The reading of the Enlightenment we present here seeks to identify, among the different conceptualisations of reason displayed by enlightened thinking, the one offering the greatest emancipatory virtualities for feminism. The starting point is an analysis of Hume’s concept of personal identity that exposes its patriarchal bias. Against Hume’s notion of an inert reason we set the train of thought that led Poullain de la Barre to conceive reason as permanent work, or effort. The contribution of this feminist philosopher, an epigone of cartesianism, is liked to the spinozian “conatus” by a line that takes us all the way to Mary Wollstonecraft’s idea of reason as “meriting reason”: a reason that is free of adscriptive privileges in the network of forces in which it operates together with passions, a reason that is endowed with emerging critical value towards the Ancien Régime
