Partisan Virtue: The Politics of Inclusion in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Political Thought

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 rad