Learning from the Budapest School women

Feminism without revolution?

Highly self-conscious from the beginning, Western feminism is now engaged in another round of anxious discussions about progress and directions. This time a preoccupation with ‘unfinished business’ weighs up gains and lags in the ‘mainstreaming’ of formerly marginalized feminist agendas. While there is no consensus about how far feminism has come, a discourse on ‘unfinished business’ suggests an axis of more or less agreed upon measures of success. Contemplating a half-full glass, Sylvia Walby assures us that feminism is still ‘alive and vibrant’, and she chalks up gains in women’s participation in the labor force, the rolling back of taboos against married women at work and the like (Walby, 2011: 2). Others are less upbeat and, reflecting upon the gendered distribution of precarious work within neoliberal economies and the demise of organized women’s movements, comment on the stalling, even the ‘death’, of modern feminism (McRobbie, 2008; Grey and Sawer, 2008). A discourse about zero sums suggests an even more complex picture. The point is made, for instance, that a celebration of the opening up of women’s participation in the labor market also has to take into account that this was facilitated by the roll-back of regulations that had protected disorganized female sectors of the workforce (Eisenstein, 2005).

According to some, the very meaning of feminist ambitions has been overturned. Amongst the soul-searchers Wendy Brown is persuaded that we need to confront normative losses in contemporary reconfigurations of feminism. Responding to some hostile reactions to her essay ‘Feminism Unbound: Revolution, Mourning and Politics’, Brown observes that ‘the call to rethink something is not inherently treasonous but can actually be a way of caring for and even renewing the object in question’. Brown is determined to call out ‘mainstreamed’ versions of feminist ambitions that have accommodated the ‘get ahead’ individualism of the new spirit of capitalism. She remains committed to feminist ideals whose realization would require fundamental changes in the way that we live and interact (2005b: 100–1). Brown is suspicious of a pragmatic feminist ambition ‘to eliminate gender as a site of subordination’ that could ‘technically be met within a capitalist life form’ (2005a: 106).

Neoliberal feminism finds its manifesto in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. Sandberg scopes feminism as an attitudinal resource for the individual woman who, in order to ‘make it’ in a world that is being reconstituted by gender-neutral, market-based norms, only has to eliminate the psychological hold of her own gendered inhibitions (Sandberg, 2013: 2). Brown concedes something of Sandberg’s main point, that capitalism is not preoccupied with social differences and can well accommodate a feminism that only demands that women also be permitted to reduce themselves to ‘human capital’. Brown’s critique of the degraded ambitions of a neoliberal feminism does not appeal to a lost feminist radicalism that had been enfolded within, and limited by, a socialist revolutionary agenda. As she sees it, feminism’s revolutionary credentials had rested upon its own critical enquiry into the social conditions that produced and reproduced gendered subordination. ‘Revolutionary feminism promised that we could become new women and men, that we could literally take in hand the conditions that produce gender and then produce it differently, that not simply laws and other institutions could be purged of gender bias but that humans themselves could be produced beyond gender as history has known it’ (Brown, 2005a: 108). What, Brown asks, does feminism mean if it allows its demands to be limited to what capitalism can offer by way of a resolution? Instead, ‘unbound’ feminism breathes revolutionary hopes that ‘can be traced from Wollstonecraft to feminists of the French and Russian Revolution to novelists, poets and theorists of the revolutionary moment of the second wave in North America and Europe’ to demand that the call for the end of gender subordination be tied to our own creative explorations of a newly ‘imagined humanity’ (Brown, 2005a: 108).

We had hoped for something much better, more demanding, than Sandberg’s pragmatic ‘can do’ feminism envisages. However, it seems that we can now find ‘neither credible alternatives nor credible roads’ to its realization and so we inhabit a difficult theoretical and political place of critique that indicts ‘more than we can repair or replace’ (Brown, 2005a: 112–13). While the political upheavals of the 1960s had allowed utopian visions to claim themselves ‘to be sustained by and partially lived out in the subcultures themselves’, what remains for us is a critical question about what might fuel ‘a lived consciousness of the inhumanity, irrationality, or simply unsatisfying nature of current arrangements and the impulse to make a better order of things’ in a post-revolutionary epoch (Brown, 2005a: 107). Brown is finally unable to either locate the sociological grounds in ‘post-revolutionary’ times that might yield a consciousness of the unfitness of the present to lingering hopes for an ‘imagined humanity’.

