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The Hostile Family and the Purpose of the “Natural Kingdom” in Hobbes's Political Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2015

Rita Koganzon
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Abstract

In his political writings, Hobbes consistently distinguishes between “natural” and “artificial” commonwealths—those that arise from the family, and those created by mutual covenants. Although he insists that “both have the same right of government,” closer examination of Hobbes's accounts of the family reveals that it is a radically deficient model for the state, and that Hobbes was engaged in a polemic against both republicans and absolutists who claimed that parental power was natural, prior to, and even a model for the power of civil sovereigns. For Hobbes, a state based on parental rule is dangerously unstable, exacerbating the mutual fears of parents and children. The “office of the sovereign representative” defuses this conflict, and within the commonwealth, the family is denaturalized and reconstituted as an educative institution whose purpose is to reinforce the artificial sovereign by schooling both parents and children in the miseries of personal rule.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 77 , Issue 3 , Summer 2015 , pp. 377 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2015 

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References

1 Abbreviations of Hobbes's works are as follows:

EL: Elements of Law, ed Gaskin, J. C. A. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

DC: De Cive, ed. Tuck, Richard and Silverthorne, Michael (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

L: Leviathan, ed. Curley, Edwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994)Google Scholar.

DH: De Homine, in Man and Citizen, ed. Gert, Bernard (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991)Google Scholar.

2 Examples of this claim can be found Gauthier, David, The Logic of Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 112–16Google Scholar; Hinton, R. W. K., “Husbands, Fathers and Conquerors,” pt. 2, Political Studies 16, no. 1 (1968): 55–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martinich, A. P., Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 157Google Scholar; Warrender, Howard, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957)Google Scholar; and Zagorin, Perez, Hobbes and the Law of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 60–62 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For somewhat different suggestions about the purpose of the distinction, see Malcolm, Noel, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 446–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kraynak, Robert, History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 172–86Google Scholar; and Strauss, Leo, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, trans. Sinclair, Elsa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar. Recently, the distinction has received more concentrated attention in Kinch Hoekstra's and Quentin Skinner's discussions of the way Hobbes may have used it to legitimate Cromwell's de facto authority during the Engagement controversy. See Hoekstra, Kinch, “The De Facto Turn in Hobbes's Political Philosophy,” in “Leviathan” after 350 Years, ed. Sorell and Foisneau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 33–73 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skinner, Quentin, Visions of Politics, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 287–307 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Julie Cooper describes the need to simultaneously justify and discourage usurpation as a “competing imperative” in Hobbes's thought: “On the one hand, Hobbes would discredit, and discourage, glory-seeking rebellion. On the other hand, Hobbes concedes the legitimacy of a commonwealth by acquisition to remove any pretext for disobedience on the part of subjects (many of whom live in states founded upon violent conquest)” (Cooper, “Vainglory, Modesty, and Political Agency in the Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes,” Review of Politics 72, no. 2 [2010]: 257n55).

4 On Hobbes's radical vision for an “eternal” commonwealth, see Richard Tuck, “The Utopianism of Leviathan,” in “Leviathan” after 350 Years, 125–38.

5 I treat Hobbes's works interchangeably here because I can see no clear arc of development in his thought on the family. Following Strauss, I take the primary shift to be towards the increasing impersonality of the sovereign, culminating in the introduction of “office of the sovereign representative” in Leviathan (Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, 62). The introduction of a representative office is significant because it provides a political solution to the instability of personal rule, but one that cannot be applied to the family, which remains its old, defective self. Another shift is Hobbes's somewhat closer identification of the child and the slave in Leviathan than in previous works, where he gives these statuses separate chapters, a shift which I discuss below.

6 Cooper, “Vainglory, Modesty,” 242.

7 The “impersonality” of the sovereign throughout this essay refers to Hobbes's formal definition of sovereignty as an office of interchangeable occupants. Hobbes pushes sovereign impersonality in Leviathan even further than Jean Bodin by describing the office as representing the wills of the people. A monarchical sovereign is no more personal than a sovereign assembly on this account, though both stand above the laws and may apply them partially. Hobbes does include impartiality among the sovereign's duties, though not among the father's (L 30.15–17). For an extended discussion of sovereign impersonality and indirect rule in the Hobbesian state, see Mansfield, Harvey, “Hobbes and the Science of Indirect Government,” American Political Science Review 65, no. 1 (1971): 97–110 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Chapman, Richard, “ Leviathan Writ Small: Thomas Hobbes on the Family,” American Political Science Review 69, no. 1 (1975): 78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although it is dangerous to explain Hobbes's thought in terms of his biography and I do not propose to do so here, one potentially useful datum is that Hobbes's own father abandoned the family and Hobbes was supported by his uncle, an experience which may have diminished his estimation of paternal authority. See Aubrey, John, Brief Lives, ed. Buchanan-Brown, John (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 418Google Scholar.

