In this book, Nancy J. Hirschmann assesses the concept of freedom in the work of five major philosophers in the Western canon—Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill—in relation to three themes. First, she assesses each thinker's approach to freedom as an interpretation of positive freedom (self-mastery) and negative freedom (noninterference) and explores how these two dimensions of freedom interact. Second, she analyzes the ways in which each thinker regarded freedom to be socially constructed. And third, she shows how gender and class play central and defining roles in the way each thinker understood freedom.

The first question that presents itself about this book is why these five thinkers? Although Michel Foucault did not invent the idea of social construction (as Hirschmann notes), he certainly had interesting things to say about its relation to freedom. Similarly, Hannah Arendt would have made an interesting study, or John Rawls, who could be easily fitted into this group. But Hirschmann's choices are the right ones, given her project. This is a study of what Westerners have adopted as their canon and not of what freedom in general is about (although the study has important implications for thinking about this larger question). It challenges the conventional interpretations of freedom within this canon. Here is where the author's choice of three themes is made. For one thing, following Isaiah Berlin, freedom has been bifurcated into “positive” and “negative” conceptions and members of the canon pigeonholed (by Berlin himself, as well as others) as exemplifying either the positive (usually Rousseau and Kant) or negative (usually Hobbes, Locke, and Mill) variety. This has been a mistake, according to Hirschmann, who seeks to show how this mistake has obscured a richer understanding of freedom found in each canonical thinker. To different degrees and in different ways, she shows how, from Hobbes to Mill, all of these thinkers understood freedom as both noninterference and self-mastery and grappled with the challenge of resolving the tensions that arise in light of the ways in which these two dimensions of freedom interact.

Concerning the second theme, social construction, despite the fact that few scholars today would deny that the idea of freedom is in some sense socially constructed, only Mill in his famous essay on “The Subjection of Women” is typically remembered as having recognized this insight. Before the twentieth century, most thinkers grounded their political theories on beliefs about the God-given and immutable nature of men, seen as born free, in a state of nature, possessed of rational capacities, and with a peaceful or warlike character. Such foundationalism, whether religious or naturalistic, placed (most of) these thinkers at a far distance from anything that could be recognized as social constructivism. Yet each was concerned, in different ways, with positive freedom and, thereby, the internal aspects of freedom. They all addressed the question of the kind of subjects that can enjoy freedom, and they all defined freedom in a manner suited to the particular way they wanted men to be. And they intended their theories to be read and adopted by men of power, who would fashion institutions and laws so as to ensure that such subjects of freedoms were created. In this, these thinkers, no matter how “foundationalist” their views of human nature, were alive to the complex relationships among individual freedom, the family, and citizenship, and thus to the importance of the social construction of freedom.

Hirschmann's third and overarching theme is gender and class. Whereas few would deny that the thinkers she analyzes were influenced by their gender or their class, few would argue, as she does, that gender and class play central and defining roles in the way that each thinker approaches freedom. According to Hirschmann, one cannot understand what freedom means in these different approaches without understanding the gendered and class-based dimensions of their arguments. This is because women, the poor, or the working class were the real-world counterexamples against which freedom, which was enjoyed mainly by wealthy men, was conceptualized. The concept of freedom is constructed as male, in part, because those who lacked freedom were female. And freedom is elitist because the elite were, indeed, freer than the poor or the working class.

And so a second question about this book presents itself: why gender and class and not race? Racial inequality shaped the societies in which these philosophers lived, and some of these thinkers (e.g., Mill and Kant) evidently thought about the circumstances of nonwhites and non-Europeans. However, Hirschmann argues, in most cases little if any evidence exists that these philosophers used a “racial” model, as they used a “gendered” model, to construct the self who is (or could be) free. This is less because they were blind to racial diversity than because they lived in racially homogeneous societies and, thus, simply took race more or less for granted. Clearly, this is truer of some of these thinkers (Hobbes in particular) than others (Mill in particular). But the author offers good reasons to suppose that her book covers the most important grounds of freedom, and leaves to other scholars the task of uncovering additional “models” of how the subject of freedom has been understood and shaped in the modern world.

Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory is an impressive piece of scholarship. At its heart are the five chapters devoted to each philosopher, each of which is rich in detail and nuanced argument. The book covers a great deal of ground. At times, the detailed arguments and complex relations among Hirschmann's three themes overwhelm a more generalist understanding of what the five different philosophers argued about freedom. In other words, this book is written for those who already understand, or think they understand, the Western canon. It promises to change how this canon is conventionally understood. And it delivers on this promise.