New book honors Susan Moller Okin

Now available from Oxford University Press:

Toward a Humanist Justice
The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin

Edited by Debra Satz and Rob Reich





Description

The late Susan Moller Okin was a leading political theorist whose scholarship integrated political philosophy and issues of gender, the family, and culture. Okin argued that liberalism, properly understood as a theory opposed to social hierarchies and supportive of individual freedom and equality, provided the tools for criticizing the substantial and systematic inequalities between men and women. Her thought was deeply informed by a feminist view that theories of justice must apply equally to women as men, and she was deeply engaged in showing how many past and present political theories failed to do this. She sought to rehabilitate political theories -particularly that of liberal egalitarianism, in such a way as to accommodate the equality of the sexes, and with an eye toward improving the condition of women and families in a world of massive gender inequalities. In her lifetime Okin was widely respected as a scholar whose engagement went well beyond the world of theory, and her premature death in 2004 was considered by many a major blow to progressive political thought and women's interests around the world.

The volume stems from a conference on Okin in February 2005. See my links to some of the conference papers.

Susan Moller Okin was professor in the political science departement at Stanford University 1990-2004.

Contents

Debra Satz (Stanford University) and Rob Reich (Stanford University): Introduction: Toward a Humanist Justice

PART 1: Rethinking Political Theory
1: Nancy Rosenblum (Harvard University): Okin's Liberal Feminism as a Radical Political Theory [conference paper]
2: Joshua Cohen (Stanford University): Justice and Gender: Reflections on Susan Moller Okin [conference paper]
3: Elizabeth Wingrove (University of Michigan): Okin's Contributions to the Study Of Gender in Political Theory
4: John Tomasi (Brown University): Can Feminism be Liberated from Governmentalism? [conference paper]

PART II: Gender and the Family
5: David Miller (Oxford University): Equality of Opportunity and the Family [conference paper]
6: Molly Lynn Shanley (Vassar College): "No More Relevance than One's Eye Color": Justice and Okin's Genderless Society
7: Cass Sunstein (University of Chicago): On the Tension Between Sex Equality and Religious Freedom

PART III: Feminism and Cultural Diversity
8: Ayelet Shachar (University of Toronto): From Liberal to Post-Colonial to Multicultural Feminism: Competing Approaches to the study of Gender, Citizenship and Fate of Religious Arbitration
9: Alison Jaggar (University of Colorado at Boulder): Okin and the Challenge of Essentialism
10: Chandran Kukathas (London School of Economics): The Dilemma of a Dutiful Daughter: Love and Freedom in the Thought of Kartini [conference paper]

PART IV: Development and Gender
11: Robert Keohane (Princeton University): Reinventing Globalization to Reduce Gender Inequality [conference paper]
12: Iris Marion Young (University of Chicago): The Gendered Cycle of Vulnerability in the Less Developed

Update 4/12:
Book review by Ann E. Cudd (University of Kansas) in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.