Just Cause: Freedom, Identity, and Rights

One of the distinguishing features of this book is its emphasis on the significance of ideas. The essays collected here examined how the ideals of freedom and equality associated with the democratic revolutions of the West have survived the challenges of 20th century critiques. The author argues that, far from threatening these ideas, feminism, race theory, and other new theories have deepened their meaning and so allowed them to survive. In particular, the author here engages with issues surrounding representation and rights. Drawing on her experiences as a union organiser, she recounts how workers, and in particular women workers, came to imagine themselves in a way that allowed them to engage in political activism. The kind of representation - the imaginative acts by which we envisage the world and our role in it - is entwined, she argues, with struggles for representation in democratic practice.