The Nature of Political Theory

130 The Nature of Political Theory

on equal terms. The theme of an overt feminist liberal capitalism has not really been
developed within feminism, although it is clear that it would be overtly hostile to
Okin’s Rawlsian stance and more at home with a Gauthier or Hayek.^20 However,
even with the classical liberal fold there are markedly different justificatory stances
and little sign of unanimity. For example, the natural right based liberalism of, say,
Mary Wollstonecraft, is clearly antagonistic to the utility-based liberal arguments of
J. S. Mill. The arguments are virtually irreconcilable in some formats. Both the latter
arguments are also very different again (and opposed to) the Rawlsian inspired social
liberalism of Okin. This more recent social liberal feminist argument (regardless of
its extension of the Rawlsian impartiality) is potentially as much at odds with both
the natural rights and utilitarian liberalisms of Wollstonecraft and J. S. Mill as it is
with the classical liberalism of Friedrich Hayek. Second, in terms of the literature on
twentieth-century feminism, socialist, radical, and postmodern feminist writers have
all been hostile to the future ofanyform of liberal feminism.
Finally, in terms of feminist arguments in the last two decades of the twentieth
century, justice-based arguments have been subject to deep criticism from another
strand of feminism associated with the ‘ethic of care’. The psychoanalytic work of
Nancy Chodorow, and more particularly Carol Gilligan in the early 1980s, on the
distinctive qualities of the female personality, gave rise to the supposition that women
have a very different moral view on the world. For Gilligan, particularly, women
have a ‘caring’ approach. They are more altruistic, nurturing, and self-sacrificing.
Gilligan links this disposition with an ‘ethic of care’, which she contrasts to a more
male-orientated ‘ethic of justice’ (see Chodorow 1978; Gilligan 1982). Morality for
women is therefore more concerned with a moral imagination, a caring disposition,
attending to responsibilities and relationships, rather than finding the right or best
principle, following rules and attending to rights and fairness, which are characteristic
of the ‘ethic of justice’. In many ways, the conflict between the ethic of care and the
ethic of justice has marked out a great deal of feminist debate in the closing decades
of the twentieth century (see Squires 1999: 141ff.). Other writers, such as Sara
Ruddick and Jean Beth Elshtain, also argued that women are primarily involved in
the preserving the lives of children and nurturing. Women are thus different to men
in certain fundamentally important ways. This has given rise to the development of
‘maternalist theory’ within feminism. However, unlike Gilligan, Elshtain and Ruddick
think that such an idea could have an immense impact on restructuring the public
sphere.^21

Spheres of Justice

Moving away from the Rawlsian argument, one final justice-based theory to mention
here, briefly, focuses on a more pluralistic stance. Michael Walzer’s theory of justice
identifies different distributive criteria applying within different social spheres. Dis-
tributions, in one sphere, may therefore not be appropriate in another. Thus, there is
no one clear principle (qua Barry or Rawls) that can adjudicate for all spheres. Walzer