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Manhood and politics: A feminist reading in political theory
Book Reviews
precisely the tension between the progressive and regressive elements in feminist fantasy that makes it a compelling area of study. In the corpus of feminist cultural interpretation, I find assumptions which reify women as beings whose natures and oppression are constant and determined by factors other than environment. This allows Shinn to posit the notion of an unchanging core of prepatriarchal values embedded in women across time and cultures. Similarly, Barr can assume that slavery isn’t so when the master is a woman. Reifying women makes it difficult for important distinctions to be made between women who belong to different groupings and whose loyalties may pull them in directions away from gender-determined values. Put another way, reification negates the exploration of the relationships between ideas and the material environment. Both books will be of interest to a number of academicians in the fields of Afro-American studies, literary criticism, popular culture, utopia, and women’s studies. They convey to the reader the importance of the study of “marginal” literatures authored by women whose broad appeal has implications our future social order. HODA M. ZAKI HAMPTONUNIVERSITY,VIRGINIA,U.S.A.
REFERENCES Carter, Angela. (1978). The pornography.
Sad&n womon and the ideology of New York: PantheonBooks.
MANHOOD AND POLITICS: A FJSMINISTREADING IN POLITICALTHEORY, by Wendy Brown, 23 1 pages. Rowman &
Littlefield, New Jersey, 1988. US$32.50 cloth, US$14.95 pb. This feminist book on political theory is not focused on women. It details the historical development of a revealing strand of argument on the nature of politics and political leaders. According to Brown, “[mlore than any other human activity, politics has historically borne an explicitly masculine identity” (p. 4). Her project is not so much critical or interpretive, as a rereading of texts by Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Weber to understand their intertwined notions of manhood and politics. I commend this enriching study to anyone in the field. Despite major differences between the views of Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Weber, Brown argues that each was mainstream in traditional political theory and each was a realist seeking theoretical coherence for the existing order of things. Moreover, for each political life was central in their society, each sought to assert the value of politics as a unique and ennobling human experience, and each developed coherent and related ideals of manhood (not equivalent to biological maleness) central to their political philosophies. Aristotle is the first who unapologetically establishes politics as a distinctly male sphere of activity and insists on the naturalness of human political association. His transcendent political organization is an aesthetic ideal, distanced from common life and human need, to “rule with mind ‘purified’ of body” (p. 40). Despite Ancient Greece’s well-known cultivation and glorification of bodily beauty, strength, and skill (p. 53), Brown empha-
279
sizes Aristotle’s view that a “real man is independent of the realm of necessity, of constraints by others, and of the needs and desires of his own body” (p. 55). He resists entrapment by women unable to escape their physiological natures, and gains fulfillment in thepolis. He strives for excellence, virtuosity in performance, and superiority through athletic prowess, exhibiting a willingness to risk life for abstract aims to gain fame. Political life may include pursuit of the highest good, rational contemplation, but also requires recognition through victory over the enemy in battle. Machiavelli makes no such claims about the exalted nature of man. He takes the view that politics emerges from the nature of man: not his superiority but his weakness as one with animalistic and bestial tendencies, living by desire and not need. Man’s essence includes a raw drive toward power; he “strives to conquer, master, dominate or control all that threatens his precarious freedom from the body . . . ” (p. 80). Women, nature, and the “uncontrollable” are bound together as the fortuna cast as antagonist to the political man in search of glory, freedom, and power through competition. Brown extracts a vision of Machiavellian political life that is war-like. Even if guided by purposive reason, it is still dominated by ambition, aggression and brutality in the quest for power. Weber’s views are more perplexing and evocative because his personal letters disclose contrasts