ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how children and childhood are accounted for in Christian accounts of original sin, and the liberal philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, John Dewey and John Rawls. It also engages in relevant feminist critiques of some of these scholars to highlight the entwined accounts of women and children, and grapple with the private–public divide that characterizes liberal political communities. It does so to argue that ideas of reason, maturity and autonomy across all these texts operate to inform, shape and limit how we are able to think and talk about children and their rights. I argue that across all these philosophical works, there is a preoccupation with children as future-adult subjects; as becomings rather than present-children as beings.
