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Liberal States, Authoritarian Families:
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Liberal States, Authoritarian Families
Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.
Koganzon, Rita. Liberal States, Authoritarian Families : Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought, Oxford University Press
Liberal States,
Authoritarian Families
Childhood and Education in
Early Modern Tought
R I TA KO G A N Z O N
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ISBN 978–0–19–756880–4
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197568804.001.0001
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Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
1. The Rise of Sovereignty and the Logic of Congruence 17
2. Hobbesian Sovereignty and the Denaturalization of Authority 33
3. Locke and the Authority of Opinion 59
4. Locke’s Authoritarian Education 93
5. Rousseau and the Authority of Opinion 129
6. Rousseau’s Authoritarian Education 157
Conclusion 191
Index 203
Acknowledgments
Tis book began as a dissertation for Harvard’s Department of Government,

where I was fortunate to fnd teachers who exemplifed in practice the liberal
pedagogical authority that I study in theory. Eric Nelson and Richard Tuck
generously shared their immense erudition and helped to illuminate for me
the intellectual history of the seventeenth century. Above all, I am grateful
to Harvey Mansfeld for his unobtrusive but conscientious guidance and his
constant encouragement both during graduate study and in the years since.
Neither the dissertation nor the book would have come to fruition without
his support.
Greg Conti, Brad Hinshelwood, Jennie Ikuta, Tae-Yeoun Keum, Sungho
Kimlee, Lorraine McCrary, Cheryl Miller, Yana Morgulis, Alexandra
Oprea, Kate Rozansky, Anna Schmidt, Julia Schwarz, Alexandra Squitieri,
and Ben and Jenna Storey have been indispensable friends and intellec-
tual interlocutors during the years that I’ve been working on these ideas.
I owe a special debt to Jennifer Page and Will Selinger, who, in addition to
their friendship, have also, over the years, provided readership, temporary
lodging, and long-distance correspondence.
Since I arrived at the University of Virginia in 2016, Jim Ceaser,
Blaire French, and the faculty in the Program on Constitutionalism and
Democracy—including Connor Ewing, Tim Brennan, Jordan Cash, and
Lynn Uzzell—have been great colleagues and friends, and have created a
fruitful and engaging intellectual community.
Several chapters of the book benefted from feedback from participants at
the Duke Graduate Political Teory Conference, the University of Virginia
Political Teory Workshop, and the Harvard Political Teory Colloquium.
Rick Avramenko, Michael Zuckert, and the participants in the Center for the
Study of Liberal Democracy’s First Manuscript Workshop at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison graciously reviewed the entire book and ofered me im-
mensely helpful suggestions for shaping the fnal version. Te two reviewers
for Oxford University Press also ofered useful recommendations, particu-
larly about my discussion of Rousseau. Angela Chnapko at Oxford has been
viii Acknowledgments
wonderfully straightforward and helpful in seeing the book through the re-
view and publication process.
Portions of chapters 2 and 4 have appeared as “Te Hostile Family and
the Purpose of the ‘Natural Kingdom’ in Hobbes’s Political Tought,”
Review of Politics 77 (2015), 377–398, and “ ‘Contesting the Empire of
Habit’: Habituation and Liberty in Lockean Education,” American Political
Science Review 110 (2016), 547–558. I thank them for permission to reprint
this material.
Both my parents and my in-laws helped this book along in many ways.
But I owe the greatest debt to my husband, Sebastian, who married me be-
fore I started working on this project and could not have known what he was
getting into, but has borne the burden of it admirably. Our children, Miriam
and Leon, are what political scientists call the “empirical” component of my
research, still in progress.
List of Abbreviations
Te major works discussed in this book are abbreviated as follows and cited
by chapter and section or line number where available, or page number
where not:
Hobbes
EL Elements of Law, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1994).
DCiv De Cive, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
L Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994).
DH De Homine, in Man and Citizen, trans. Bernard Gert
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991).
B Behemoth, ed. Ferdinand Toennies (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990).
Locke
FT and ST Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
STCE and CU Some Toughts Concerning Education and On the Conduct
of the Understanding, ed. Nathan Tarcov and Ruth Grant

ECHU Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
LCT Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James Tully
Rousseau
FD and SD Discourse on the Arts and Sciences and Discourse Concerning the
Origin of Inequality, in Te Discourses and Other Early Political
Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
x List of Abbreviations
PE, SC, and GP Discourse on Political Economy, Social Contract, and Considerations
on the Government of Poland, in Te Social Contract and Other
Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
LA Letter to M. d’Alembert, in Politics and the Arts, trans. Allan Bloom
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960).
E Emile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
Introduction
Dionysius, the tyrant, when expelled from Syracuse, kept school at

