Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Partisan Virtue recovers an overlooked tradition of thinking about partisanship in the political thought of two eighteenth-century women writers from opposite ends of the political spectrum: the Tory conservative and early feminist Mary Astell and the historian and radical republican Catharine Macaulay. Histories of partisanship have long centred on canonical male thinkers—Thucydides and Plato on stasis, Aristotle on civic friendship, Machiavelli on tumults, Hume and Burke on parties, the Federalist on faction—and contemporary political theorists working on partisanship typically draw on this same canon. This book argues that the focus on canonical men has obscured a counterintuitive but important perspective developed by eighteenth-century women, for whom partisanship offered an unexpected means to political inclusion. As women, Astell and Macaulay could neither hold office nor vote, yet both belonged to political groups and intervened in the central debates of their time. This marginal position—neither fully excluded nor included—enabled them to recognise both the value of partisanship as a mechanism of inclusion for those formally excluded from politics and the dangers of the political virtues these men advocated to bridle partisanship. The book argues that the approach to political ethics emerging from Astell and Macaulay’s works speaks more adequately to current concerns about polarization and echo chambers than the dominant accounts, and offers a more inclusive model of partisanship that does not require those on the margins to set aside their anger or righteousness before entering political life.</jats:p>