Reviews of Books

Back to the Future

Reviewed by Bruce Burgett, University of Washington/Bothell

Perhaps the most familiar of the many commonplaces shared by scholars of the early republic is the one that mandates our return to the founding era if we are ever critically to engage our contemporary world. Pauline Schloesser is no exception to this general rule. In The Fair Sex, she seeks to intervene in current pedagogical, academic, and political debates by providing a counter-reading of the history and historiography of the early republic. Her focus is eighteenth-century social contract theory, which she deems the philosophical underpinning of American republicanism. Though that theory claimed to be universal in its scope, expressing the needs and desires of all humanity, its practice was exclusive from the start, omitting from participation those whose gender, class, or race made them unacceptable to the dominant group. Schloesser's critique of this familiar contradiction leads her to elaborate what she calls a "theory of racial patriarchy" (p. 13)—a theory that she intends as a corrective to histories concerned with gender, race, or class to the exclusion of the other terms.

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This critique derives from two distinct approaches to eighteenth-century thought. Schloesser's indictment of the exclusions built into social contract theory is explicitly indebted to political philosophers Carole Pateman (The Sexual Contract [Stanford, 1988]) and Charles W. Mills (The Racial Contract [Ithaca, 1997]). Unlike Pateman and Mills, Schloesser also holds to normative claims whose genealogies lead back to the same Enlightenment texts and contexts. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas's theory of "communicative rationality," Schloesser contrasts "ideal speech situations" to "instrumental rationalities" wherein "ends are predetermined or coerced by one of more of the parties, and others are not allowed to debate or question those ends" (p. 4). From this perspective, she at once upholds the ideals of eighteenth-century revolutionary humanism and skewers their application. Ideally, all persons, regardless of gender, class, or race, should be entitled to speak freely, on any subject for any purpose, in public or private debate. In practice, that privilege was reserved primarily for white men.

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