Corinth. He could not dispense with that continued opportunity of
commanding.
—Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, III.12
Te Problem with Authority
You’re not the boss of me. Tis is a pronouncement you may have heard
(or even uttered yourself at some point), from a child chafng against some
imposed limitation. Further eforts to restrict children can ofen elicit from
even the youngest among them a fairly sophisticated political philosophy,
namely, this is a free country and I can do what I want. It might occur to us to
wonder how persons who have been alive for fewer years than they have fn-
gers (and still use those fngers to count) came to harbor such expansive ideas
about their liberty. Tis book attempts to answer just this question, posed by
our child philosophers—whether in a free country, it is in fact the case that
no one should be the boss of them.
However exasperating parents may fnd this proposition when it is ad-
vanced against them, their children have correctly intuited the liberal
tradition’s prevailing suspicion of authority, and especially personal au-
thority. Te rise of liberalism went hand-in-hand with the decline of what
Max Weber called “traditional” authorities—the clerics, feudal nobility, and
scholastics of pre-Reformation Europe. At the same time, the ascent of po-
litical theories of individual right, natural equality, contract, and constitu-
tionalism elevated impersonal and neutral states and put what was lef of the
clergy and the nobility on the defensive. Tis was no mere historical coinci-
dence but a central aim of liberalism—to topple arbitrary political authority
and replace it with government grounded in consent and conducted by
elected representatives who were constrained by the natural rights inhering
Liberal States, Authoritarian Families. Rita Koganzon, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197568804.003.0001
2 Liberal States
in individuals. Te goal was from the start to ensure that, as far as possible,
you would be the only boss of you.
Of course, it was never quite that simple, and children posed the most ob-
vious challenge to the idea, since they were not, as the seventeenth-century
royalist writer Robert Filmer pointed out, born free and capable of governing
themselves, but rather totally dependent on adults. “Children, I confess,” John
Locke retorted cryptically, “are not born in this full state of equality, though
they are born to it” (ST, 6). Tis raises a number of pressing questions: from
where does their freedom and equality then come? At what point could they
be said to possess it? And, most important, the education question: what does
it take to bring children from dependence to freedom? A political regime
grounded in natural freedom has to contend with the brute fact that children
are not immediately capable of freedom or even of consent to government,
and so it always has to fnd some way to account for the authority that must
be exercised over them until they are. Even if all other traditional authorities
over adults could somehow be expunged, the problem of dependent children
would remain with us. Te very intransigence of childhood is what makes
the child and the family an ideal entrée into the problem of authority in liber-
alism since it continues to confront us every generation, long afer the clergy
has been disestablished and the nobility overthrown and universal sufrage
made a basic expectation.
Tat is not to say that political theorists have not tried to address this ten-
sion. In the United States, courts and legislatures have struggled to estab-
lish stable boundaries between the rights of the state, parents, and children
themselves, especially afer nineteenth-century eforts to outlaw child labor
and enforce child welfare. Teir distinctions had enormous implications
for pedagogical and parenting practices throughout the twentieth century.1

But it was not until the 1972 Supreme Court decision in Wisconsin v. Yoder
that political theorists were inspired to enter the debate, armed with John
Rawls’s contemporaneous Teory of Justice. Tese theorists set out to defend
a narrow sphere of legitimate parental authority that would, on one hand,
avoid the radical argument that childhood and the family were oppressive
constructs to be abolished in the name of equality, but could, on the other
hand, counter the increasingly efective argument of religious conservatives
1 Ann Hulbert, Raising America (New York: Vintage, 2004).
Introduction 3
that parents have, by First Amendment right if not from nature itself, broad
or even complete discretion over their children’s upbringing.2
Having succeeded at marking out a middle ground, these Rawlsian
theorists of parental authority have come to dominate the feld. Although
they understood themselves to be liberal, and ofen make cursory appeals
to early liberal thinkers like Locke, their arguments betray serious amnesia
about the arguments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries regarding
the nature and justifcations for authority over children. By neglecting these
early liberal understandings, however, modern liberal theorists have weak-
ened their own grounds for even the minimal parental authority they set out
to defend and have delineated unstable and ultimately inefectual boundaries
between the state and the family.
Contemporary Liberalism’s Problem with Authority
At issue in Yoder was a contention by Amish parents that their children

should be exempted from Wisconsin’s compulsory school attendance law
because public high school attendance undermined Amish children’s ability
to participate in the Amish way of life and violated their rights under the
Free Exercise Clause. Te US Supreme Court’s decision in favor of the Amish
families defended potentially broad parental authority over the upbringing
of children against the infuence of state and local governments. Te unwill-
ingness of a tiny religious minority like the Amish to assimilate to prevailing
social norms posed little danger, but the threat that liberal political theorists
saw in Yoder was that it could be used by a much larger group of religious
parents—fundamentalists and evangelicals—to justify removing their far