We don’t ask of the Budapest School women that they help us to unblock efforts to reinstate the radical legacies of Western feminism. However, these strangers from the Eastern bloc did come to Western feminism well versed in theorizing the grounds upon which a ‘lived consciousness of inhumanity’ and insight into the irrationality of ‘current arrangements’ might break through to interrupt an apparently seamless political rationality. We might hope then for some clarification from these deeply interested outsiders about the nature of the normative losses as the utopianism of social democratic feminist energies apparently dry up in a post-revolutionary epoch. We look also for clarifications about how these idealizations might continue to make themselves felt. For both Heller and Márkus, the introduction of the question of needs into modern politics both expands its scope and democratizes its potentials. We look to the contributions that their respective theorizations of ‘radical needs’ (as an evaluation of different types of needs), and the ‘politicization of needs’ (which stresses processes that seek the rationalization of needs as claims) can make to the self-conscious utopianism of modern feminism. It has to be said though that neither of these scholars made a career out of writing about feminism. Key figures in the dissident ‘Budapest School’ that was, virtually, forced out of communist Hungary in the later 1970s and so immigrated to Australia, we look to both for the interpretive power of their distinctive diagnoses of the unrealized emancipatory potentials of the social democratic world they had entered into.

Feminism as radical need

As early as 1970 when she, together with Mihaly Vajda, published their contribution to The Humanisation of Socialism (1976) titled ‘Communism and the Family’, Heller affirmed the centrality of overcoming the subordination of women to the task. On the one hand, she and Vajda do not stray far from the authority of Engels’ manifesto against the bourgeois family. However, there are traces also of a courageous subversiveness as the authoritarianism of the bourgeois family is targeted and feminism’s contribution to a modern open personality, for whom the democratization of everyday becomes a need, is celebrated. A self-conscious feminism is the vanguard that signals the general existence of this need and pushes its wider significance forward. ‘If this new kind of need has registered itself only in circles that are free from everyday material problems, this certainly does not signify that such needs do not exist elsewhere, or that a social movement oriented towards their development might not bring them into the open’ (Heller and Vajda, 1976: 19).

Heller’s provocative interest in exploring modern dynamism from the standpoint of its production of needs whose demands for satisfaction challenge existing social arrangements culminates in the Theory of Need in Marx (1976a), a work that could not at the time be published in Hungary. On this account, Marx’s critical theory identified immanent tendencies within capitalist dynamism that produce needs (for liberalized modes of interaction and for open personalities) that are incompatible with its own commodity form and so are oriented to its revolutionary overthrow. Marx, Heller contends, does not only hold that the bourgeois commodity form produces alienation, he also insists that it contains the seeds of a consciousness of alienation. However, Marx’s theory of radical needs is not just a reflection upon critical potentials of an empirical consciousness, it also includes expectations that it will be the bearer of emancipatory trajectories embedded in history. By the early 1970s Heller has already begun to distance herself from Marx, hoping all the while that this posited collective ‘ought’ that informs the theory of radical needs might be grasped as a ‘practical necessity’ by the New Left movements in the West. Contemplating the significance of a new pluralistic radicalism that seems to be infecting social democratic societies, Heller observes that, while Marx had been compelled to ‘invent’ radical needs, we can now see them ‘with our own eyes’ (Heller, 1976a: 86).

Interpreting the rise of new social movements under the sign of ‘radical needs’ appears, on the one hand, to confer the otherwise disparate activisms, of student protests, embryonic environmentalist, anti-war, anti-racism and feminism movements, with a narrative coherence and a generalized significance. Breaking down the ‘Chinese walls’ of authoritarian traditionalism, capitalist dynamism sets the preconditions for a ‘human wealth’ that grasps itself as ‘the free development of all capacities and senses of the human being, the free many-sided activity of every individual’ that cannot finally reconcile itself to capitalism’s quantification of human needs (Heller, 1976a: 38). With Marcuse, Heller is persuaded that Western New Left activism signals that these potentials live on as radical needs having displaced the proletariat as their bearer.

