Anne Phillips Quotes on Politics
Anne Phillips's The Politics of Presence (1995), The Politics of the Human (2015), and Unconditional Equals (2021) develop one of the principal contemporary statements of feminist democratic political theory. The central argument of the earlier book is that the standard politics of ideas — democratic representation as the representation of programs and policy preferences — must be supplemented by a politics of presence in which the actual diversity of the political community is reflected in the demographic composition of its representative bodies. The later books extend the argument to the philosophical analysis of the human (against the easy invocations of common humanity that elide actual social and political differences) and to the unconditional equality of persons that the framework recommends as the foundation of democratic political life.
Quotes
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Attributed to Anne Phillips:
“The presence of women and minorities in political institutions is itself a form of representation, not merely a means to it.”
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Attributed to Anne Phillips:
“Multiculturalism need not, and should not, fix culture as the property of any one description.”
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Attributed to Anne Phillips:
“The body cannot be removed from political philosophy without removing the citizen who has the body.”
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Attributed to Anne Phillips:
“Equality of status is not the same as equality of outcome, but neither is it independent of it.”
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Attributed to Anne Phillips:
“Contractualist political philosophy thinks itself disembodied; it has merely forgotten the bodies it presupposes.”