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Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 476 pp.
In recent years, at least two distinct tendencies within contemporary Western feminist debates have emerged. The first involves the internationalization of feminist theory and politics, and the second involves a critique of "victimization." Both of these tendencies have influenced the feminist arguments found in Martha Nussbaum's recent book, Sex and Social Justice.
Feminist theory is only one of several areas that Nussbaum has written on, and in our age of academic specialization, her interdisciplinary breadth is intriguing. She began her career in the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity, writing The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986) and later The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994). She extended her research to contemporary literature (Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, 1990) as well as to legal issues (Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, 1996). Meanwhile, she was a research adviser from 1986 to 1993 at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki which led to her work The Quality of Life (Studies in Development Economics), co-authored with Amartya Sen. Responding to the Gulf War in a Boston Review essay, she wrote a critique of patriotism that provoked several responses by other thinkers, leading to For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (edited by Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen in 1996). In the recent Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Radical Reform in Higher Education (1997), she defended liberal reform within education against the likes of Allan Bloom, William Bennet, and Dinesh D'Souza. Most recently, she is primarily concerned with feminism. Sex and Social Justice (1999) will be followed by Feminist Internationalism as well as Upheavals of Thought: A Theory of the Emotions.
What is one to think of this astonishing breadth of concerns that include the classics, literature, ethics, politics, law, economic development, educational reform, psychology of the emotions, and finally, feminism? Sex and Social Justice alone is a good representation of Nussbaum's style of thought. In a densely packed text, she covers a wide variety of topics. All but two or three of the fifteen chapters were published as articles, and as much as she reworked...