Mackinnon’s critique of objectivity

Catharine MacKinnon describes herself as a radical feminist, one who practices, she writes, “feminism unmodified.” MacKinnon thus takes her theory to be fundamentally, formatively a feminist one, unlike Marxist or liberal feminist theories, which are mere adaptations of preexisting theories to accommodate women’s concerns. But MacKinnon also understands her radical feminism as a political and theoretical attack on the liberal establishment at its roots, in its most fundamental nature, at a deeper level than disagreements within liberalism (or Western political philosophy more generally) right and left. MacKinnon’s objections to liberalism are multiple and complex: she criticizes liberalism, for example, on the grounds that it endorses “individualism, naturalism, voluntarism, idealism, and moralism.” 1 But MacKinnon identifies the core of her objections to liberalism as a “political-methodological” or “political-epistemological” critique of liberal “objectivity.” Her most ambitious political, epistemological, and even metaphysical claim against liberalism is her argument that there is an intrinsic link between “objectivity” as the purportedly neutral but actually male epistemological point of view expressed in or presupposed by liberalism, and “objectification” as the social-sexual process that subordinates women. 2 To the degree to which liberals are committed to objectivity, MacKinnon argues, so too are they inevitably committed to the subordination of women.