Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism

At the centre of this project is the crucial importance of freedom for the Enlightenment thinker Mary Wollstonecraft's account on the relation between morality and politics. Her theory is interpreted to imply that moral agency necessarily presupposes freedom, something which shapes her views on politics, property, and law as well as family relations and friendship.This project started within the research programme “Understanding Agency. Conceptions of Action, Human Nature and Value in the Western Philosophical Tradition”, which has funding from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation) and involves researchers from several universities with Uppsala University as host. This project investigages the relation between moral and political agency and between moral agency and political background conditions in the Enlightenment philosopher and feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft's thought. The emphasis is on the crucial and central important of the concept of freedom in her works. Halldenius develops an interpretation to the effect that moral agency, for Wollstonecraft, necessarily presupposes freedom, something which makes the implications of unfreedom much more radical than previously thought. Wollstonecraft saw freedom as independence, socially as well as cognitively or mentally. Social dependence hampers mental independence, affects people's deliberative capacities and makes moral agency unavailable since a human being who is unfree does not dispose of her own person. This approach to freedom and its moral implications shapes her theory on politics, institutions, law and property as well as family relations and friendship. The project has resulted in the monograph Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism (Pickering & Chatto, 2015), which was published in Swedish as Mary Wollstonecraft, feminismen och frihetens förutsättningar (Thales, 2016), and a substantial number of articles and book chapters. The Bank of Sweden funding is now concluded but the project lives on.