by CINZIA ARRUZZA
by Nancy Holmstrom
Nancy Holmstrom’s From a Marxist-Feminist Point of View: Essays on Freedom, Rationality and Human Nature is a collection of essays written across several decades by a philosopher whose commitment to theoretically and politically integrating Marxism and feminism has remained unfashionably steady across half a century of shifting intellectual trends. Emerita Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University-Newark, Holmstrom has spent her career doing what analytic philosophy in its mainstream forms has largely refused to do: taking the political and economic structures that condition human life seriously and asking what philosophy—rigorously practiced—has to say about them. The book announces its ambition plainly. As Holmstrom writes in her introduction, the essays integrate her intellectual work with “the values I have been committed to all my life: freedom, justice and equality.”1 What distinguishes this collection is that the integration is genuine. In Holmstrom’s case, the political commitments are not context for the philosophical work—they are its content.
The volume is organized into four thematic parts—“Modes of Production,” “Rationality,” “Freedom,” and “Human Nature/Women’s Nature”—unified by a sustained engagement with Marx’s concept of the mode of production and a normative commitment to freedom, equality, and social justice. Holmstrom is explicit that the sections are not independent but represent different theoretical angles on the same underlying question: how does capitalism structure social life, subjectivity, gender, and the horizon of emancipation? Together they constitute a systematic Marxist Feminist perspective.
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