ABSTRACT
This Chapter investigates the pre-social, abstract individual which forms the basis of this tradition and which communitarian and many second wave feminist critiques see as the liberal individual. Feminist critiques seek to highlight the contrast between the search for abstract universality, finding a common characteristic of humans, and their specific experienced empirical circumstances in a gendered world. A search for abstraction or universalisation has been criticised by many in the feminist movement as a male or masculine way of thinking. Some feminists argue that the liberal feminist view of the inclusion of women in the universal subject contains the seeds of its own destruction. The chapter analyses communitarian critiques of the pre-social before investigating Carol Gilligan and the ethic of care critiques. Many communitarians are critical of abstraction, which they see exemplified in Rawls's conception of the person in the Original Position precisely because that person's contingencies are extracted.
