The Radicals criticize Contractarianism: Anna Doyle Wheeler’s reading

Abstract

François Poullain de la Barre’s Equality ideal served as a historical and philosophical evaluative criteria, useful to distinguish between weak and strong forms of Equality, for instance between Condorcet, on the one hand, and Rousseau, on the other. The key problem here consisted in identifying what is encompassed in the concept of “Equality”, or, in other words, who are included (or not) within “Equality”. This article analyses the division between British Utilitarians regarding this problem. Adherents to the theory of the Contract, they took marriage contracts of the time as token cases of the limitations of contractarianism. This is the context of William Thompson’s and Anna Doyle Wheeler’s Appeal to the One Half.