with his political essays. He writes of yearning to pursue “great tasks of a purely human nature” thought “less impressive” by the “masculine profession”, and describes the inability of “masculine preoccupation” with external life to understand the “inner side,” which he ascribes to women (pp. 128-129). But he confesses that politics originates in organizations of young men involved in marauding raids of armed rape and pillage, developing into inevitable political “domination” and “legitimate monopoly of violence in society” (p. 135). Brown argues that for Weber the value of politics lies not in addressing collective needs or well-being; it is autonomous from economic and social life. An association is made political through use of force. Its goal is the power, prestige, and glory of the state through organized domination. The tension in Weber’s thought is evident in his defense of the institutionalized expression of manhood as domination, despite his keen perception of its danger of evolving into a political-economic system out of control because it destroys personal values and lets means become ends. The political leader seeks freedom, but despite his personal responsibility for his actions, it is freedom to control and dominate. Brown does not attempt to give complete overviews of these theories. She abstracts the common thread woven throughout, a conception of ideal masculine political life driven by desire for power, unharnessed by human need, with “no purpose save fulfillment of its own ideals of individual and national power and prestige” (p. 173). Outrageous depictions of women, and historical division between men and women in political thought and institutions, are now well-documented. Yet Brown argues that continued focus on the exclusion of women from politics and justifications for their relegation to subordinate status, emphasizes the most foolish, anachronistic, or blatantly misogynist features of a theorist’s account. Others investigate whether a theory is viable if women are added to the “men” allowed to govern. Schol-
280
Book Reviews
ars such as Susan Okin (1979) have argued that for many theories, such modifications generate incoherence. Important as these studies are, Manhood and Politics goes beyond urging that the theories analyzed are not to be dismissed lightly. Brown exposes the rich depiction of masculinist public power, and the relationship between manliness and politics in these traditional political theories. Her goal is to understand the world and discourse that produced women’s omission or subjugation, and to evaluate ways of constructing politics divorced from its historical identification with manhood. Despite the devastating consequences of masculine political dominance, she also notes its compelling features to support her provocative conclusion endorsing transformation, not thorough-going abolition or condemnation of politics rooted in masculinity. Brown charges that Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Golda Meir, Indhira Ghandi, and Margaret Thatcher are almost parodies of modern-day manliness in politics (p. 185), women gaining entry into the political system by accepting the required standards of machismo. Whether or not that assessment is fair, Brown also rejects merely substituting “feminine values” for masculine ones in the public sphere as impossible and inappropriate. “Feminine values” have not been shaped for public purposes, and it is unlikely there are distinctly female values given differences of race, class, culture, and religion (Spelman, 1989). An alternative transformation Brown sketches dictates reintegration of bodily needs intimately tied to women’s experiences through reproduction, reaffirmation of the values of sustaining life and human projects, and revitalization of power in women and men. She advocates changing political commitments from narrow conceptions of heroic conquest, domination, and destruction toward meeting needs, enhancing life, and developing creative activity. Readers may wish for a more specific vision of a nonmasculine political order, and Brown is acutely aware of this limitation of her book. Her explanation is that feminist attempts to articulate theories of political power lack success not only because power is complex and elusive, but also due to adaptation of an insight of Machiavelli’s: women cannot understand power without experiencing themselves as bearing power. JUDITHWAGNERDECEW CLARK UNIVERSITY WORCESTER,MA, U.S.A.
REFERENCES Okin, Susan. (1979). Women in western political thought. Princeton:PrincetonUniversityPress. Spelman,Elizabeth.(1989). Inessenlialwoman. Boston: Beacon Press.
