The Autonomous Animal: Self-Governance and the Modern Subject
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Conceiving a Human Being 1. The Choice of Law: Autonomy between Norm and Creation 2. Mature Subjects: Physical Education and the Political Child 3. Intoxicated Citizens: America's Drug War and the Body Politic 4. Man Is a Political Animal: Self-Discipline and Its Beastly Other 5. Fit to Be Tied: Exercise Fads and Our Addiction to Autonomy Conclusion: Freedom and Self-Governance Notes Bibliography Index
Locating the Social in Social Justice
A concept of social justice in which the social names a subset of justice suggests that the social constitutes a distinct sphere within which a distinctively social justice is produced and experienced and within which a specifically social injustice can be addressed. Theorists from Dewey to Latour to Foucault, however, have questioned the conceptualization of the social as a separate substantive domain within which a distinctively social justice can be found. I seek to move from a substantive to a relational conceptualization of the social in social justice, drawing from Dewey's concept of the social as an associative rather than an aggregative relation. A relational approach situates the social not in a delimited substantive domain within which justice can be assessed but as a mode of collective association through which justice is performed and produced. Relocating the social from a substantive sphere to a relational practice transforms the problem of social justice. Rather than assessing the justice of outcomes within a specifically social sphere, the problem of social justice addresses the interactive practices of social actors engaged in the collective project within which justice is dialectically and simultaneously a process and an outcome, a means and an end. I illustrate the challenges of practicing a relational conception of social justice in an antidisplacement protest against a neighborhood redevelopment proposal in Camden, New Jersey. The case study suggests that furthering the goal of social justice focuses on everyday practices of associative interaction in which relations of democratic equality are undermined or encouraged.
“Made for Man's Delight”: Rousseau as Antifeminist
A CHRONIC PROBLEM IN STUDYING Rousseau is the paradoxical nature of his works.' His Emile (176I) is no exception. Officially condemned but widely read, it was a boldly anticlerical and completely anti-institutional treatise on education. The book became an inspiration to both reformers and revolutionaries, but in one area it also disappointed many who embraced much of what Rousseau maintained in Emile as well as in his other critiques of society. Because Rousseau slighted the education of women, Emile became a special source of chagrin to contemporary feminists and to many of the women who avidly read Rousseau in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the fifth and final book of Emile, where he prescribes an education suitable to the woman in the protagonist's life, the radical Rousseau emerges as a reactionary, both by the standards of his own time as well as by our own. Emile was to be a critical, self-reliant citizen, entitled to an elaborate education and full equality with his peers. Sophie, on the other hand, was to be trained only as a wife to Emile and as a mother to his children. It was in total earnestness that Rousseau uttered one of his most misleading epigrams: "Woman is made for man's delight."2 Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the most vigorous proponents of equality of the sexes in law and education in the eighteenth century, expressed considerable admiration for Rousseau's equalitarianism in praising the achievements of the French Revolution in her Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (X 794). But two years before, when she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, she had pleaded with the leaders of revolutionary France to ignore the views of Rousseau on the subject of women and to grant them full equality under the new constitution. She was very direct in attacking Rousseau's conception of female nature and women's rights: "I may be accused of arrogance; still I must declare, what I firmly believe, that all the writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory