ABSTRACT
Feminist scholarship has focused on exploring the barriers to women's inclusion within existing authority practices, in part because feminism in the West has been linked most directly to liberal, democratic traditions. Yet, the more one focuses on the tendency, even in liberal, democratic traditions, to identify authority with command, the more one concludes that the concept and practice of authority itself needs to be subjected to critical, feminist analysis. This chapter focuses on how particular notions of judgment construct a specifically gendered discourse on authority. Hannah Arendt argued that it was compassion, or more precisely, the confusion of pity for the masses with solidarity that accounted for the destructiveness and violence of revolutionary authority. Solidarity enables the deliberate and dispassionate establishment of "a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited". Arendt calls solidarity a "principle that can inspire and guide action".
