Partisan Virtue

Historians of political thought interested in partisanship have long privileged the perspective of male canonical thinkers. Scholars have turned to Thucydides and Plato for insights on stasis, Aristotle on civic friendship, Niccolò Machiavelli on tumults, David Hume and Edmund Burke on political parties, and The Federalist on faction. Even political theorists who are primarily concerned with contemporary theories of partisanship often turn to these “usual suspects” to strengthen their otherwise largely non-historical arguments. Yet this narrow focus on canonical men has led scholars to neglect an important if counterintuitive perspective on partisanship which we find in the political thought of eighteenth-century women, for whom partisanship offered an unexpected but essential means to political inclusion.Partisan Virtue focuses on two such women political thinkers from opposite ends of the political spectrum: the Tory conservative and early feminist Mary Astell and the historian and radical republican Catharine Macaulay. Their identity as women and partisans placed them on the margins of politics--neither fully excluded nor included. As women, they were not allowed to hold public office or cast votes. Yet they were nonetheless partisans who belonged to a political group and intervened in the principal debates of their time. This marginal position enabled Astell and Macaulay to appreciate both the benefits of partisanship as a mechanism of political inclusion for those formally excluded from politics--a mechanism their male contemporaries ignored--and the dangers of the political virtues these men advocated to bridle partisanship. The book argues that the approach to political ethics that emerges from Astell and Macaulay's works should be of continuing interest to contemporary political theorists. Not only does it speak more satisfactorily to current political concerns about polarisation and echo chambers, but theirs is a far more inclusive kind of partisanship than the one offered by their male contemporaries and present-day scholars. It does not ask of people on the margins to get rid of their anger, indignation, or righteousness, before becoming partisans. Instead, Astell and Macaulay embrace these features, and recognise that partisanship, when done right, is precisely the vehicle for the political inclusion of those on the margins.