more numerous children from common schooling and consequently from
the reach of liberal state infuence.3 It was this possibility that they set out to
theorize against.
2 Infuential versions of the liberationist argument can be found in Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
(New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum,
2003); John Holt, Escape from Childhood (New York: Ballantine, 1975). Te religious conservative po-
sition was represented by organizations like the Homeschool Legal Defense Association and groups
involved in defending local control of the schools in the 1970s. For their arguments, see Mitchell
Stevens, Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) and Campbell Scribner, Te Fight for Local Control: Schools,
Suburbs, and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).
3 As Yoder faded from memory and privatizing educational reforms like homeschooling,
vouchers, and charters became more widespread in the 1990s, liberal theorists extended their
arguments to target them instead. For example, Meira Levinson, Te Demands of Liberal Education
4 Liberal States
Rawls himself, writing just before Yoder, had said little about the legitimate
extent of parental authority over children. He admitted that some experience
of personal authority is necessary for adequate moral development but la-
mented that so irrational a foundation as the “morality of authority” is re-
quired for so rational a project as a well-ordered society. Accordingly, he tried
to diminish and constrain it, limiting its use to “primitive” childhood. Even
there, it was not absolute, since “moral development fails to take place . . . if
parental injunctions are not only harsh and unjustifed, but enforced by pu-
nitive and even physical sanctions.”4 But faced with the possibility that few
parents will abide by “the principles of justice” in their childrearing practices,
Rawls turned to ideal theory and instructed readers to imagine ourselves
in a society where parental “precepts are on the whole justifed,” thereby
circumventing the most difcult questions about which precepts are justif-
able in the frst place.5 Tis omission lef an opening for Rawls’s followers to
deduce the nature and extent of parental authority that would conduce to his
vision of a just society.
Tese followers advanced a few central points. First, they argued that since
no one can claim a property right in children, “it is morally arbitrary who—
the state or the parent—exerts coercive control” so long as the coercion is in
the interest of the child, as Levinson put it.6 Parents are only the most com-
monly appointed trustees discharging a societal duty to educate children, a
duty they share with the liberal state through its schools.7 Tough there is
some disagreement over the appropriate goal of this education, most liberal
theorists have settled on autonomy as the aim to be pursued and protected
by the state. Autonomy has taken stronger and weaker forms for diferent
theorists, ranging from a “right to an open future,” a willingness to weigh
and revise one’s conception of a good life, or the capacity of “choosing freely
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Rob Reich, “Testing the Boundaries of Parental
Authority over Education: Te Case of Homeschooling,” Nomos 43 (2002), 275–313. Similarly, the
opponent on the lef shifed over the same period from child liberation to a multiculturalism that
demanded accommodation in liberal societies for anti-liberal minority cultures. On this, see Stephen
Macedo, Diversity and Distrust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 13–40. Te no-
table exception to these trends in Rawlsian thought was William Galston, who consistently defended
parental authority, educational decentralization, and pluralism on liberal grounds. See Liberal
Purposes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
4
John Rawls, A Teory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 466.
5
Rawls, Teory of Justice, 463.
6 Levinson, Demands of Liberal Education, 47–48.
7 Amy Gutmann, “Children, Paternalism, and Education: A Liberal Argument,” Philosophy and
Public Afairs 9 (1980), 344.
Introduction 5
among a range of competing conceptions of the good life.”8 Some authority

has to be wielded in the service of this aim given the cognitive immaturity
of children, but this authority might be limited only to the minimum that
would render the child capable of weighing and revising his conceptions of
the good or choosing among lives, without overtly directing or imposing
these conceptions or choices. Moreover, this guidance can never be done by
parents alone (or even entire communities if they are, like the Amish, too ho-
mogenous) because it entails “an obligation to allow children to be exposed
to the choices available in their extra-familial society.”9 Education is thus a
process through which children rehearse their future autonomy, equality,
and liberty “in a protected space,” the school, away from the dominating in-
fuence of parents.10
Te schools that these theorists had in mind were, with few exceptions,
compulsory, state-run, and designed explicitly to, as Gutmann put it, “con-
vert children away” from the presumptively undemocratic views of their
families.11 Tey would ensure that all children acquire the “sensibilities” that
must be inculcated early to allow them to “frst become the kind of people
who are repelled by bigotry” and other anti-liberal sentiments, so that later
rational deliberation will allow them to “feel the force of the reasons for their
repulsion.”12 Or, in Macedo’s account, schools would pursue “the core lib-
eral civic mission of inculcating toleration” through the “necessary means”
of “exposure to diversity.”13 Levinson envisions schools that would “foster an
atmosphere of refection detached from the constitutive commitments of the
other arenas of the child’s life” and free again from the partiality of parental
and community preferences.14 All these theorists insist that schools must
8 I am eliding for concision slightly diferent accounts of the goal of democratic education here
under the umbrella of autonomy, but I take Meira Levinson’s point that even those theorists who
claim to be arguing for something weaker than autonomy ultimately depend on it. See Levinson,
Demands of Liberal Education, ch. 2. Te specifc aims quoted here originate in Joel Feinberg, “Te
Child’s Right to an Open Future,” in William Aiken and Hugh LaFollette (eds.), Whose Child?
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefeld, 1980), 124–153; Eamon Callan, Creating Citizens: Political
Education and Liberal Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Gutmann,
“Children, Paternalism,” 338. Similar arguments can be found in, e.g., Levinson, Demands of Liberal
Education; Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999);
Stephen Macedo, Diversity and Distrust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); and
Matthew Clayton, Justice and Legitimacy in Upbringing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
9 Gutmann, “Children, Paternalism,” 338, 342.
10 Ian Shapiro, Democratic Justice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 71.
11 Gutmann, Democratic Education, 121.
12 Gutmann, Democratic Education, 43.
13 Macedo, Diversity and Distrust, 201.
14 Levinson, Demands of Liberal Education, 61.
6 Liberal States
be controlled primarily by the disinterested and centralized state, since pa-

