Fathers and Sovereigns: The Uses of Paternal Authority in Early Modern Thought

Abstract

Contemporary liberal and democratic theorists argue that hierarchical institutions like the family and the school should be democratized to reflect the egalitarianism of the state and to allow children to rehearse their civic duties from as early as possible, but I show that this impulse towards “congruence” between the structures of authority in the family and the state is not historically liberal in origin, but rather arises out of the absolutist arguments of early modern sovereignty theorists like Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. While absolutists tried to substantiate the possibility of absolute sovereign authority by modeling it on a strengthened ideal of paternal authority, early liberals like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau turned to the private authority of the family to counteract the threat posed by sovereignty’s consolidation and centralization of political authority.

My dissertation begins by showing how the modern demand for congruence between family and state is linked to the development of sovereignty theory. Bodin substantiated the possibility of sovereign power by modeling it on paternal power. However, by elevating the power of fathers alongside that of sovereigns, he brought naturalistic, personal, and patriarchal conceptions of authority into conflict with the impulse to build a rational, impersonal state. In subsequent chapters, I explore how a series of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers worked out this tension. Hobbes went the farthest in defense of absolute sovereignty, subordinating all institutions whose authority competed with that of the sovereign, including the family. He denied all forms of “natural” authority in favor of authority grounded in consent and represented by the sovereign, and even extended sovereign power to the definition of moral ideas to pre-empt ideological dissent.

Locke doubted that any political power could control “fashion and reputation,” a more powerful determinant of human conduct than any positive or even divine law. To counteract the power of opinion, Locke enlisted parental authority to insulate children from fashion and strengthen their wills against it. He thus reversed the logic of congruence: a state grounded in equality and individual liberty requires a hierarchical, authoritarian family to sustain itself. Rousseau accepted a democratic version of sovereignty theory, but denied that the sovereign governed moeurs. Instead, personal authorities like the legislator and the censors regulate moeurs alongside a formal and impersonal government that promulgates positive law. However, in modern, commercial societies, where public authority has degenerated into “fashion,” the private authority of parents and especially mothers still has the potential to fortify children against the social and intellectual corruption – the “tyranny of the majority,” as Tocqueville would call it – which modern political arrangements had exacerbated.