Sophie Smith- Okin, Rawls and the Politics of Political Philosophy
Sophie Smith, Associate Professor of Political Theory, Oxford
The paper historicises, for the first time, the debate between Susan Moller Okin and John Rawls about justice, gender and the family. Drawing on archival sources, it offers new perspectives on this exchange, and, more specifically, on the relationship of the principles of justice to the family, and the relationship of the family to the basic structure. In light of this history, the paper explores further interpretative issues around canonicity, contingency and charitable reconstruction in the context of Rawls’s developing theory of justice. Finally, it offers some reflections on what I call the 'politics of political philosophy’ - that is, the importance not simply of attending to the socio-political context that might shape any one author’s preoccupations, but to the strategies and wagers involved in engaging with the mainstream from the margins.
I am a historian of political thought; my main research addresses the nature and limits of the state, the intersection between ideas of empire, citizenship and political philosophy, and the historical development of philosophical and scientific approaches to politics. My work to date has focussed primarily on early modern perspectives on these issues. I also work on the reception of Aristotle's Politics and its impact on political philosophy from the late medieval period through to the eighteenth century.
I have further research interests in Greek and Roman political thought (particularly Plato and Aristotle), the relationship between philosophy and imaginative literature (especially the uses of drama, imaginative prose and poetry by political theorists and the reasons they give for doing so), and contemporary environmental and feminist political theory.