rental and community control will only reinforce parental and community
prejudices and prevent the necessary exposure to other ways of life.15
Te Logic of Congruence
If we follow these arguments, we must admit that children have a point

when they insist that neither their parents nor anyone else is the boss of
them, at least not by any particular right. Te overarching aim of Rawlsian
theorists has been to limit parental authority as much as the circumstances
of childhood permit. Tey regret the exercise of authority over children,
even while admitting its practical necessity, because they cannot reconcile
childhood subordination with adult freedom. If property right is the only
legitimate basis for subordination, and if children cannot be understood
as the property of parents (a claim no liberal, early or late, has advanced),
then there seems to be no justifcation for authority over them except the
unfortunate failure of human development to harmonize with ideal theory.
Te best way to deal with this incongruity then is to minimize it as much
and as quickly as possible. Consequently, the basic logic of liberal educa-
tional theory has become that of “congruence” between the public and pri-
vate realms, the structure of the state, and its families and schools.16 Since
the liberal democratic state turns on equality and individual liberty, chil-
dren are best prepared for citizenship in it by experiencing egalitarian so-
cial relations and rehearsing rights in the pre-political spheres they inhabit.
Te democratic school, with its emphasis on neutral exposure to and ex-
perimentation with many ways of life serves this end much better than an
insular and hierarchical family.17
15 Gutmann and Macedo admitted narrow exceptions to compulsory state education, but Levinson
argued that such exemptions are unnecessary, since any potential tyranny of the state over children
through schools is no worse than, and indeed counteracts, the de facto tyranny of parents. Gutmann,
Democratic Education, 121–122; Macedo, Diversity and Distrust, 207; Levinson, Demands of Liberal
Education, 67. Gutmann’s schools are amenable to some community input but only over “particulars”
like the teaching of state history and local traditions, while federal and professional considerations
determine everything else and may be invoked to overturn local decisions even in particulars.
Gutmann, Democratic Education, 72–77.
16 I borrow this term from Nancy Rosenblum, “Democratic Families: Te Logic of ‘Congruence’
and Political Identity,” Hofstra Law Review 32 (2003), 145–170.

17 Tis is true even for “liberal parents” who “favor their children’s thinking for themselves,” since
in many cases, the requirement of “family harmony” will “(properly) trump autonomous decision-
making.” Levinson, Demands of Liberal Education, 60–62.
Introduction 7
Tere is an appealing and logical simplicity to this assumption, and as a

result, it is typically deviations from it that require justifcation. Practice is
obviously an important way to learn, so if we want children to grow up un-
derstanding their democratic rights and duties, they should practice them
from the start. By contrast, if they practice obedience and submission in
childhood, they may naturally grow into slavish adults. It is incongruence
that is confusing, requiring us to demand a form of personal authority in
one sphere of the regime—the family and the school—that liberalism is
otherwise designed to undermine in all others. Te dependence and needi-
ness of children demand that parents and pedagogues behave toward them
in a hierarchical, coercive way that is not only impermissible in relation
to fellow citizens, but is also at odds with their cardinal civic principles.
Ambivalence toward authority makes a great deal of contemporary lib-
eral sense.
Tis discomfort with authority among scholars tracks the growing
purchase of “child-centered” parenting and pedagogy among the public
during the same years, which encouraged adults to relate to children
more like sympathetic older friends than hierarchical authority fg-
ures.18 Much of our contemporary practical discussion about childrearing
derives from our ambivalence about adult authority, down even to the
minutiae of infant care. Should you “sleep train” your baby, letting him
cry until he conforms to an adult-imposed sleep schedule, or practice “at-
tachment parenting” by subordinating yourself to his sleep preferences?
Parents may sometimes allow desperation to guide their answers, but the
physicians, psychologists, and parenting gurus who have been peddling
these alternatives to parents for the past century have grounded them on
ideas about the infuence of parental authority on healthy development,

viewing it as either a salutary guide, or more ofen, a baleful obstacle to
healthy maturity.19 Te same is true of pedagogues, who debated whether
the classroom teacher should be the “sage on the stage” versus the “guide
on the side,” with the latter coming out ahead more ofen as new trends in
pedagogy like constructivism and “fipped classrooms” gained traction.20
Dissenters from the prevailing anti-authoritarian tendency, like Amy
18 Tis development, centered especially on the theories of psychologists like Jean Piaget, is
described in Hulbert, Raising America.

