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INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY:
PROFESSOR ATTRACTA INGRAM, Department of Politics, University College Dublin -
National University of Ireland, Dublin, on 16 June, 2005, on the occasion of the
conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, CAROLE PATEMAN.
A Sheansail�ir, agus a mhuintir na hOllscoile,
I am privileged to present Professor Carole Pateman for the highest honour that
this university can award. Carole Pateman is a highly esteemed and brilliant
scholar, political theorist, and educator.
A native of Maresfield, Sussex, England. Carole Pateman pursued her education at
Ruskin College and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she read Politics,
Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) for her BA degree. She remained in Oxford to
pursue political philosophy and received her D. Phil. in 1971. She joined the
University of Sydney in 1972. Since 1990 she has been Professor of Political
Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She continued her
connections with Australia as an Adjunct Professor at the Research School of
Social Sciences, the Australian National University from 1993-2000.
Pateman writes about the political and social thought of Western democratic
political systems, especially the social contract argument, and is also an
outstanding contributor to feminist analysis of the classic arguments about
obligation and consent and how actual contracts such as the marriage or the
employment contract fit in.
Pateman has brought feminist analysis into the mainstream of political theory by
her combination of rigorous scholarship and a critique that bears on
contemporary inequalities of power and status. Her approach exposes silences in
some of the canonical writers of political theory, particularly Hobbes, Locke,
and Rousseau, and has made it impossible to think of them in the traditional
way. Her writings on democracy and participation, on contract, consent, and
obligation, on citizenship and employment, and on the social and political
structuring of the relations between the sexes, have transformed the debates
around these issues. The powerful social contract idea that informs Western
constitutionalism and our view of democratic legitimation is but one dimension
of contract according to Pateman's account. Intertwined with it are two further
dimensions, the sexual contract which is the subject of her justly famous book
of that title, and the racial contract, an aspect of that book which is now
being taken up and developed by Pateman herself and others. Pateman is
interested in how the assumption of these further contracts facilitate political
and social subordination. She provides sophisticated tools for the analysis of
the hidden relationships between power and gender, race, ethnicity, and
class.
The worldwide reception of Carole Pateman�s work is an index not only of its
quality but of the political and social immediacy of the problems that benefit
from her high-powered theoretical tools. Problems of social and civic exclusion,
poverty, contemporary slavery, the sex industry, the arms trade, consideration
of the powers of transnational corporations, of the interpretation and
implementation of human rights, of employment and citizenship, are but some of
the issues that call on the work of political theorists, and Pateman's writings
show her as an exemplary public thinker actively contributing an intellectual
basis for the resolution of these problems and the making of a more just
society.
Carole Pateman is highly influential both within her own field of politics and
also in history, literature, law, and feminist studies. Her focus on
participation was some thirty years ahead of its time and has made her book
Participation and Democratic Theory (1970) a contemporary classic. Her
prizewinning bestseller The Sexual Contract (1988) is an innovative development
of reflections stirred by her book on political obligation (1979). She has
written a great deal more, exciting critical attention and contributing to the
spirit of controversy and contestation that marks the world of ideas.
Professor Pateman has received many prestigious appointments and awards. She has
been a visiting Professor at Stanford (1980) and Princeton (1985-86), the
University of British Columbia (1996), and is currently a Distinguished Visiting
Professor in the School of European Studies at the University of Cardiff (2005).
She was the inaugural holder of the Kersten Hesselgren Professorship of the
Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and the Social Sciences in
1988-89. She has been a Fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioural Sciences (1984-85) a Member of the School of Social Science at
Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (1986-87), a Guggenheim Fellow in
1993-94, and a Fellow at the University of Manchester in 1997.
In recognition of her contribution to political science Professor Pateman was
made a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 1980, and a
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. The Australian
National University awarded her an honorary doctorate of letters in 1998. She
has been President of the Australian Political studies Association, and she was
the first woman President of the International Political Science association.
PRAEHONORABILIS CANCELLARIE, TOTAQUE UNIVERSITAS:
Praesento vobis hanc meam filiam, quam scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et
idoneam esse quae admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus in Litteris,
idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.
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