Eunomia is a Woman: Philip Allott and Feminism

Abstract

Is Philip Allott a feminist? There are reasons to feel that he might be. Eunomia, after all, is a woman. Literally a ‘good social order’, which Solon lauds as straightening crooked judgments and stopping the works of factional strife, the title of Allott’s extraordinary book is also the name of one of the three daughters of Zeus (chief of the gods) and Themis (tribal law). But there is more than this. Allott’s profoundly reasoned message – that human society is a product of human imagination and sense of possibility – is one that resonates for many feminists. As a methodological matter, almost all feminist legal theorists share his social constructionist stance. In feminist legal theory, this is manifested in the view that the meaning and power of sex/gender come from culture, not nature, and that gender relations are therefore open to revision through the reform of important social institutions such as law. Similarly, Allott writes in Eunomia that the international system is ‘nothing other than a structure of ideas’, thereby exhorting us, feminists included, to interrogate international law at this deep ideational level because such an interrogation can bring about fundamental change. However, any intuition that Allott is a feminist or, at least, that there is an affinity or potential alliance between his project and a feminist project, must contend with his silence about women. In The Health of Nations, Allott’s most recent book, a work of over 400 pages on the need for a global revolution of ideas aimed at remaking all of