Western Canon and Missing Women: Locating the Interventions of Susan M. Okin to Contemporary Liberalism

Abstract

The Western philosophical tradition has generally ignored women and the so-called Canon does not include the works of classical thinkers like J.S. Mill on women into its fold. The rare exceptions of the tradition have not influenced the foundational assumptions of even liberal theories of social justice. Liberalism suffers an infirm assumption that women possess a natural inclination to make up a family. There is a natural sympathy at work at the level of family, and, hence, the mutual claims neither compete nor conflict. The individual-centric social justice mainly conceptualized by and for men would trickle down to their families and benefit women and children invisibly. The contemporary political philosophy works uphold this canonical assumption. Taking this diagnosis along, this paper underlines the fact-of-missing women in the Western Canon and highlights the deep contradictions in it. This article attempts to situate Susan Moller Okin’s “Justice, Gender, and the Family” as an ‘exception’ in contemporary liberalism. Her novel critique of John Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice” is attentive to ‘family’ as a unit of justice and is the bedrock of her idea of ‘humanist justice’. This paper is also an attempt to illustrate that the individual, if situated in/along family, does not retain the isolated characteristics and liberal-individualist justice, thus, does not attain the same attraction, if extended to family.