A modified version of the ‘radical needs’ framework informs Heller’s early remarks upon feminist contributions to the utopian democratization of everyday life (Heller and Vajda, 1976; Heller, 1976b). She is not persuaded that systemic gender subordination is simply a remnant of the old patriarchal order that has no organic place in, or relevance to, the egalitarianism of modern dynamism (Heller, 1976b). Rather, she finds that contemporary gendered subordination has its own modern logic. The alienating commodification of all relations that underpins bourgeois morality gives sanction to sexist expectations of masculine entitlement to women. ‘One of the common permanent features (and this does not only affect family relations) of every alienated social formation is that, under private ownership, life is oriented toward possession. Only that which is in our possession can we regard as rightly ours’ (Heller, 1976b: 29). The subordination of one gender to another manifests and reproduces the alienation of commodifying human relationships and, accordingly, calls for equality between the sexes give voice to a radical need that demands new humanizing ways of interacting and the free development of the personality of each as an end in itself. The feminist struggle encompasses nothing less than a radical reform of the type of personality who ‘strives to maintain himself under given conditions, if necessary to the detriment of others; an individual in whom passions oriented towards his own person dominate – envy, jealousy, vanity and egoism: the kind of person who is incapable of seeing himself at a distance or of regarding himself objectively, and who identifies himself uncritically with his own passions and interests’. This type of individuality has a functional importance for and is channeled into ‘more comprehensive needs and interests’ (Heller, 1976b: 31). When the bourgeois morality that sanctions gendered subordination is put on notice by ‘the sexual revolution’ it raises ambitions for a far-reaching social revolution.

How can the relevance of this account of feminism as a radical demand for change in the very logic of modern relationships and institutions be sustained in a ‘post-revolutionary’ context? Robbed of its descriptive stance as a reflection upon the far-reaching significance of what was, apparently, occurring in a climate of radical social activism, an account of feminist demands as the bearer of radical needs begins to reveal a dogmatic, authoritarian normativity. Heller herself became increasingly uneasy about the problematic anthropological and teleological foundations of the theory that are seemingly transferred by it even as it ceases to simply offer itself as interpretation of Marx’s critical theory. This skepticism about the ‘ought’ that was implicit in the theory of radical needs was part of impetus for the shift in the focus in Heller’s own original theory of modernity (Heller, 1990). In the present context, we cannot attempt to reconstruct the trajectories of Heller’s thinking in all their novelty and complexity. The point might be made though that it seems consistent with her own subsequent misgivings about the presumptions of a collective ‘ought’ embedded in the theory of radical needs that Heller’s theory gained most favor and traction amongst those radical political movements that saw themselves as inheritors of the normative agendas and totalizing politics of an ‘Old Left’.

There is much to be hoped for, but perhaps not quite so much to be gained, from an attempt to address Heller’s theory of radical needs to the challenge that Brown sets for contemporary feminism. Heller’s theory offers to identify needs encountered within the everyday whose satisfaction demand fundamental changes in logics and political rationality of the present and she finds that contemporary feminism indicates just such a radical need. It seems then that feminism needs to grasp itself as ‘lived consciousness of inhumanity’ and as insight into the irrationality of current arrangements. However, once the kind of feminist activism that it presupposed crumbles, it turns out that the theory of radical needs can only offer itself as a normative injunction. What finally remains is an authoritarian demarcation between ‘true’ qualitative and humanistic needs and ‘false’ quantifiable needs: the undigested legacy of an anthropological reading of Marx. To move forward in our discussion of the contributions of the Budapest School women into the self-clarification of a feminist utopian imaginary, we turn now to Márkus’s reflections upon critical politics and the ‘politicization of needs’.

Feminism and the politicization of needs

Márkus’s ‘Civil Society and the Politicization of Needs’ registers its indebtedness to Nancy Fraser’s earlier paper (Fraser, 1989) for its key concept. Nevertheless, Márkus has important reservations about Fraser’s version of ‘the politicization of needs’ as a reflection upon the tasks and potentials of contemporary critical politics. After some general reflections upon key differences between Heller’s theory of radical needs and Márkus’s account of the politicization of needs the next section will attempt to illuminate the critical power of Márkus’s paradigm by contrasting it with Fraser’s weaker version of the ‘politicization of needs’.

