Feminist Realism: Jean Bethke Elshtain and Armed Civic Virtue

Abstracts Recent scholarship has led both to a reconsideration of political realism and to a recovery of women’s international thought. The two projects meet at a surprising juncture: the rearticulation of realpolitik in gender egalitarian terms. This article introduces and interrogates the seemingly paradoxical hybrid of “feminist realism” through its most accomplished and controversial academic proponent: Jean Bethke Elshtain. I argue that Elshtain merged feminist and realist commitments over many decades despite a hostility to grand theory. Drawing on public works and personal archives, I show how she combined a pessimistic anthropology drawn from Saint Augustine and Reinhold Niebuhr with an account of anarchy inspired by Hannah Arendt with Kenneth Waltz. These realist aspects were reconciled with Jane Addams’ notion of civic householding and unsettled by the spectre of armed civic virtue. Elshtain illuminates a strand in international political thought of greater past and future significance than has yet been appreciated.