ABSTRACT
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. 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". This chapter investigates and evaluate this most ambitious of MacKinnon's criticisms of liberalism. It analyzes MacKinnon's critique of liberal objectivity as comprising three different, and escalating, types of criticism: an internal criticism of specific liberal claims, a metaphysical criticism, and a moral/political criticism. The chapter argues that MacKinnon's successful criticisms of liberalism and objectivity, despite her own descriptions of them, and despite liberal antagonism toward her, should be understood to lie largely within the liberal tradition and its norms, both moral/political and epistemological.
