Social Justice and Feminist Agency

Abstract

Explores how Arendt, when speaking of equality, is not thinking of substantial equality with its social or economic dimensions as do those who call for distributive justice, choosing to limit the scope to formal, political, equality. Yet, political equality is a quasi-substantial freedom that she sees as power: the capacity to act in concert and speak on an equal footing in the common world. In this way, even though social injustice remains a part of contemporary democratic life with which Arendt’s thinking as originally formulated seems unwilling and/or unable to address or redress, her particular way of yoking equality and freedom in the capacity to act in concert and speak on an equal footing in the public sphere, provides the resources with which one can, through some of her central convictions, develop an intersectional feminist account of agency that points a way toward a different resolution of Arendt and feminism. relation and, more importantly, to innovative approaches to the practice of enhancing freedom and seeking justice.