19 Hulbert, Raising America, 325–359.
20 Paul Peterson, Saving Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 79–104; Diane
Ravitch, Lef Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).
8 Liberal States
Chua in Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother, have occasionally made a splash by

proposing that strict parental authority may actually help children achieve
independence and happiness, but these arguments have rarely met with
the approval of the experts.21
Tese cultural tendencies were reinforced by an underlying political anx-
iety about authority in the postwar period, one that was articulated most
clearly by Teodor Adorno in the bestselling Te Authoritarian Personality,
which purported to locate the roots of fascism in an “authoritarian” style
of parenting, and in the process became a classic statement of the logic of
congruence:
A basically hierarchical, authoritarian, exploitive parent-child relation-

ship is apt to carry over into a power-oriented, exploitively dependent
attitude toward one’s sex partner and one’s God and may well culminate
in a political philosophy and social outlook which has no room for an-
ything but a desperate clinging to what appears to be strong. . . . On the
other hand, there is a pattern characterized chiefy by afectionate, basi-
cally equalitarian, and permissive interpersonal relationships. Tis pattern
encompasses attitudes within the family and toward the opposite sex, as
well as an internalization of religious and social values. Greater fexibility
and the potentiality for more genuine satisfactions appear as results of this
basic attitude.22
Adorno and his coauthors drew a straightforward parallel between po-

litical and parental authority, claiming that the child who is dominated by
adults becomes an adult dominator of his fellow citizens, while a child who is
treated as an equal grows up to be an egalitarian. Te book refected an asso-

ciation between private authority and political despotism that was pervasive
in postwar American discourse, and it is telling that the source of such des-
potism was found in the exercise of authority over children. Te underlying
assumption of all such arguments is that incongruence is a problem to be
solved rather than a necessary condition of freedom.
21 While I’m aware that the term “authoritarian” has a nefarious connotation, I use it in my title
and throughout this book as a morally neutral adjective to describe the application of authority. Te
English language has no other word for this, “authoritative” being more connected to the trustwor-
thiness of experts than the rule of parents over children. Te lack even of a word to describe moral
authority in action that isn’t coded as illiberal is itself an indication that our antipathy to authority has
overreached.
22 Teodor Adorno et al., Te Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950), 971–972.
Introduction 9
Te Case for Incongruence
Liberalism’s postwar efort to purge itself of authority was not without

dissenters. In two essays on authority and education in the mid-1950s that
anticipated the central error of Rawlsian congruence theory, Hannah Arendt
raised important objections to the idea that authority and liberalism were
simply at odds and that the kind of progressive education that curtailed ped-
agogical authority in the name of children’s freedom was likely to produce
anything like a free citizen. She argued that it was a characteristic failing of
liberal thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to assume that li-
berty grows where authority declines, so that overthrowing authority wher-
ever possible would always conduce to progress.23 Liberals had confated
authority with coercive power, and while most theorists in the twentieth cen-
tury admitted some necessity of coercion, their eforts to limit its scope led
them to mistakenly suppress authority along with it.
Instead, according to Arendt, a distinction must be made between power,
which induces submission by force, and authority, which elicits it voluntarily.
Authority had to be defned “in contradistinction to both coercion by force
and persuasion through arguments” because it “implies an obedience in
which men retain their freedom. . . . [T]‌he most conspicuous characteristic
of those in authority is that they do not have power.”24 When we confate au-
thority with power, force, and even violence, we transform compliance into
a character faw—cowardice, a weak will, or an incapacity to think and judge
for oneself. Tis is why it seems so urgent to contemporary liberals to cir-
cumvent it.
But Arendt points out the irony of this proposition in a democracy. An
education that suppresses adult authority for the sake of facilitating self-
government in children and a “protected space” in which to rehearse equality
among themselves in fact leaves the child wholly at the mercy of his peers.
23 Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?” Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin,
1968), 96–97.
24 Arendt, “What Is Authority,” 93, 106, 122. Each thinker I discuss in the chapters that follow
defnes authority and its relation to power somewhat diferently. I will allow each one to speak for
himself, but Arendt’s defnition is useful to keep in mind in the background since it does turn out to
be generally true that absolutists tend to collapse power and authority while liberals try to separate
them. Contemporary defnitions like Joseph Raz’s that authority is “exclusionary reason” may in some
cases render authority more concrete and legible than Arendt’s somewhat vaguer account, but for my
purposes, hers is conceptually more useful in clarifying the diferences between liberal and non-
liberal accounts of authority, without carrying so much of the analytical baggage that is attached to
contemporary defnitional disputes. But see Joseph Raz, Te Morality of Freedom (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988), chs. 2–3.
10 Liberal States
Authority is not abolished but merely transferred to an even more malicious

element: the peer group.
Te child in the group . . . is of course rather worse of than before. For the
authority of a group, even a child group, is always considerably stronger and
more tyrannical than the severest authority of an individual person can be. . . .
By being emancipated from the authority of adults the child has not been freed
but has been subjected to a much more terrifying and truly tyrannical au-
thority, the tyranny of the majority.25
What begins as a project to facilitate the development of children’s autonomy