WAR’S ~HER VOICES: WOMEN WRITERS ON THE LEBANESE CIVIL WAR, by Miriam Cooke, 208 pages. The Cambridge University Press, New York, 1988. US$34.50
cloth. Miriam Cooke has undertaken two tasks: a) the identification and presentation of a new group of Arab women writers who shared the experience of Beirut and the Leb-
anese civil war from
1975 to 1982; and b) an examination of modern Arabic literature-especially that related to the war-from a feminist literary perspective. Both tasks are accomplished with intelligence and care. The volume is a valuable contribution. Still, the works discussed may be less singular and the feminist consciousness less developed than Cooke concludes. Cooke has named the women writers the Beirut Decentrists. She has named them. They did not name themselves, for they wrote intellectually and physically separated from each other in a self-destructing city. These women shared a middle or upper-middle class background, but represented a full range of religious confessions and political perspectives. Among the Decentrists are Ghada al-Samman, Hanan al-Shaikh, Emily Nasrallah, Laila Usairan, Daisy al-Amir, Claire Gebeyli, and Etel Adnan. Their voices are the voices of noncombatants living in a war zone. It is not unfair to describe their work as the literary responses to chaos (p. 170), for a shared theme is the realization of the need for individual responsibility and action in an unravelling society. Because these women chose to remain in Beirut while many of their male counterparts left the country, Cooke describes their new consciousness as being both feminist and Lebanese. This is because they assumed (or had thrust upon them) a new responsibility for self and survival, and because by staying they showed a love of country even as that country seemed on the verge of total disintegration. Cooke finds this war “like no other war” in its lack of clear cause, stable enemy, and stereotypical attitudes (p. 164), and rightly wishes to retain these authentic voices when the war is reconstructed by writers and historians after its conclusions. However, some writers about war suggest that, in fact, all wars are experienced as chaos and that their meaning as well as simply “who won” is determined later by interpreters. Further, the themes expressed so parallel French existentialist writing under the German occupation that one must at least ask if the Decentrists are, indeed, singular, or whether they are part of a recurring genre-a genre whose loss is also recurring because of a human need for more structure and meaning than the genre affords. One should also be cautious about the liberation women experience during war. Clearly women become conscious of the fact that they are no longer protected. It is not so clear that they develop a group consciousness or that they (and the men related to them) understand the new circumstances as change. It might be more accurate to view norms as suspended. Also the stayers may or may not survive to see the return of exiles and refugees, and if they do, the resentment expressed during the period of abandonment may quickly ease with return and the acknowledgement that men ARE positioned differently than women during war. There are, after all, expectations that the young and able-bodied man must choose a side and participate. Merely surviving and assisting others to survive does not meet social expectations for men. Finally, the distinction made between patriotism (good) and nationalism (bad) requires more discussion. Cooke sees the former rooted in a shared history, land and family, the second in geography and government. A preference for the former, unfortunately, can lead to political stances which have no room for compromise. In
precisely the tension between the progressive and regressive elements in feminist fantasy that makes it a compelling area of study. In the corpus of feminist cultural interpretation, I find assumptions which reify women as beings whose natures and oppression are constant and determined by factors other than environment. This allows Shinn to posit the notion of an unchanging core of prepatriarchal values embedded in women across time and cultures. Similarly, Barr can assume that slavery isn’t so when the master is a woman. Reifying women makes it difficult for important distinctions to be made between women who belong to different groupings and whose loyalties may pull them in directions away from gender-determined values. Put another way, reification negates the exploration of the relationships between ideas and the material environment. Both books will be of interest to a number of academicians in the fields of Afro-American studies, literary criticism, popular culture, utopia, and women’s studies. They convey to the reader the importance of the study of “marginal” literatures authored by women whose broad appeal has implications our future social order. HODA M. ZAKI HAMPTONUNIVERSITY,VIRGINIA,U.S.A.
REFERENCES Carter, Angela. (1978). The pornography.
Sad&n womon and the ideology of New York: PantheonBooks.
