Table Of ContentMartha Nussbaum and Politics
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Thinking PoliTics
series Editors: geoff M. Boucher and Matthew sharpe
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Matheson Russell
Irigaray and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Laura Roberts
Lyotard and Politics: A Critical Introduction
Stuart Sim
Hannah Arendt and Politics
Maria Robaszkiewicz and Michael Weinman
Martha Nussbaum and Politics
Brandon Robshaw
Forthcoming titles
Nancy Fraser and Politics
Marjan Ivković and Zona Zarić
Judith Butler and Politics
Adriana Zaharijević
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MARTHA NUSSBAUM
AND POLITICS
Brandon Robshaw
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contents
Introduction: A Public Intellectual 1
1 Nussbaum and the Ancient Greeks: Tragedy, the
Luck-Proofing of Life, and Practical Rationality 10
2 Nussbaum and Education: Socratic Scrutiny,
World Citizenship and the Narrative Imagination 30
3 Nussbaum and Feminism: Liberal Feminism, Adaptive
Preferences and FGM 51
4 Nussbaum and Capabilities: Human Nature, Human
Flourishing and the Ten Capabilities 76
5 Nussbaum and Animal Rights: Capabilities for Animals 99
6 Nussbaum and Religion: Liberty of Conscience,
Accommodation and Burqa Bans 117
7 Nussbaum and the Emotions: Emotions as Cognitive
Judgements – and a Normative Critique of Anger 139
8 Nussbaum and Global Justice: Cosmopolitanism,
Material Aid and Immigration 163
Conclusion: An Organic Whole 185
Bibliography 188
Index 194
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Introduction
A Public intellectual
I first encountered Martha Nussbaum in 1987. She appeared as a
guest on Bryan Magee’s BBC television series The Great Philosophers.
At that time I had not studied philosophy, but took a dilettante-ish
interest in it. The format of each programme was that Magee would
interview a leading contemporary philosopher about the ideas of
some great philosopher of the past, just the two of them sitting on a
sofa, debating; and Martha Nussbaum was brought in as the Aristotle
specialist.
Nussbaum would have been still in her thirties when the pro-
gramme was recorded and was in fact the youngest contributor to the
series (beating Peter Singer, who talked to Magee about Karl Marx,
by one year). Magee introduced her by saying that she had ‘estab-
lished a reputation very young in Aristotle scholarship’ (1988: 34).
She had recently been made professor at Brown University and her
book The Fragility of Goodness had been published the previous year.
There were, no doubt, other, more senior Aristotelian scholars whom
Magee could have chosen. But he could not have made a better choice.
Magee stated that he employed two criteria in selecting which modern
philosophers should discuss the philosophers of the past: they had to
be experts in their subject, of course, but they also had to be skilled
communicators (Magee 2004: 520). The second of these criteria was
no less important than the first. And in Martha Nussbaum he found
an expert communicator; a philosopher with the gift of making highly
complex ideas seem lucid and comprehensible, to rival Magee’s own
gift (which is saying a good deal).
Nussbaum was the only woman guest over the whole series (there
were twelve episodes), which in itself made her something of a trail-
blazer. There were far fewer women philosophers then than there are
now, and Nussbaum was one of the first to achieve a prominent public
profile. But her contribution was notable not only because she was a
young woman in a field of middle-aged men. Her exposition was sharp,
smart and witty; she made ideas that were over two thousand years
old spring to life. Despite finding much to disagree with in Aristotle’s
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martha nussbaum and politics
work – his dim view of women and his defence of slavery, for example –
Nussbaum strongly endorses his approach to philosophy:
the philosopher must be someone who’s attentive to and almost humble
before the variety of human life and its great richness. But at the same
time one who is committed to giving explanations, one who is committed
to mapping that richness in a perspicuous way. In every area he strikes a
kind of balance: between oversimplifying theorising that takes philoso-
phy too far from the richness and complexity and even messiness of ordi-
nary discourse and, on the other hand, a kind of negative or deflationary
philosophising that says theorising is all a house of cards and there’s no
point in asking for and giving explanations. I think Aristotle has found
the right balance, and has probably the best conception of the philosophi-
cal task that one can give to a student. (Nussbaum in Magee 1988: 54)
This characterisation of how philosophy ought to be done is an accurate
description of the way that Nussbaum herself does it.
After this, Martha Nussbaum was on my radar, but for some time
as a rather distant presence. She is a prolific author and every now
and again I would read a review of one of her books and remem-
ber her performance on The Great Philosophers. It was not until
decades later that I began to study philosophy seriously myself; when
I did, I found myself immersed in Nussbaum. My PhD thesis was
in political philosophy – ‘Should a Liberal State Ban the Burqa?’ –
and I soon discovered that Nussbaum had written extensively and
perspicuously on every aspect of the topic. She had written about
liberalism. She had written about feminism. She had written about
personal autonomy. She had written about multiculturalism. She had
written about religious freedom. She had even written, explicitly,
about burqa-wearing.