thus dissolves into a more powerful engine of conformism than the most ex-
treme caricature of the corporally punishing, Latin-reciting scholastic educa-
tion that liberalism initially set out to banish. Te logic of congruence that turns
the family and school into miniature liberal democracies to better cultivate lib-
eral democrats produces subjects for tyranny instead.
Tis is not merely a theoretical fear. Tere are also signs that the postwar
pursuit of congruence in childrearing and education has had worrisome
efects on American children, who have increasingly shown symptoms of
distress and difculty making successful transitions to adulthood, symptoms
that cut across race, class, and gender. Schools have become more demo-
cratic, but academic achievement has stagnated or declined since the 1970s.26
Parents have tried to enhance their children’s autonomy, but depression, anx-
iety, and suicide rates for those under eighteen have increased sharply in the
past decade.27 Te causes of these changes are complex, and a broad cultural
shif toward democratic education and childrearing could never be the whole
story. Nonetheless, it is striking that as straightforward adult authority over

them has been scaled back as a result of changing priorities in childrearing
and pedagogy, and children have been lef more to govern themselves in
real and virtual life, they have not, on the whole, become happier, but rather
25 Arendt, “Te Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1968), 181.
26 Tis is true both relative to other countries, in Trends in International Mathematics and Science
Study (TIMSS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test results, and do-
mestically, in standardized test scores.
27 See, e.g., Jean Twenge et al., “Birth Cohort Increases in Psychopathology among Young
Americans, 1938–2007: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of the MMPI,” Clinical Psychology Review

30 (2010), 145–154. On suicide rates, see Sally Curtin and Melonie Heron, “Death Rates due to
Suicide and Homicide among Persons Aged 10–24: United States, 2000–2017,” NCHS Data Brief 352
(October 2019), https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db352-h.pdf.
Introduction 11
lonelier, angrier, and sadder.28 Tese difculties track Arendt’s worries about
what will happen to children in liberal democracies in the absence of adult
authority.
Education in the liberal tradition is the gradual development of self-
control, what earlier liberals called “self-mastery.” But until children can
control themselves, they are easily controlled by others. Te parental and
pedagogical authority of individual adults may be abused and misused, but
it can also be well-used. Te pedagogical authority of the peer group difers
in that, in its irrationality, it can never be well-used. So the task of educa-
tion in liberal democracies requires adults to use their personal authority
over children to protect them from the competing and corrupting sources
of authority and guide them toward self-mastery and intellectual indepen-
dence, allowing them eventually to face the omnipresent social pressure of
society on their own and decide for themselves whether and when to follow
the crowd.
Arendt’s account begins to illuminate the reason that liberty has always
required authority, and not simply the impersonal authority of the law or of
political representatives viewed as extensions of one’s own will, but the in-
tensely personal authority of individual adults whose guidance and instruc-
tion shapes us in childhood. Her answer to the pugnacious philosophizing
child is that, precisely because this is a free country, your parents and your
teachers must be the boss of you. If they don’t step up to this role, you will
fnd yourself at the mercy of much worse bosses. Tis understanding of the
central role that adult authority plays in the development of self-mastery and
the protection it ofers against subjection to the tyranny of opinion ofers a
stronger grounding for the exercise of parental and pedagogical authority
than Rawlsian liberals have so far been able to ofer.

Early liberal theories, for all their opposition to traditional public author-
ities, never proposed to liberate children from their parents. Indeed, a no-
table feature of some of the most politically anti-authoritarian thought of
early modernity—John Locke’s and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s—is that it de-
voted specifc attention to the case of children and the problem of education,
defending the need for extensive parental and pedagogical authority. Locke
and Rousseau opposed modeling the family on the state—even on a demo-
cratic, egalitarian state—because they viewed the “authoritarian” family as a
necessary educational buttress for children against the new forms of social
28 Jean Twenge, iGen (New York: Atria Books, 2017), ch. 4.
12 Liberal States
tyranny that liberal, commercial states would develop. Undermining tradi-

tional authorities and leveling hierarchies would not issue uncomplicatedly
in freedom and equality for all, but it would instead elevate other forces to
commanding heights—in particular, the authority of fashion, opinion, and
the majority. Tese forces might—unlike the old authorities—leave our
bodies and properties alone, but they would subtly and forcefully shape our
understandings, subjecting us to a new kind of tyranny of public opinion
that could be as powerful as it is invisible. To counteract this threat, Locke
and Rousseau defended the private authority of the family to protect chil-
dren from public opinion’s infuence while they are most vulnerable to it, and
to build up their self-control so that they could one day protect themselves
and be more fully free. Tis authority is substantially more expansive than
what contemporary liberals have allowed, but it is nonetheless limited in
duration and so still compatible with liberalism’s principles of adult liberty
and equality. What it is not is congruent with them. By abandoning the logic
of congruence and permitting the adult authority they’ve over-cautiously
withheld, modern liberals can strengthen liberal education and thereby an-
chor their political project on frmer ground.
By examining Locke’s and Rousseau’s educational writings in the context
of their political thought and that of their immediate opponents, we can see
more clearly why early liberals opposed the logic of congruence and what
kind of authority in the family and state they thought would conduce to li-
berty. What I hope to show is what they saw originally in dealing with this
difculty but has since been largely forgotten or misinterpreted—that in
a liberal democracy, the practices of childrearing and education must run
counter to those of civic life. In other words, the family (and later, the school)
cannot simply be a mirror of the regime, a position that was originally held
by absolutist thinkers before it was revived by contemporary liberals, and in
fact must be its inverse: the liberty of the adult citizen depends on the subor-
dination of the pre-political child.
Plan of the Book
Tis study begins from Arendt’s insight that education is an inherently au-
thoritarian undertaking and that liberalism’s denial of this seriously weakens
it. Following Arendt, I attempt to answer the question, “What was authority?”
My concern is primarily with modern authority, authority as it was conceived
Introduction 13
alongside—and in opposition to—the growth of the neutral, impersonal