9 Bodin, Jean, The Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed. McRae, Kenneth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Bodin, Six Books, 20.

11 Hooker, Richard, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1907)Google Scholar, 1.10.5. There are too many instances of naturalistic accounts of the family in natural-law thought from this period to include here, and Bodin and Hooker are simply illustrative of the diverse conclusions to which naturalism led. Consider also Althusius, Johannes, Politica, ed. Carney, Frederick (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 2.13–40Google Scholar; Grotius, Hugo, The Laws of War and Peace, ed. Tuck, Richard (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005)Google Scholar, 2.5; and Suarez, Francisco, “On Laws and God the Lawgiver,” in Selections from Three Works of Francisco Suarez, trans. Williams, Brown, and Waldron (London: H. Milford, 1944), 3.3Google Scholar.

12 James I, The True Law of Free Monarchy (London, 1642)Google Scholar, 4.

13 Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Somerville, Johann P. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 284CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Parker, Henry, Observations upon some of His Majesties late answers and expresses (London, 1642), 18–19 Google Scholar.

15 Schochet, Gordon, The Authoritarian Family and Political Attitudes in 17th Century England (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988), 99–114 Google Scholar.

16 Only after Hobbes do we find natural lawyers like Samuel Pufendorf and John Locke, both readers of Hobbes, advancing the argument that parental right is derived from consent rather than generation. See Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, II §74; Pufendorf, Samuel, The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature, trans. Saunders, David (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003)Google Scholar, 2.3.

17 Schochet, The Authoritarian Family, 238–340.

18 See Hirschmann, Nancy, Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 44–45 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Okin, Susan Moller, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 198–99Google Scholar; Pateman, Carole, “‘God Hath Ordained to Man a Helper’: Hobbes, Patriarchy and Conjugal Right,” British Journal of Political Science 19, no. 4 (1989): 445–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other efforts to assimilate Hobbes into patriarchalism can be found in Hinton, “Husbands, Fathers and Conquerors,” 55–57; King, Preston, The Ideology of Order (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), 184Google Scholar. By contrast, Chapman and Abbott are more skeptical that Hobbes's particular brand of patriarchalism could be assimilated into any existing tradition, and my argument here is much indebted to their suggestive doubts, discussed below. See Abbott, Philip, “The Three Families of Thomas Hobbes,” Review of Politics 43 (1981): 242–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chapman, “Leviathan Writ Small.”

19 Nathan Tarcov, Locke's Education for Liberty (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), 40–41.

20 Schochet, The Authoritarian Family, 230–31.

21 Tarcov (Locke's Education, 36) characterizes this line of argument as “ad hominem, replying to those who argue for paternal dominion from generation by showing that such considerations would lead instead to maternal dominion.” See also King, Ideology of Order, 204.

22 Schochet, The Authoritarian Family, 241–42.

23 Tarcov points out that even the “natural affection” (demoted to “natural inclination” in L 20.4) of parents is a species of “charity,” which flows from the self-aggrandizing impulse to feel one's power over another. See the useful discussions of gratitude to parents in Abbott, “The Three Families,” 246–47; Tarcov, Locke's Education, 35–40. In his discussion of Hobbesian international relations, Noel Malcolm suggests that gratitude for benefits received is specific to the “trust” established between sovereign and subject in the commonwealth by institution, but not by acquisition, which is to say, not in the family (Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 447).

24 Hobbes is most explicit about the indistinctness of childhood and servitude in Leviathan, where they are discussed in the same chapter, but in De Cive and Elements of Law, the parallels are already quite clear. For a fuller discussion of Hobbes's conflation of family with servitude, see Hinton, “Husbands, Fathers and Conquerors,” and Pateman, “‘God Hath Ordained a Helper,’” 455–58.

25 This is particularly the case in De Cive, where there is no suggestion that children consent even tacitly to their parents, and the only contract parents are offered is thoroughly hypothetical: “If then [the mother] raises [the child], she is understood to be doing so on the condition that he shall not be her enemy” (DC 9.3). In effect, even the tacit consent of Leviathan is only such a hypothetical assurance, since the child cannot be expected to understand these “conditions” attached to his upbringing until later. A child, and especially one with a more “modest” than “aggressive” disposition, may consent to his parents at some time after his initial subjection, as Hobbes says the workhouse slave may also do. But the difficulty with Hobbes's contractual family is not that no child will ever submit, but that consent cannot be inferred in infancy and Hobbes's psychology of resentment indicates the imprudence of presuming the unproblematic submission of older children, contrary to his explicit assurances in L 20 that children are easily ruled. In Behemoth, for example, Hobbes describes adolescence as “that time wherein children are least governable,” driving parents to send them to the university “to save themselves the trouble of governing them at home” (The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Molesworth, William, vol. 4 [London: Bohn, 1840], 347)Google Scholar.