Published in the mid-1990s, after she had become well versed in developments in the embattled reformism of social democratic Australia, Márkus’s ‘Civil Society and the Politicization of Needs’ reflects upon the critical potentials of the politics of need interpretation that has accompanied the ‘crisis of the welfare state in its Western and Eastern varieties’. In the West, she tells us, the addition of claims about needs and their interpretation into a political discourse that had been dominated by issues of ‘rights and obligations’ amounted to a change in ‘the very meaning of the political’ (Márkus, 1995: 161). Márkus goes on to observe that the introduction of claims about needs into political discourse ‘poses a serious problem for the welfare state’ which is called upon to respond to a ‘multitude of claims’ and to the ‘socially stratified distribution of the competencies and means necessary for bringing the needs into the arena of public debate in a given political field’ (Márkus, 1995: 161). The introduction of the relevance of the experiential and subjective questions about needs into contemporary political life invades it with democratic potentials and expectations. The ‘politicization of needs’ refers to processes that seek to wrest these potentials away from prescriptive deformations that are supplied by traditional determinations and by the bureaucratic imperatives of the welfare state. The new social movements occupy a new political space in which the interpretation of needs had become a ‘main object of social contestation’ (1995: 162).

Fraser makes the point that this social contestation encompasses a political dispute over who gets to ‘establish authoritative, thick definitions of people’s needs’ (Fraser, 2013: 56). For Márkus though this account of the democratization of need interpretation does not adequately represent the critical potentials of the new social movements and she reflects upon the ‘politicization of needs’ as a discursive process that exponentially expands into the rationalization of ever-wider fields of action. On this account, the ‘politicization of needs’ initiates reflections upon the social conditions that produce, and inhibit the realization of, socially conditioned needs as they begin to articulate themselves as demands. Márkus uses an example from feminist activism about childcare to illustrate what she means.

When today, different groups of women take up the issue of social provision of childcare, this is not simply asking society to help in the fulfillment of their parental functions. It also thematises such issues as: What is the equitable distribution of responsibilities in this respect? Are there any particular social limitations of life aspirations connected with motherhood? What modes of life should an appropriate childcare accommodate? And so on. This of course opens a whole new discourse (or even series of discourses) between women (or parents) and the representatives of childcare agencies, and the more general public forum. After all the answers to these questions have more or less direct implications for all the members of society as well. (Márkus, 1995: 168–9)

However, according to Axel Honneth the ‘politicization of needs’ thesis, at least on Fraser’s account of it, does not fully address key limitations that have already been noted with respect to the theory of radical needs. As he sees it, Fraser derives the normative contents of critical theory ‘directly from an orientation to new social movements’ (Honneth, 2003: 117). This is meant as a criticism because if critical theory is seen to only occupy an expressive relationship to an already formed self-conscious activism, then it can only wane into an accommodating inertia as the emancipatory radicalism of these political solidarities subside. Fraser’s formulation of critical theory as guardian to the ‘politicization of needs’ does seem to give some credibility to Honneth’s diagnosis of the limitations of the concept. When she is called upon to clarify the generalized significance of this process, Fraser introduces the idea of ‘participatory parity’ as the ‘principal idiom of public reason’ (Fraser, 2003: 43). There is to be no silencing of the marginalized and no automatic privileging of particular voices in the effort to raise needs as claims on public resources. The rational justification of claims is to be determined ‘dialogically, by the give and take of argument’ not by entitlements or to rights sanctioned by power’ (Fraser, 2003: 42–3). However, because ‘participatory parity’ is to be the ‘sole justificatory standard’, pluralism becomes the only measure of the reasonableness of claims about needs.

Márkus confirms Honneth’s caution about Fraser’s account of the ‘politicization of needs’ thesis. Fraser’s version is finally only interested in ‘the question of the possibility for the normative grounding of a plurality of forms of life and the systems of values and needs representing them’ (Márkus, 1995: 175). However, on Márkus’s reading, the problem is not, as Honneth suggests, that Fraser’s account of critical theory’s role in the ‘politicization of needs’ only allows it an expressive relationship to new social movements. Fraser’s version of the role of critical theory is limited because it gives expression to a narrowly partial understanding of the significance of new social movements. Fraser restricts the ‘crucial specificity of the contemporary social movements’ to ‘the centrality of “identity formation”’ (Márkus, 1995: 175). She concentrates on the shaping of internal group solidarities via processes of interpretation and reinterpretation of needs and these new identities seem in her account to be established in an exclusively ‘oppositional’ manner (in an opposition to all others ‘outside’ the given group; Márkus, 1995: 175). This version forfeits insight into the vital rationalizing processes that are, according to Markus, also set in motion by the politicization of needs. The principle of ‘participatory parity’ fails to reflect upon the widening orbit of critique that unfolds as efforts made to justify claims about needs build dialogue partners that must to be persuaded about their reasonableness and elaborates new understandings about wider social conditions that must also be changed. Márkus is convinced that this creative dimension of the politicization of needs ‘offers us some hope’ that (in Habermas’s language) a ‘radically democratic formation of public will’ might be in a position to require state and economic power to become sensitive to goals forged in a democratized civil societies (Márkus, 1995: 176). Márkus agrees with Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen that this attempt to ‘push back’ against the steering resources of money and administrative power will require the establishing of ‘some channels through which the new concerns can find their place in the states policies and the new forms of activity can acquire appropriate legal guarantees, without incorporating the movement into the establishment’ (Arato and Cohen, 1984, cited by Márkus, 1995: 177). Accordingly, the democratizing agenda must extend upwards to encompass the formal political structures of the liberal democratic state.

