Key Thinkers: Martha Nussbaum (born 1947)

Life

Martha Nussbaum grew up in Bryn Mawr, Philadelphia, an upper-middle-class area with an elitist reputation. She noted early her mother’s deep unhappiness after giving up her career to care for their family, but also had an encouraging figure in her father. Before entering higher education, she attended Baldwin School, an academically vigorous all-girls academy that encouraged difficult thought and discourse to which she attributes the seeds of her current work. After a classics BA at New York University, she moved to Harvard University for her graduate studies. She gravitated towards philosophy because of the difficult and intriguing work going on in that area with scholars like G.E.L. Cole and Bernard Williams, although she faced sexual harassment and persistent invalidation of her work because of its treatment of supposedly “female” topics like the nature of emotion.

Nussbaum is a public intellectual and has reached a level of notoriety inside and outside academia. She has advised the UN and taught at top world universities such as Harvard, Brown, and Oxford, while occasionally taking aim at other well-known scholars like Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler, advocating for a practical, change-based approach to political science. She is now the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago.

Works

Nussbaum is well-published on numerous topics related to political philosophy. She has written about legal ethics, global justice, and human rights—to name but three specific topics. Her analysis often uses a liberal feminist lens. She is well-known for her work on the classical writing of Aristotle and Plato, but it was her international economics work that led her to cast a feminist lens on her scholarship because of the economic injustice she saw perpetrated against women in the developing world. Many have referred to her as one of the most prolific feminist political philosophers of our time.

She collaborated with economist Amartya Sen and others on the human capability approach, which evaluates human well-being in terms of abilities of individuals. This work led to her book Women and Human Development (1999). The theory brought out in this text was later instrumental in the formation of the UN’s Human Development Index. Nussbaum became particularly interested in women’s issues in the global south, but ultimately, she was writing about freedom and its reach for all people. She has been lauded for applying a feminist lens to the capability approach and offering a more concise engagement with the capability approach as key to women’s human development.

Nussbaum has written for The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and other trade presses. Her writing is pervasive in scholarly and non-scholarly publications. She has almost 60 honorary degrees from colleges and universities across the globe. Nussbaum is a prolific writer who has produced almost two dozen books and edited an equal number.

Nussbaum noted that feminist philosophy was key to understanding new theories of justice and answering questions about moral, political, and legal issues. She understood the importance of cosmopolitanism and wrote about “compassionate citizenship.” The notion of compassionate citizenship resonated for many in the post-9/11 political landscape. Her area of theoretical expertise includes human rights, emotions, development, legal ethics, and justice. Her work spans from Aristotle to Trump. She is well-known for her clear, concise writing style and comments on politics and ethics. However, she is not without critics, who find her work to be too enmeshed in the liberal tradition and not critical enough of systemic problems owed to the neoliberal framework of many Western governments.

Key Thinkers: Martha Nussbaum (born 1947)

Key Thinkers: Martha Nussbaum (born 1947)

Life

Works

Further Reading