MANHOOD AND POLITICS: A FJSMINISTREADING IN POLITICALTHEORY, by Wendy Brown, 23 1 pages. Rowman &
Littlefield, New Jersey, 1988. US$32.50 cloth, US$14.95 pb. This feminist book on political theory is not focused on women. It details the historical development of a revealing strand of argument on the nature of politics and political leaders. According to Brown, “[mlore than any other human activity, politics has historically borne an explicitly masculine identity” (p. 4). Her project is not so much critical or interpretive, as a rereading of texts by Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Weber to understand their intertwined notions of manhood and politics. I commend this enriching study to anyone in the field. Despite major differences between the views of Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Weber, Brown argues that each was mainstream in traditional political theory and each was a realist seeking theoretical coherence for the existing order of things. Moreover, for each political life was central in their society, each sought to assert the value of politics as a unique and ennobling human experience, and each developed coherent and related ideals of manhood (not equivalent to biological maleness) central to their political philosophies. Aristotle is the first who unapologetically establishes politics as a distinctly male sphere of activity and insists on the naturalness of human political association. His transcendent political organization is an aesthetic ideal, distanced from common life and human need, to “rule with mind ‘purified’ of body” (p. 40). Despite Ancient Greece’s well-known cultivation and glorification of bodily beauty, strength, and skill (p. 53), Brown empha-
279
sizes Aristotle’s view that a “real man is independent of the realm of necessity, of constraints by others, and of the needs and desires of his own body” (p. 55). He resists entrapment by women unable to escape their physiological natures, and gains fulfillment in thepolis. He strives for excellence, virtuosity in performance, and superiority through athletic prowess, exhibiting a willingness to risk life for abstract aims to gain fame. Political life may include pursuit of the highest good, rational contemplation, but also requires recognition through victory over the enemy in battle. Machiavelli makes no such claims about the exalted nature of man. He takes the view that politics emerges from the nature of man: not his superiority but his weakness as one with animalistic and bestial tendencies, living by desire and not need. Man’s essence includes a raw drive toward power; he “strives to conquer, master, dominate or control all that threatens his precarious freedom from the body . . . ” (p. 80). Women, nature, and the “uncontrollable” are bound together as the fortuna cast as antagonist to the political man in search of glory, freedom, and power through competition. Brown extracts a vision of Machiavellian political life that is war-like. Even if guided by purposive reason, it is still dominated by ambition, aggression and brutality in the quest for power. Weber’s views are more perplexing and evocative because his personal letters disclose contrasts with his political essays. He writes of yearning to pursue “great tasks of a purely human nature” thought “less impressive” by the “masculine profession”, and describes the inability of “masculine preoccupation” with external life to understand the “inner side,” which he ascribes to women (pp. 128-129). But he confesses that politics originates in organizations of young men involved in marauding raids of armed rape and pillage, developing into inevitable political “domination” and “legitimate monopoly of violence in society” (p. 135). Brown argues that for Weber the value of politics lies not in addressing collective needs or well-being; it is autonomous from economic and social life. An association is made political through use of force. Its goal is the power, prestige, and glory of the state through organized domination. The tension in Weber’s thought is evident in his defense of the institutionalized expression of manhood as domination, despite his keen perception of its danger of evolving into a political-economic system out of control because it destroys personal values and lets means become ends. The political leader seeks freedom, but despite his personal responsibility for his actions, it is freedom to control and dominate. Brown does not attempt to give complete overviews of these theories. She abstracts the common thread woven throughout, a conception of ideal masculine political life driven by desire for power, unharnessed by human need, with “no purpose save fulfillment of its own ideals of individual and national power and prestige” (p. 173). Outrageous depictions of women, and historical division between men and women in political thought and institutions, are now well-documented. Yet Brown argues that continued focus on the exclusion of women from politics and justifications for their relegation to subordinate status, emphasizes the most foolish, anachronistic, or blatantly misogynist features of a theorist’s account. Others investigate whether a theory is viable if women are added to the “men” allowed to govern. Schol-
280
Book Reviews
ars such as Susan Okin (1979) have argued that for many theories, such modifications generate incoherence. Important as these studies are, Manhood and Politics goes beyond urging that the theories analyzed are not to be dismissed lightly. Brown exposes the rich depiction of masculinist public power, and the relationship between manliness and politics in these traditional political theories. Her goal is to understand the world and discourse that produced women’s omission or subjugation, and to evaluate ways of constructing politics divorced from its historical identification with manhood. Despite the devastating consequences of masculine political dominance, she also notes its compelling features to support her provocative conclusion endorsing transformation, not thorough-going abolition or condemnation of politics rooted in masculinity. Brown charges that Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Golda Meir, Indhira Ghandi, and Margaret Thatcher are almost parodies of modern-day manliness in politics (p. 185), women gaining entry into the political system by accepting the required standards of machismo. Whether or not that assessment is fair, Brown also rejects merely substituting “feminine values” for masculine ones in the public sphere as impossible and inappropriate. “Feminine values” have not been shaped for public purposes, and it is unlikely there are distinctly female values given differences of race, class, culture, and religion (Spelman, 1989). An alternative transformation Brown sketches dictates reintegration of bodily needs intimately tied to women’s experiences through reproduction, reaffirmation of the values of sustaining life and human projects, and revitalization of power in women and men. She advocates changing political commitments from narrow conceptions of heroic conquest, domination, and destruction toward meeting needs, enhancing life, and developing creative activity. Readers may wish for a more specific vision of a nonmasculine political order, and Brown is acutely aware of this limitation of her book. Her explanation is that feminist attempts to articulate theories of political power lack success not only because power is complex and elusive, but also due to adaptation of an insight of Machiavelli’s: women cannot understand power without experiencing themselves as bearing power. JUDITHWAGNERDECEW CLARK UNIVERSITY WORCESTER,MA, U.S.A.
