Changing the Subject: The World Is Object, Those Who Would Change It Are Subject. For Really Big Change, Change the Subject

Brown also has a critique of liberalism in an article that is sadly not online, Liberalism’s Family Values (collected in States of Injury). Like Okin, she deals with the liberal tradition being predicated on a liberal subject that is the antithesis on the conceptual and practical role women play in society. The eight values of a liberalism positioned next to the values they exclude from the political realm is a particularly sharp explanation of what is going on under the hood of liberalism. From the article:

I want to make a quick argument that this critique is important for those who want to rebuild an economy where prosperity is broadly shared and concentrations of power are held in check….

Why? Academic feminism has thought deeply about two arguments that need to be addressed. The first is that that the project is larger than stagnating wages, something that can’t be addressed by the differential inflationary impacts of the consumption of cheap electronic goods and really cheap food. The issue is about freedom and autonomy. The subject that can lead a life of equality, liberty, autonomy in the public is not a given or a prerequisite to society but instead a political creation, something created only through struggle.

The second is that a contract, like a marriage contract or like a labor contract, can be “freely” entered into but still contain elements of coercion to it. Coercion can still be the central characteristic of it. That the market is a series of voluntary transactions, and any outcome of it just, is an illusion. How to pull away that veil is the project, and feminist thought gives us a start on it.

What Brown is doing here is, in a sense, critiquing the formal structure of liberal political theory, if we think of the formal structure as that which contextualizes and shapes that which is the content of the theory. As soon as I began reading this, I immediately thought of Robert Kegan’s levels of cognitive complexity, particularly the fifth level, about which I’ve written relatively little online. Here, for the sake of completeness, is my crib sheet on the subject:

Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan has developed a theoretical framework for integrating the developmental theories of Jean Piaget and later developmental psychologists, such as Lawrence Kohlberg and Erik Erikson. Kegan argues that at each developmental stage, what was the background/context/subject of consciousness in the previous stage now becomes foreground/content/object. The result is the table below:

Feminist theory of the sort that Brown practices belongs to Level 5. It takes liberal political theory (a Level 4 theory concerned with autonomy/self-authorship) as its subject. Level 5 is particularly concerned with opposites, and transforming their seemingly absolutist nature into more tractable forms. In short, it takes them out of the realm of absolutes that define us and turns them into objects that we may manipulate and define for ourselves. This is why, at the deepest and most fundamental level, feminism is a theory of liberation for men as much as it is for women.

Conservatives, for the most part, are either stuck at Level 3, the level of traditional social order, where the self is defined by the social roles and relations of society, or at Level 2, an even more primative level associated with late childhood and early adolesence. (Libertarian “you’re not the boss of me!” temper-tantrums, anyone?) Liberals, OTOH, tend to be fixated at Level 4, based on a mascunilist model of autonomy, which Brown’s article excerpt above provides an embrionic critique of.

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