Megan Gallagher

As former graduate students of Kirstie McClure (1951–2023), we offer these remembrances of our time with her at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Our hope is to put Kirstie’s contributions to historically-inflected political theory into the fuller context of how she worked as a teacher, mentor, editor, and reader. For all of us, and for many years, Kirstie was among our most significant interlocutors. This kind of scholar, who is ever in conversation, will never be appreciated enough.

The aim of this chapter is to survey civic virtue’s historical trajectory within republican political thought, as well as its comparatively reduced but still important role in contemporary republicanism. It begins by asking three broad questions: what characterizes civic virtue? what is the purpose of civic virtue? and how is civic virtue cultivated? From there, the chapter examines the central concerns of civic virtue in the historical tradition, considering the nature and function of civic virtue for three key thinkers: Aristotle, Cicero, and Machiavelli. It then turns to consider the role of virtue in contemporary republicanism, focusing on the work of historian Quentin Skinner and philosopher Philip Pettit. Section 4 outlines the criticisms that have been levelled at civic virtue.

This article explores the ambivalence of consent presented by Vanessa Springora’s recent memoir, "Consent" (2020). It argues that current notions of affirmative consent are inadequate for understanding the role of autonomy in scenarios characterised by inequality or injustice. Building on the insights of Quill R. Kukla, Emily Owens, and Carole Pateman, the article demonstrates that current concepts of consent are insufficient to address situations of deep structural inequalities, such as those foundational to Springora’s relationship with the writer Gabriel Matzneff. It argues that Matzneff's exploitation of Springora challenges two commonplace beliefs about consent that are nonetheless in tension with one another: the first, about the efficacy and desirability of a standard of affirmative consent, and the second, the belief that adolescents cannot act agentically and do not possess sexual autonomy. Reading these two claims with and against each other points toward the need for a new framework for consent grounded in the concept of relational autonomy. Ultimately, drawing on recent feminist theory, as well as the relational autonomy literature, I suggest that relational autonomy establishes the conditions of possibility under which consent can be established, debated, and refused.

This paper introduces the concept of gothic violence in order to better theorize how domination operates in Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. The fictive companion to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Maria is an account of the titular character’s struggle for self-determination in all aspects of her life, including her desire for a companionate partnership. I argue that Maria’s ultimate lack of freedom is directly attributable to coverture, the patriarchal legal fiction whereby wives are subsumed under the legal persona of their fathers or husbands. Building on scholarship that positions Wollstonecraft as a republican feminist, I show how Maria articulates what I call gothic violence, a form of psychic domination that places the other in a condition of unfreedom by denying their status as an autonomous being and holding them in subordination through a variety of techniques, such as denial of legal and social status and testimonial quieting. I show how gothic violence results in the unfreedom of women through its reliance on domestic settings and intimate relationships, and with the support of law and custom, of which coverture is a central example. I conclude by suggesting that attending to gothic violence in Wollstonecraft’s thought allows us to further see the continuity between her political and fictional writings.

I read Montesquieu’s 'Persian Letters' as an attempt to theorize a liberated alternative to despotic rule. As Montesquieu argues in 'The Spirit of the Laws,' fear—specifically fear of the ruler’s emotional and material excesses—dominates the life of the despotic subject. Although in the 'Letters' the seraglio is the despotic state’s parallel, the seraglio is the site of over owing and barely governed passions. Montesquieu’s solution to the excesses of the seraglio is not the eradication of emotion; rather, he o ers a template for transforming negative passion—fear—into courage, a prelude to a potentially liberating experience. is transformation is portrayed most clearly in the character of Roxane, the rebellious wife whose courageous actions precipitate the collapse of the seraglio. I argue that Roxane’s insurrection and suicide evoke a model established by the Roman matriarch Lucretia. Though not traditional political actors themselves, both Lucretia and Roxane anticipate the possibility of a personal and political liberation through their refusal of fear-based, despotic politics in favour of alternative emotional regimes based in courage.

Rousseau’s embrace of ceremony and festivals in his Considerations on the Government of Poland demonstrates one way for republican political thought to develop a substantive treatment of civic virtue. Differentiating the narcissism of spectacle and theater that Rousseau critiques in the Letter to d’Alembert from the Considerations’ call for a generous affect, I demonstrate that the latter is compatible with a republican ethos premised on civic virtue and patriotic attachment to the nation-state. Rousseau argues for the instantiation of political practices that constantly cultivate political virtue and their associated affective orientations. His treatment of civic ceremonies in the Considerations should be read as an attempt to inculcate patriotic affect in republican citizens via constitutional measures.