In the year 2012 I finally got to meet her, a quarter of a century
after first seeing her on television. She gave a paper at a conference
at Durham University which I attended. After her talk we had a brief
conversation – fifteen minutes or so – about our views on the burqa,
which did not entirely align. She was courteous, interested in what I
had to say, and rapier-sharp in defending her own position.
Nussbaum: An Overview
Martha Nussbaum is one of the most important living philosophers,
who has made influential contributions in many areas of moral and
political philosophy. Her work has been widely reviewed and debated,
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introduction: a public intellectual
and has garnered many honours. The following list is far from
exhaustive, a mere sprinkling of greatest hits: she has been awarded
no fewer than sixty-four honorary degrees from universities around
the world; several of her books have won awards, such as the 2000
Book Award of the Year bestowed by the North American Society for
Social Philosophy, for Sex and Social Justice; she was listed among the
world’s top 100 intellectuals by Prospect magazine in 2005 and made
the same list in the American publication Foreign Policy not only in
2005 but in 2008 and 2010 as well; in 2016 she received the Kyoto
Prize, which comes with an award of $500,000 and is ‘the most pres-
tigious award offered in fields which are not eligible for a Nobel,
joining a small group of philosophers that includes Karl Popper and
Jurgen Habermas’ (Aviv 2016); most recently, in 2021 she received
the Holberg Prize, an international award conferred by the Norwe-
gian government, for her ‘groundbreaking contribution to research in
philosophy, law and related fields’.
Yet, to date, no synoptic account of her work has been published.
That is a surprising fact, for which I canvas some possible explana-
tions below. But first, a list of distinctive features of her approach
which demonstrates that it’s high time her oeuvre received the book-
length treatment it deserves:
• For Nussbaum, philosophy’s purpose is to provide ideas and
principles that can be applied in the real world. She is no ivory
tower intellectual; ideas should inform public policy. (This might
be traced to her intellectual debt to Aristotle, with his emphasis
on practice, rather than Plato’s valorisation of timeless, absolute
ideas.)
• Nussbaum is a public intellectual. It is noteworthy that she pub-
lishes not only for academic presses and journals, but also for
newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, the New
York Review of Books and the New Republic (and appears on TV
shows like The Great Philosophers; she has also presented a pro-
gramme on Plato on the Discovery Channel). She wants her ideas
to have influence outside the academy.
• Nussbaum is a superb communicator. She writes in lucid, acces-
sible prose and her works can be read for sheer pleasure, which is
certainly not something that could be said of all academic philoso-
phers. She has the gift of making the reader feel intelligent (unlike
certain theorists who use jargon, abstruse terminology and appeals
to authority to baffle and bully the reader into acceptance).
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martha nussbaum and politics
• Her work is exceptionally wide-ranging, covering ethics, political
philosophy, animal rights, personal autonomy and global justice,
among many other areas.
• Although Nussbaum’s work tackles contemporary issues, she is
a scholar of the history of philosophy. Her books provide excel-
lent introductions to such philosophical giants as Plato, Aristotle,
Kant, Mill and Rawls, relating their ideas to today’s world.
• Nussbaum’s work is broadly in the tradition of analytic philosophy,
but she is also a synthesiser. She brings together ideas and argu-
ments from different centuries, relating them to one another and
developing new theories from a synthesis of the old.
• For Nussbaum, philosophy does not exist in isolation, but can and
should be informed by other disciplines, including the study of liter-
ature, psychology, economics, law, history and behavioural science.
• Certain themes are consistent throughout Nussbaum’s long career:
the Aristotelian concept of flourishing, the importance of the emo-
tions, the principle of equal human worth and dignity. However,
her work has never stood still and she often revisits, revises and
reinvents positions.
• Nussbaum is one of the most important exponents of the liberal
tradition in political philosophy, which in recent years has (unde-
servedly, in my view) fallen from fashion.
• Nussbaum has the ability to find things of value even in philo-
sophical views with which she disagrees. Thus, she has important
reservations about both Stoicism and utilitarianism, but she also
finds many valuable insights in those traditions. She is never guilty
of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
• Finally, her philosophy is rooted in an idea of what it means to be
human (again, following Aristotle).
It would, of course, be stretching matters to suggest Nussbaum’s
work has been neglected, given her media presence, the recognition
she has received and the awards she has won. Nevertheless, it does
seem rather odd that no synoptic account of her work has been pub-
lished. Why should this be?
Nussbaum is an extremely prolific writer and among academ-
ics there can be a distrust (and perhaps envy?) of those who write
‘too much’. A bizarrely hostile review of her work by Geoffrey Galt
Harpham, ‘The Hunger of Martha Nussbaum’, appeared in the jour-
nal Representations in 2002, suggesting that her productivity was the
result of some kind of neurotic compulsion. Harpham’s theory is that
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