Brown’s lament for contemporary feminism’s, apparently submerged, ‘utopian imaginary’ does not encourage us to return nostalgically to the revolutionary energies of a major new social movement. However, it seems useful to reflect upon the sources of this radicalism so we might better inform contemporary efforts to guide feminist agendas that are forced to negotiate the ‘dark times’ of our own neoliberal age. Márkus’s reconstruction of the ‘politicization of needs’ grasps that dimension that is, for Brown, the vital dimension of feminism’s utopian hopes. Bypassing the centrality of identity politics, Márkus deploys the concept to explore the processes through which feminism had sought to ‘take in hand the conditions that produce gender and then produce it differently’ (Brown, 2005a: 108). We saw too that Brown repudiates those versions of feminist objectives that can be rendered as demands that are satisfiable within terms set by capitalism. However, on this major point Márkus’s reconstruction of the radicalism of a social democratic feminism substantially pulls away from the revolutionary zeal of Brown’s idealizations of a feminist utopian imaginary. In doing so she implicitly suggests a critique, and a way out of, a debilitating tension in Brown’s account of the goals of contemporary feminist critique.

Márkus’s account of the radicalism of ‘the politicization of needs’ works within the terms of a social democratic diagnosis of the divided rationalities of modernity in which the logics and imperatives of capitalism are forced to negotiate weak, but nevertheless persistent, democratic expectations. By contrast, it seems that Brown identifies the logics of capitalism with modernity as such and so, while she is committed to searching within the terms of an ‘unrevolutionary present’ for traces of a feminist utopian imaginary her conviction that we might continue to be able to ‘parse the promise’ and ‘let our objects fly’ is finally unable to offer any sociological grounds for its sanguinity (Brown, 2005a: 115). A commitment to recapture the radicalism of a feminist politics that contributes to the ‘politicization of needs’ engenders a circumspect, unexciting utopianism that is prepared to negotiate compromises with a here-to-stay capitalism. At the same time it does allow us important insights into the key mechanisms that are employed by a neoliberal political project as it seeks to annihilate any countervailing democratic rationalities within modern politics. A neoliberal political project is determined to eliminate all traces of that discourse about needs that had reconstituted the very meaning of the political in the social democratic period. Instead, we saw that, neoliberal feminism is all about the attitudinal changes that is required if the individual woman is to grasp what that market thinking says is ‘rightfully’ already hers. For a feminist utopian imaginary, the challenge is to defy the neoliberal bid to re-quantify all human needs and to self-consciously reignite the radical potentials of a politics that struggles to democratically interpret needs, to rationally justify them as emancipatory claims while endeavoring to bring about the far-reaching practical changes that might be required to satisfy them.

Brown is finally not able to make sense of what Pierre Rosanvallon has identified as the paradox of ‘undeniable advances in regard to the status of women, acceptances of differences of sexual orientation, and individual rights generally’ in a neoliberal age that has been otherwise marked by ‘diminished solidarity and a new toleration for inequality’ (Rosanvallon, 2013: 222). Honneth is also struck by democratizations in gender relations that have leaked into and have continued, against the odds, to guide expectations in a neoliberal age (Honneth, 2014). It seems that new emancipatory needs have broken through to claim public and institutional support and we now see legal as well as civil rights to marriage equality within most modern democracies. Changing attitudes towards the role of fathers as well as a new mainstreaming of campaigns opposing violence against women are further indexes to paradoxical liberalizations that neither Brown nor Fraser are able to make sense of. By contrast, as will see, a case can be made that Márkus’s account of feminism’s contribution to the politicization of needs is able to illuminate the ‘paradoxical’ achievements of emancipatory goals in neoliberal times.

