Me: Talking About Books

I did a “Five Books” interview with the Browser, talking about five books that I think are foundational to my view of progressive politics. I think I probably make the best case for Susan Moller Okin’s Justice, Gender, And The Family:

This is definitely a book I recommend to men. A lot of men who have left-wing political views of one kind or another say, “Well of course I’m a feminist! Of course women’s equality is important.” They pay lip service to that goal. But being men, they do not necessarily have a visceral sense of what these questions are all about. Susan Okin has written a book which is not visceral at all. It’s an intellectual book, it’s very abstract. It engages with all of the “great men” of political theory through a feminist lens, in a very rigorous and analytical way. She shows that the exclusion of women from centuries of conversation – about what equality, liberalism and freedom mean – has had a really distorting influence. I think the main message of her book is that you can’t take a political order that’s been constructed over hundreds of years on the basis of the disempowerment of women, and then one day say, as a kind of add-on, “oh and also we’ll treat women fairly”. Once you take seriously the idea that women are equal, you actually have to rethink social and political institutions from the ground up.

The basic dynamic of the ongoing feminist revolution is to take a very simple, almost banal claim — women and men are equal in the same sense that “all men are created equal” — and to unpack the series of very radical conclusions that turn out to follow from that.