26 As the responses of royalists like Clarendon to Leviathan demonstrated, even what Hobbes did say was enough to raise suspicion. What Clarendon found most objectionable in Chap. 20 was the assertion that original paternal dominion relied on any kind of contract, since contract is revocable. To further claim that there are no natural grounds of obedience to this contract would be beyond the pale (Hyde, Edward, A brief view and survey of the dangerous and pernicious errors to church and state, in Mr. Hobbes's book, entitled Leviathan [Oxford, 1676], 67)Google Scholar.

27 Pufendorf, The Whole Duty of Man, 1.4.9.

28 Locke's family is as conventional as Hobbes's, but is held together by the strong natural desire of parents to preserve their offspring (Locke, Two Treatises, I §97; II §§63, 67, 75, 170). Bodin, like Hobbes, proposes to extend the power to kill children to fathers, but assumes that the strength of parental affection will restrain its abuse, for “the real danger lies in the temptation of parents to be too partial” (Bodin, Six Books, 1.4).

29 Elshtain, Jean Bethke has said that “the existence of families does not succeed in taming the savage heart of Hobbesian man, in part because with the birth of each child, the state of nature, a seething within, is reproduced” (Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981], 110)Google Scholar.

30 Thomas Schrock has suggested that these two rights—the right of the sovereign to punish by death and the right of the subject to resist death—are in principle irreconcilable. Whether or not that is theoretically the case, the conflict between them certainly poses a much greater practical problem if it should arise in the domestic context and pit a man against his children. See Schrock, Thomas, “The Rights to Punish and Resist Punishment in Hobbes's Leviathan ,” Western Political Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 853–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Thus, as Abbott points out, “the threat of murder is much more likely within the household, both because of opportunity and motive, than from without at the hands of a marauding stranger” (Abbott, “The Three Families of Hobbes,” 248).

32 More particularly, it is the duty to perform (and for all subsequent generations, to understand and affirm) the original covenant that forms the artificial commonwealth, since that is the only covenant made from hope for future goods rather than for relief from immediate fear, so it is the most difficult covenant to secure, since “if other men will not lay down their right as well as he, then there is no reason for any one to divest himself of his; for that were to expose himself to prey, which no man is bound to, rather than to dispose himself to peace” (L 14.5).

33 Chapman, “Leviathan Writ Small”; Bejan, Teresa, “Teaching the Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Education,” Oxford Review of Education 36 (2010): 619CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Fathers need not be savage with their children, and Hobbes recommends that they soften their delivery when compelling their children to perform “sour labour,” which “always humanity requireth to be sweetened in the delivery, by encouragement, and in the tune and phrase of counsel, rather than in harsher language of command” (L 25.9). Nonetheless, Hobbes nowhere recommends laxity in discipline or excusing children from “sour labour.”

35 Hinton, “Husbands, Fathers and Conquerors,” 56.

36 Chapman, “Leviathan Writ Small,” 90.

37 The education I am referring to throughout this discussion is basic upbringing, not the more advanced education in theological and philosophical doctrine with which Hobbes is elsewhere concerned. These educations are connected, but I cannot take up the latter here. For more detailed discussions of advanced education, see Bejan, “Teaching the Leviathan”; Tuck, Richard, “Hobbes on Education,” in Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives, ed. Rorty, Amelie (New York: Routledge, 1998), 147–55Google Scholar; Vaughan, Geoffrey, Behemoth Teaches Leviathan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007)Google Scholar.

38 On Hobbes and associations, see Boyd, Richard, Uncivil Society (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), chap. 1Google Scholar.

39 This does not of course mean that there are states devoid of families, only that the family is no more essential to the Hobbesian state than the university or any other subgovernmental body. Chapman draws a similar but less drastic conclusion about the state's precedence in his observation that, for Hobbes, “it is not that the state is an extension of the family; it was Filmer, not Hobbes, who saw the state as the family writ large. Hobbes almost never finds the family in the state; the family is the model only in questions of intestate succession. In all other cases the state is the model for the family” (“Leviathan Writ Small,” 78). On the contingency of the family within the state, see Tarcov, Locke's Education, 42.