Her father, Morris Minkus, was descended from the Seer of Lublin, and published several Yiddish plays in Poland before emigrating to the US and becoming a stamp dealer.
She studied with Hannah Arendt, Richard McKeon, and other illustrious professors, and took part in early anti-war demonstrations there, which helped turn her interest toward political philosophy.
Drawing on an interpretation of Karl Marx's middle work Grundrisse, Gould developed a distinctive approach to understanding the basic entities of social life, which she called "individuals-in-relations," replacing the "atomistic individualism" prevalent in liberal political thought.
[9] She argued that Marxian philosophy combined Aristotelian elements with Hegelian ones, and that the Grundrisse provides an essential connection between his early theories of alienation and the later political economy, in a book which amounts to "a philosophical reconstruction of Marx's entire system.
"[10] In a second collection on feminist philosophy, Beyond Domination: New Perspectives on Women and Philosophy (1984), Gould argued for what she called “political androgyny,” in which a polity could usefully combine historically “male” and “female” characteristics, rather than defining the public sphere in traditional masculinist terms that exclude care and supportiveness, traits historically identified with women.
Gould proposed a similar openness to self-definition in personal life to incorporate the possibility of androgyny and other diverse expressions of gender and sexuality.
Gould, along with other thinkers such as Claudia Card, Marilyn Friedman, and Martha Nussbaum, link the ideal of androgynous society to other social and political desiderata such as democratic equality and socialist justice.
Despite expressing reservations about the practicability of her proposed extension of democracy to social and economic life, Cranston concludes that "no reader can fail to be impressed with the intellectual rigour of her presentation and the charm of her style.
"[15] Gould's edited collection The Information Web (1989) was one of the first to take up the ethical and social implications of the newly emerging Internet, growing out of a collaborative NSF research grant on that theme that she led at Stevens Institute of Technology.
[19] Gould proposed seeing universalist norms like human rights as “intersociative," in which they remain open to diverse cultural interpretations, while retaining their critical edge,[20] appealing to a conception of concrete universality, which provides “a constructivist approach that is neither an endorsement of the local practice nor an imposition of an alien value.”[21][22] Yet, in seeking intercultural deliberation and dialogue, the question of "Who speaks for a culture?"
[27] In her fourth book, Interactive Democracy: The Social Roots of Global Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Gould attempted to integrate the norms of democracy, justice, freedom, care, and solidarity, arguing that the tendency of political philosophy to treat them separately unnecessarily limits the insights that can be gleaned by exploring their interactions.
"[29] According to the Italian international relations theorist Daniele Archibugi, the book poses a challenge to contemporary political theory and practice, which holds that democracy applies to nation-states, rather than also to smaller communities (e.g., firms, or even families) or to institutions beyond the state such as regions or the UN.
Since many active human communities no longer coincide with states, and many issues escape control of particular governments, Gould argues for a necessary expansion of the scope of democracy.