Heller consistently approaches the ‘woman problem’ as a matter of a particularity that must not be permitted to act as a limit in the pursuit of our freedoms. Early on, she gives some extreme formulations of what this construction entails for a democratized everyday life. Overcoming alienation in everyday life will see a self who is freed from the weight of unchosen particularities and is capable of ‘making value-oriented decisions as a result of its own endowments’ (Heller, 1976b: 38). In an idealized future, people ‘will choose the types and the content of their relationships on an individual basis’ (Heller, 1976b: 40). In the post-bourgeois commune

the adult members are not necessarily more attracted to ‘their own’ children, and therefore they can choose those children whose temperament, character and intellect are closest or most attractive to them. Neither adults nor children have to love anyone, nor do they have to love anyone ‘the most’: like every other emotion, love too depends upon choice. (Heller, 1976b: 23–4)

Heller and Márkus both agree with Hannah Arendt that ‘to be really emancipated, women have to be emancipated as women, that is not to accept the existing structures but to pluralise them and to change them to the degree that suits their own identities’ (Markus, 1989: 127). However, there are vital differences in the meaning that Heller and Márkus give to this proposition. It seems that Heller does not find anything particular to the contingencies of feminine contexts that might be brought to the vitalization and enrichment of an emancipatory project. For such insights, we turn to Márkus’s discussion of ‘women and success’. Companion to her article on the limitations, as well as strengths, of Arendt’s ‘anti feminism’, Márkus’s ‘success’ paper reformulates the ‘women problem’ in terms that allow certain ‘neglected life practices’ which ‘continuously, throughout the whole life span of an individual, create or reinforce certain ways of seeing, thinking and acting’ to be explored not simply as the mechanism of oppression, ‘in virtue of being ascribed exclusively to women’. These distinctive ways of doing things are also to be opened to exploration as the ground of capacities and potentials that ‘ought not to be lost’ but might be reevaluated as possible components not only of women’s liberation but also of the restructuration of the dominant culture’ (Markus, 1987: 97).

Women and success

Drawing upon her early empirical study on Hungarian women engineers in the 1970s, Márkus’s essay does not set out to contribute to feminist literature on the psychology of ‘success avoidance’ among women. It starts from some reflections upon the paradoxical evidence of a ‘relatively low level of “standard” success orientation’ among a cohort whose choice of profession would indicate a higher than normal level of self-confidence and a ‘somewhat lower degree of conformity with the socially defined model of femininity’ (Márkus, 1987). Márkus’s empirical research finds that,

even when women entered the public sphere of the economy, as in principle the equal of male breadwinners, for the majority of them success remained defined not through ‘external’ criteria of career achievement, but in terms of personal experience interpreted as satisfaction. (Markus, 1987: 101)

In a world in which eligibility for ‘top jobs’ is determined by ‘extrafunctional criteria’ that prescribe gendered capacities, rather than measuring actual achievements, women, as we know, face an uphill battle if they attempt to ‘dress for success’. There are other options though and ‘more or less conscious choices’ to be made about the re-working the meaning of success so that it reflects the singularity of women’s experiences ‘which have taught them different types of loyalties and values’ (Márkus, 1987: 104–5). Márkus’s reflection on a feminism that attempts to change the meaning of success does not simply reproduce Lisa Belkin’s neoconservative ‘opt out revolution’ which celebrates a ‘mommy track’ that is content with the chosenness of a life that is devoted to domestic virtues (Belkin, 2003). Again, focusing on cultural potentials that ‘ought not to be lost’, Márkus is unconvinced by Betty Friedan’s optimism that women are the bearers of a humanistic ethics that is capable of reinventing public life. ‘Neither have women (even the daughters) become so wise, nor society so open as [Frieden] seems to assume’ (Márkus, 1987: 108).

