“You can’t find me in the club”: the fate of a reliable mainstream woman essayist

This essay reflects on the fate of a reliable woman essayist of our time: Martha Nussbaum. Brian Leiter has reminded us of his 2017 vote for Best Anglophone philosophers since 1957. Similar essayists, Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, make the top 10. Martha Nussbaum is not on the list of 20 at all. Poor Martha Nussbaum! Neither am I though. I propose that it is like a club, as lots of others probably think. The club has solved various problems, which are difficult to solve - if you don’t solve them well, you would easily lose your students, amongst other things - and maybe Martha Nussbaum is not a proper member of the club. One might propose that she is good for a kind of reader who enjoys Victorian classics: a reader in search of a lot of common sense, some system, good scholarly knowledge, but readability rather than cult-like obscurity, big books to delve into, briefer articles too, the big issues of the day and material of enduring value, philosophy which is involved with the problems our lives confront us with - that combination please. But in my experience, there are stark divisions amongst such readers, for example pro-Dickens versus anti-misogynist-Dickens. These will affect her reception a lot, I suspect.