REFERENCES Okin, Susan. (1979). Women in western political thought. Princeton:PrincetonUniversityPress. Spelman,Elizabeth.(1989). Inessenlialwoman. Boston: Beacon Press.
WAR’S ~HER VOICES: WOMEN WRITERS ON THE LEBANESE CIVIL WAR, by Miriam Cooke, 208 pages. The Cambridge University Press, New York, 1988. US$34.50
cloth. Miriam Cooke has undertaken two tasks: a) the identification and presentation of a new group of Arab women writers who shared the experience of Beirut and the Leb-
anese civil war from
1975 to 1982; and b) an examination of modern Arabic literature-especially that related to the war-from a feminist literary perspective. Both tasks are accomplished with intelligence and care. The volume is a valuable contribution. Still, the works discussed may be less singular and the feminist consciousness less developed than Cooke concludes. Cooke has named the women writers the Beirut Decentrists. She has named them. They did not name themselves, for they wrote intellectually and physically separated from each other in a self-destructing city. These women shared a middle or upper-middle class background, but represented a full range of religious confessions and political perspectives. Among the Decentrists are Ghada al-Samman, Hanan al-Shaikh, Emily Nasrallah, Laila Usairan, Daisy al-Amir, Claire Gebeyli, and Etel Adnan. Their voices are the voices of noncombatants living in a war zone. It is not unfair to describe their work as the literary responses to chaos (p. 170), for a shared theme is the realization of the need for individual responsibility and action in an unravelling society. Because these women chose to remain in Beirut while many of their male counterparts left the country, Cooke describes their new consciousness as being both feminist and Lebanese. This is because they assumed (or had thrust upon them) a new responsibility for self and survival, and because by staying they showed a love of country even as that country seemed on the verge of total disintegration. Cooke finds this war “like no other war” in its lack of clear cause, stable enemy, and stereotypical attitudes (p. 164), and rightly wishes to retain these authentic voices when the war is reconstructed by writers and historians after its conclusions. However, some writers about war suggest that, in fact, all wars are experienced as chaos and that their meaning as well as simply “who won” is determined later by interpreters. Further, the themes expressed so parallel French existentialist writing under the German occupation that one must at least ask if the Decentrists are, indeed, singular, or whether they are part of a recurring genre-a genre whose loss is also recurring because of a human need for more structure and meaning than the genre affords. One should also be cautious about the liberation women experience during war. Clearly women become conscious of the fact that they are no longer protected. It is not so clear that they develop a group consciousness or that they (and the men related to them) understand the new circumstances as change. It might be more accurate to view norms as suspended. Also the stayers may or may not survive to see the return of exiles and refugees, and if they do, the resentment expressed during the period of abandonment may quickly ease with return and the acknowledgement that men ARE positioned differently than women during war. There are, after all, expectations that the young and able-bodied man must choose a side and participate. Merely surviving and assisting others to survive does not meet social expectations for men. Finally, the distinction made between patriotism (good) and nationalism (bad) requires more discussion. Cooke sees the former rooted in a shared history, land and family, the second in geography and government. A preference for the former, unfortunately, can lead to political stances which have no room for compromise. In