For Márkus, a critical feminist theory is to grasp itself as advocate to the politicization of needs rather than as the champion to an already constituted ‘feminine ethic’. Contributing to the politicization of needs that are embedded in ‘neglected life practices’, feminist theory might promote insights into ‘the importance of personal (and not just functional) relationships for life-fulfillment, the value of work well done for its own sake, the norm of helpfulness to others and the like’ (Márkus, 1987: 107) as the grounds for a changed definition of the meaning of success. As it begins to understand itself as a politicized need, the demand for new ways of thinking about success, that do not require us to treat others or the self as mere means but embrace support for and development of self and others within its objects, shifts a ‘feminine ethic’ out of the private sphere, where it has been used to sanction gendered subordination, and articulates itself as a practical demand for far-reaching changes in ways of interacting as well as the transformation in the norms and rules that govern our of institutions. A fully-fledged aspiration to a life of ethical autonomy is central to this changed meaning of success. After all, as Márkus points out, if women are content to ‘dress for success’ without participating in the struggle to change its meaning they sign up for an unfair battle that ‘by its very definition…is not only an extremely restricted way of gaining social recognition, but also one that destroys the very idea of social realization and deforms the concept of human dignity’ (Markus, 1987: 107).

Conclusion: A cast of feminist characters

In some respects what unites the feminism of Agnes Heller and Maria Márkus is as important as their differences. For both, at the heart of feminism is a moral seriousness that enjoins each person to, against the odds and using an interpretation of her best potentials, take charge of her life. For Heller, beyond justice lies the task of the good person and the good life and, for Márkus, the decency and the decent life is an essential personal ideal as well as a political project (Márkus, 2001). Facing up to the high resistance in a post-modern age to the assumption that the moralist might offer us guidance, Heller turns in The Ethics of Personality to a new experimental form that enables the philosopher to continue to offer advice and counsel. Reasoning that neighboring genres manage to negotiate the role of the moralist in a post-modern age, Heller’s ethics of personality ‘is delivered by an array of “character masks”, employing lectures, dialogues and letters’ (Grumley, 2005: 260). In this fashion Heller hopes to address herself as a modern moralist to the individual who knows that, in the end, only she can fathom for herself how to live rightly, as she can, amidst ‘damaged life’.

While she has always considered herself to be a feminist, Heller has not, we have seen, written much directly on feminism and some might bridle at the proposition that feminists might look up to her. After all, she did describe academic ‘gender studies’ as another form of ‘kitchen’ where women are confined to the study of cultural works that, with some exceptions, she deems of only secondary significance (Heller cited in Grumley, 2005: 14). Nonetheless, Brown reminds us that ‘the call to rethink something is not inherently treasonous but can also be a way of caring for and even renewing the object in question’. A solicitude for the fundamentals of feminism is certainly the impetus behind Heller’s critique of the ‘biopolitics’ that grips feminism when it privileges questions of ‘life’ over the value of ‘freedom’ (Heller and Feher, 1994).

In a 1983 lecture series he delivered in the US, Michel Foucault warmed to the topic of the ‘truth teller’ and to ‘truth telling as an activity’ (Foucault, 2001). He was particularly interested in the figure ‘who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relations to power…’. Parrhesia, fearless speech, is his theme and he identifies the parrhesiaste as someone who takes a risk. Foucault describes parrhesia ‘as a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain type of relation to himself and other people through criticism…and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty’ (Foucault, 2001: 19). Heller knows no other way. Her story has been told before (see Grumley, 2005: 1–19) and only a few episodes need to be picked out here. As a young Jewish woman in fascist Europe, Heller’s quick judgment and spirited determination, together with some luck, saw her and her mother escape deportation and death. A key figure in the dissident ‘Budapest School’ that took shape in the aftermath of the 1956 revolution in Hungary, Heller again forged ‘life through danger’ through a ‘specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty’. Warned by police about ‘anti-state activity’, she was finally banned from working at the university. Refusing to ‘learn her lesson’, upon her return to post-communist Hungary in 1994 Heller has again been a leading dissenter, speaking out against the anti-liberal policy of the administration and standing up to the intimidations of a resurgent anti-Semitism.

Maria Márkus has made grandeur out of what has, in some respects, turned out to be a very different kind of life. Maria’s courage as a dissident intellectual who forged a career as a highly respected scholar and teacher in an Australian university has been entwined with another kind of fierce bravery. In 1986 Gyuri, the eldest son of Maria and her husband György, incurred a terrible head injury playing soccer which left him wheelchair bound and completely dependent. A feminist ‘ethics of personality’ is enlarged and enriched as we contemplate the strength that this feminist has found to face the relentless slog of everyday care with boundless love and respect for those who need her.