Lena Halldenius

For Mary Wollstonecraft, the moral purpose of government is to act on the principle of equality and protect the weak against the fact of inequality. The political day-to-day is characterized by classes and groups with competing interests, some more powerful than others. Wollstonecraft was a republican thinker and so it is reasonable to expect in her writings a notion of political society as representative, but how? After placing Wollstonecraft in relation to contemporary republicanism, we can see that Wollstonecraft’s notion of representation operates on different levels of right: constitutional and political. The “what” that is represented on is, respectively, authority of the people and the perspectives of groups or classes. The people as an abstract, idealized union, so crucial for many republicans, makes sense only on the constitutional level. The political field of law making and policy is an agonistic one where representation has to be practical and no unity is to be expected beyond class or group interests. That is why women and the labouring classes need to have their own interests represented by representatives who share their interests and perspectives.

The argument in this article is that Hobbes' theory of freedom in Leviathan allows for four ways of being free to act - corporal freedom by nature, freedom from obligation by nature, the freedom to disobey and the freedom of no-rule - each corresponding to a particular absence, some of which make sense only in the civil state. Contrary to what some have claimed, this complexity does not commit Hobbes to an unarticulated definition of freedom in tension with the only one that he explicitly offers, which is that freedom consists of nothing other than the absence of external impediments of motion. To be free from obligation is to be free from impediments. As a political subject in the state, the power that is blocked or compelled by law is a person's power to perform artificial acts as her will directs. Laws and prior commitments are external impediments that block or compel making an artificial, institution-dependent act either impossible or unavoidable. The bonds of law bind artificially yet corporally, given that the power that makes them is, quite literally, an external body that moves at will.