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University of Chicago political philosopher and maternal feminist Jean Bethke Elshtain has devoted her academic career to pointing out inextricable ties between politics and ethics. Among her many books are Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought; Who Are We? Critical Reflections, Hopeful Possibilities; and Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World. In 2005–2006, she delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Scotland, following in the footsteps of William James and Hannah Arendt. In them, she considered the topic of what would become Sovereignty: God, State, and Self, published by Basic Books in 2008. Agnieszka Tennant spoke with Elshtain—her former academic advisor in the master's degree program in international relations at the University of Chicago—about questions prompted by the book. This interview is an edited excerpt from their conversation.
In Sovereignty, you observe the following irony: "In our own liberal society at the moment, and in most of the Western democracies in general, we are pursuing a paradoxical project: We are most aware of those with physical and mental disabilities; we want to provide them access. Yet at the same time, our most enthused-about and ideologically fraught projects aim at creating a world with no such persons in it." How did we arrive at the point of convergence of such opposites?
These kinds of opposites have been embedded in the great Western project from the beginning. If you put a premium on certain kinds of developed capacities—let's say, those who can enact projects of freedom, who have achieved a certain level that we recognize as definitively human—and tethered to that you have philosophies that measure us by our capacity to engage in rational operations, then those who can never maximize their capacity and who lack certain capabilities are going to be a huge problem. You can see that in the social contract literature. John Locke doesn't know what to do with idiots and imbeciles, in the tender language of the day. Where do they belong? They can't sign the contract. They're outside of the rationally interacting universe. Once you set that in play, an ongoing devaluation of certain categories of people takes hold.
Because we want to be compassionate and we feel badly about this, we say we've got to make things fairer for these kinds of people. I don't want to negate the importance of those projects for access. But even as those go on, at the present moment we're rapidly aiming for a more and more strenuous norm of perfection, with the promise and the possibilities of eugenics—or positive genetic enhancements, as we're supposed to call it. We can get more people of an ideal type, where we try to tweak off the bad bits of the genome. That's why a number of ethicists from the Netherlands have said that if you're a parent of a child with disabilities in a liberal Western democracy, particularly if they're mental disabilities, you have reason to be worried—precisely because of the devaluation that's placed on such human beings. Think about what it says to an adult with Down syndrome that the society in which she lives aborts 90 percent of Down pregnancies, and that in an ideal world there wouldn't be any like her left. That says something about how she is valued.
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