Hypatia

For all its variety, feminist theory can be understood as a kind of "hermeneutic of suspicion," and hence it largely operates as a critique of existing theories and practices, including political theory and practice. This special issue is aimed at showing the kinds of contributions—not just critiques—that feminist theory brings to political thought, especially now that political philosophy is well past the realpolitik thinking of much of the twentieth century. Until about twenty years ago, most political thinkers reduced politics to a practice of individuals' maximizing their own self-interest through rational calculations, or as a province of warring parties trying to take hold of the reins of official government. In contrast, over the past two decades, there has been a resurgence of theorizing about democratic theory, the public sphere, and civic engagement. An increasing number of political theorists have been thinking about the role of citizens, about nongovernmental spaces of common problem solving, and about the ways in which diverse individuals could develop a common will—a truly public opinion—that might provide normative direction for public policy and hold governments more accountable to their people. In short, political theory has turned from realpolitik toward normative ideals and practices for democratic self-government, as well as from the province of government toward civil society.

It may be safe to say that today most political theorists from around the globe and even from different ideological orientations focus on democratic theory, and many of them specifically on how democracy can be more deliberative, that is, moved through reasoned argument and public discussion, rather than force and manipulation. Many of the values and goals democratic theorists hold are shared by feminist theorists as a whole, even though feminist theorists have been some of the most perceptive critics of underlying sexist notions in modern political philosophy, from the public-private split, to the "man" of reason, to the totalizing focus on agreement that can make differences and plurality [End Page vii] "disappear." In the process of critiquing modern political philosophy, feminists have made major contributions to the field. But it has long seemed to us that these contributions have not been sufficiently heeded, and also that feminist scholars have more to say about what a more democratic society might look like, how it can be theorized and developed. On this point, we sorely grieve the passing of Iris Young, whose most recent work was moving away from a trenchant criticism of deliberative democratic theory and to her own construction of what it might be. It is in this spirit that we planned this special issue.

The idea for this issue grew out of our twin desires to expand the scope of feminist interventions in democratic theory and to foreground feminist engagements so that they might receive more attention by mainstream (mostly male) democratic theorists. We come at this topic from over a decade of work in the field of applied democratic theory, having met through our association with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, an organization that researches the question of how to make democracy work. We have found that practitioners in the applied field often look to mainstream democratic theorists to enlighten their work, yet the dearth of feminist arguments from which to draw necessarily means that feminist democratic theory has received little attention. We also come at this topic as scholars and political theorists. Our own academic work—McAfee in philosophy and Snyder in political theory—draws on both feminist and democratic theory, and we would like to encourage more fruitful engagements between those two subfields.

What types of politics do different theories of democracy enable and constrain? In the past feminist interventions in democratic theory (including Iris Young's many contributions) have focused on the limitations of deliberative models of democracy, such as its supposed privileging of rational thinking and discourse. Theorists of "radical democracy," or rather "agonistic" democracy, such as Chantal Mouffe, emphasize deliberative theory's potentially tyrannical aim for consensus and its reliance on philosophical foundations, such as rights or reason. Some contributors to this issue continue this line of criticism and stress...