to go [...]

THE MODERN MYTHS Adventures in the machinery of the popular imagination PHILIP BALL 368pp. University of Chicago Press. 20 [pounds sterling] (US $30). THE PRODUCTIONS OF TIME A study of [...]

THE BRIGHT BOOK OF LIFE Novels to read and reread HAROLD BLOOM 537pp. Knopf. $35. TAKE ARMS AGAINST A SEA OF TROUBLES The power of the reader's mind over a [...]

FOR THE CHRISTMAS OF 1919, the future George Orwell gave his sweetheart a copy of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. That is, Eric Blair, a sixteen-year-old Eton boy, acquired a copy [...]

Twentieth-century feminist scholarship has largely ignored the foundational role of theology in Wollstonecraft's moral and political philosophy, and its role in shaping the development of her philosophy of the family through three distinct stages. Wollstonecraft was a traditional trinitarian Anglican in her early writings, a rationalistic unitarian Christian Dissenter in her middle writings, and a Romantic deist, skeptic and possible atheist in her late writings. The early Wollstonecraft views the traditional family as a cave that traps humanity in a morass of corruption with no hope of escape except in the next life; the middle Wollstonecraft believes that once the family takes a new, egalitarian form, it can serve as a 'little platoon' (to use Burke's phrase) that instills the moral, social and political virtues in each generation of citizens; while the late Wollstonecraft fears that the traditional family is a prison from which women have little hope of escape, either in this world or through passage to the next.