Translated material
M. vs. AND.
And the idea of equal rights for women can be derived from two main sources that feed seemingly completely different ideological “reservoirs” - from Hobbes and Bakunin.
Hobbes, discussing justice, noted that justice lies in fulfilling the requirements of the contract. Therefore, the specific content of this term is determined by the specific terms of the contract - and before the conclusion of the contract, no justice exists. There is, according to Hobbes, the notorious “war of all against all.”
The assumption of the primordial “war of all against all” is, in fact, similar to the assumption that man is spherical, that is, a purely theoretical assumption put forward for convenience. Chebyshev seems to have proposed this spherical shape as the starting point for a mathematical theory of clothing design. Chebyshev knew what he was doing, unlike the shocked fashion designers who had gathered for his lecture. Hobbes, instead of immediately making a reservation - that “let us assume for simplicity that before the conclusion of a contract, everyone is at war with everyone,” insisted on the historical reality of this very war. As a result, an intelligible, in fact, theory of the foundations of law turned into an odious theory of the foundations of social science - and into an object of leftist criticism.
Bakunin, although he did not directly indicate this, argued with Hobbes on a number of points. One of these points was “war of all against all”, another important point was “the power of authority”. Bakunin did not object to the second point, but made his own conclusions - opposite to Hobbes's. Bakunin's line of reasoning can roughly be represented as follows: before the emergence of the state, human society is not at all in a war of all against all; there is no “tacit social contract” - it is a fiction; contractual justice, which must be preserved by some arbitrator (authority, sovereign), also does not exist. Thus, state power, indeed - here Bakunin agrees with Hobbes - based on the power of the sovereign and on formal relations, the guarantor of which the sovereign is, is unnecessary and unfair .
But what then is justice? Bakunin, without going into arguments, declaratively identified justice with equality . This move is quite understandable, although completely wrong. It is understandable, because “in everyday life” “fair” is identified with the natural and original (“this is quite fair” = “this is quite natural”). To act justly means to act according to nature. The dispute about justice comes down to a dispute about nature. One can consider a person to be initially a biological being and identify fair actions with those that any monkey would perform in a person’s place (more strictly, with those actions that psychologists and ethologists should study). One can assume that by nature man is a cultural being, after which justice can be derived from Hobbes. But it is possible - in the spirit of pragmatism - to deduce the justice of an action from the problems that this action is intended to solve (if the decision is effective, then the action is fair). All of the above approaches are used by us in one way or another. As for Bakunin’s “equality,” it is no better than Hobbes’s war of all against all: the statement “suppose that everyone is initially equal” is essentially no different from the statement “suppose that man is shaped like a ball.”
Bakunin did not go into these subtleties: the needs of his polemics did not require theoretical sophistication - just as the needs of the revolutionary polemics of the times of the Great French Revolution did not require it (when the idea of the identity of justice and equality “went to the masses”). The struggle, relatively speaking, between “Bakuninism” and “Hobbesism” against the backdrop of Hobbes’s uncorrected methodological error led to the fact that justice and equality began to be identified everywhere, with or without reason. As a result, Bakuninism and Hobbesism merged into a single cocktail, the liberal idea of equality of all before the law, that is, equal rights .
Today it is impossible to be a liberal and not demand “equality for minorities.” Women also fall into the category of “minorities”. Soon, probably, inanimate objects will also be included. The problem, of course, is not that women are “worse” than men or in some way “not equal” to men. There are many examples when a woman copes well with “male” work: just remember the brilliant gallery of rulers: Catherine the Great, Marie de Medici, Elizabeth of England, Margaret Thatcher. Many of the traditional “inability” of women (to drive a car well or feed the family abundantly) are precisely traditional , that is, they arise from social habits and complexes, and not from any biological “purely female” qualities.
The problem, I repeat, is not women or “minorities”. The problem is the flaw of the unconditional identification of justice and equality. And more broadly, the problem is the depravity of everything unconditional. A normal reaction to the dictates of unconditional justice, and even served with a legal “side dish,” turns out to be a funny mixture of anarchism and chauvinism. From these speculative amusements, in fact, it is not so far from the “amusements” of the military, to the physical “people’s war” against “minorities” and - alas - to the war of the sexes .
Although it is precisely in relation to gender that the naive slogan “ Make love not war ” is most likely relevant.
Kirill Yakimets