Carole Pateman is awarded the 2012 Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for outstanding contributions to the discipline. She gets the prize for “in a thought-provoking way challenging established ideas about participation, sex and equality”. The ceremony takes place in Uppsala, September 29th.
Pateman is a political philosopher, born in Great Britain, she graduated from Oxford and is presently teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1970, Participation and Democratic Theory was published, a book that questioned the prevailing democratic theory on elite-democracy, while reconnecting to traditions of participation as both individually and collectively beneficial. Democracy moves forward through participation, is her normative conclusion.
Pateman has become one of the most influential representatives for participatory democracy, and in her presidential address at the American Political Science Association (APSA) 2011, she returned to this topic. The Sexual Contract (1988), followed by The Disorder of Women( 1989) marked a radicalization in her research, and in these books she questioned, from what evolved into a clear feminist position, the powerful theory of the social contract associated with classic thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. This work paved way for unorthodox and original feminist research in political science. Throughout her writings, citizenship, consent, obligation and sex, have continued to play prominent roles. In later years, Carole Pateman has elaborated the idea of a basic income as a part of citizenship.