modern state. Consequently, I begin in the sixteenth century, with the rise
of sovereignty theory in the thought of Jean Bodin and Tomas Hobbes.
Sovereignty theory is the modern origin of the logic of congruence. Its con-
gruence tends in the opposite direction from democratic congruence—that
is, fatherhood is to be made absolute in order to mirror the absolute power
of the monarch. Nonetheless, it is animated by precisely the same impulse,
that the family ought to be a miniature version of the state, so that children
may rehearse from the outset the conduct expected from them as adults.
Sovereignty theory was a major turning point in the career of authority be-
cause it confated power and authority in a single impersonal ofce, and its
proponents turned to the family and in particular to fathers to substantiate
the new kind of absolute, indivisible, and fnal power they imagined. Te ab-
solute patriarchal family they sought was not the “traditional” premodern
familial arrangement from time immemorial, but rather the outgrowth of the
conception of political power embodied in sovereignty.
It is in the opposition to sovereignty that we also fnd the frst articulated
objections to the logic of congruence and an efort to reconcile an authori-
tarian family to a liberal state. In particular, in Locke, we fnd a profoundly
anti-authoritarian state and epistemological theory coupled with an author-
itarian pedagogy. Locke denies any natural basis for parental authority and
places strict limits on its reach and duration, but nonetheless he tells parents
to behave as their children’s “absolute” rulers. In Rousseau, who accepts dem-
ocratic sovereignty, we fnd an even more expansive embrace of personal au-
thority, in both politics and education, set against impersonal government.
Te reason that Locke and Rousseau defend parental authority despite their
general antipathy to authority is their fear of precisely the power of public

opinion that Hobbes had hoped to tame with his sovereign. Te authority of
parents over children turns out to be an antidote or counterweight to the in-
fuence of fashion and popular opinion that is strengthened and elevated by
the centralizing, rationalizing, and depersonalizing impulse of sovereignty.
Te frst chapter examines Bodin’s purpose in advancing sovereignty
theory, his construction of power and authority, and the reasons for his re-
defnition of the family in the image of absolute power. It then takes up the
thought of Bodin’s most original follower, Hobbes. Hobbes followed Bodin’s
absolute sovereignty most of the way, including in his presumption that pa-
ternal power is absolute, but he saw that naturalistic sources of authority like
paternity are highly unstable relative to conventional sources like contract.
14 Liberal States
Moreover, unlike Bodin, he saw that the deepest threat to sovereignty would
not come from competing formal powers like the nobility or the clergy, but
from the competing informal power of public opinion. So, to fortify sover-
eign authority against any challenge from above or below, he subordinated
fathers to sovereigns in the commonwealth. But he also encouraged the
sovereign to maintain the patriarchal family in order to educate subjects by
harsh experience to prefer a distant, impersonal ofce of the sovereign rep-
resentative to rule by a powerful, near-at-hand, and obnoxiously personal
father. Hobbes’s sovereign is designed to resolve the contradictions of the
sovereignty theory inherited from Bodin, and it does so by structuring polit-
ical authority in such a way that even the right to defne ideas is concentrated
in the sovereign.
In the third and fourth chapters, I turn to Locke’s account of political and
paternal authority. I show that Locke developed an anti-sovereignty political
theory as a result of a gradually increasing skepticism that Hobbes’s solution
to the problem of seditious opinions was practicable. If even an absolute sov-
ereign could not direct or control public opinion, and “fashion” and “reputa-
tion” rather than positive law were the most powerful determinants of human
conduct, then these forces posed an even greater threat to individual liberty
than an arbitrary political ruler. Contemporary liberals identify Locke as one
of, if not the foundational thinker for the positions they develop, but their ac-
count of Locke remains at best incomplete. Tey are right to see in the Second
Treatise an efort to reduce political authority to impersonal ofces and laws,
but they overestimate the extent to which that efort bleeds into private life or
is intended to be a guiding principle for education and childrearing. Locke’s
education follows from his concern with protecting epistemic liberty against
the power of fashion described in the Essay, and he enlists the paternal (or
parental) authority in this efort to defend against something like the tyranny
of the majority that Arendt feared from submitting children to one another’s
government. Locke thus reverses the logic of congruence: a state grounded in
equality and individual liberty requires a hierarchical, authoritarian family
to sustain itself.
In the fnal two chapters, I consider Rousseau’s writings on public and pri-
vate authority. Rousseau is of interest to us because he responds directly to
Locke and Hobbes and ofers the most elaborate account of the relation be-
tween personal authority and both legal sovereignty (in the Social Contract)
and the informal power of opinion (in the Letter to d’Alembert). Unlike
Locke, Rousseau does believe that public opinion can be directed, though
Introduction 15
not as Hobbes claims, by the sovereign, but rather by outstanding individ-

uals who compel admiration and emulation through their virtue—that is, by
their personal authority. Tese individuals—the legislator and the censors
in public life, and women and tutors in the private sphere—form a kind of
shadow government, regulating mores alongside a formal government that
promulgates positive law.
Tese chapters examine how these personal authorities are intended
to work in public life in a well-ordered society and how they serve as pri-
vate preservatives against the corruptions of the poorly ordered modern
commercial societies depicted in Emile. Like Locke, Rousseau set out to
fortify the modern family to serve as a fence against the social and intel-
lectual corruption—the tyranny of the majority—which modern political
arrangements had exacerbated.
What I hope to demonstrate by re-examining early modern ideas about
public and private authority is that postwar liberalism, by fearing all authority
and trying to rationalize and de-personalize it indiscriminately, has advanced
a self-undermining and essentially absolutist conception of authority and
education. Te infuence of this anti-authoritarian liberalism on contempo-
rary education and childrearing has been particularly destructive because
the demand for congruence between the state and the families and schools
within it imperils precisely the realm that Locke and Rousseau identifed as
most capable of averting a tyranny of public opinion. Early modern ideas
about authority were directly tied to the desire to control public opinion—
those thinkers who took public opinion to be amenable to conscious control
by the state subordinated or entirely dispensed with private authority, while
those who saw it as difcult or impossible to centrally direct saw the need
for private authority to counter public opinion’s threats to freedom. Modern

liberalism—both inside and outside the academy—has remained concerned
with the threat of propaganda, demagoguery, and intellectual conformism,
but it has largely lost sight of the salutary function of personal authority in
countering these dangers and would do well to rediscover them.
Te family’s claim to naturalness— to a spontaneous, pre- political
existence—poses a special challenge for any conception of state or sovereign
authority because it appears to pre-date and possibly to supersede the au-
thority of any particular government. Te way that diferent thinkers have
dealt with this claim to naturalness and primacy then infuences what scope
they can give to political authority. Bodin, for example, admits the family’s
naturalness and primacy over the state, and he attempts to strengthen the
16 Liberal States
sovereign’s power by establishing a parallel between familial and political au-

thority. By contrast, Hobbes and his followers, for whom the family poses
a serious threat to the supremacy of his sovereign representative, are con-
cerned to deny the pre-political naturalness of the family and to re-establish
it on a conventional foundation of consent or historical contingency so that it
no can longer compete efectively with the state for loyalty.
However, because it can claim to be the primordial, pre-political human
association, the family’s authority also poses a potent threat to freedom and
cannot simply be celebrated as the great counterweight against modern tyr-
anny. To the same extent that the family is the frst and most natural society,
it is also the frst and most natural tyranny. Locke and Rousseau saw this as
clearly as Hobbes and Bodin, and were for that reason hardly willing to con-
cede that any exercise of power over children constituted authority. What
Hobbes showed was that men naturally resist being ruled. What Rousseau
and especially Locke ofered was a kind of authority that could channel
and overcome that resistance in the short run in order to preserve liberty
in the long run. Recovering a picture of that kind of authority is the aim of
this study.
1
Te Rise of Sovereignty and the
Logic of Congruence
Te idea that there could or should be congruence between the structure of

authority in the family and the state was essentially absent from sixteenth-
century constitutionalism before Jean Bodin. Te primary concern of earlier
constitutionalism had been to describe the appropriate extent and limits of
the monarchy and the balance among the ofces of the constitution.1 While
it occasionally admitted that the frst governments were patriarchal, this was
only to show how incompatible this form of rule was with modern govern-
ment, which required standing laws. It was not until the rise of absolutist
arguments in France, and especially Bodin’s formulation of these arguments
into a legal theory of sovereignty—absolutism in the service of rule of law
rather than against it—that paternal authority was invoked as a positive
model for the power of the monarch.
To understand the origins of our modern aversion to authority and es-
pecially to personal authority, we must begin with the sixteenth-century
development of sovereignty as an account of the nature of political power.
To do so may seem counterintuitive, since in its frst guise as an encour-
agement to the absolute monarchies of France and England, sovereignty
hardly seems to be at odds with rule by personal authority. Monarchical

absolutism requires a monarch, an ofce whose character is highly per-
sonal and whose personality seems only to be expanded when abso-
lutism severs the monarch’s accountability to the nobility or the people.
Sovereignty was conceived as—and has at bottom always been—a justif-
cation for absolutism, frst for the absolutism of a monarch, and later for
the absolute power of the assembly or the people. It seems to be consum-
mately personal.
1 Examples of such constitutionalism from English and French thought include Tomas Smith, De
Republica Anglorum (1583), Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1597); Claude de
Seyssel, Te Monarchy of France (1519); and Francois Hotman, Francogallia (1573).
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197568804.003.0002
18 Liberal States
Yet establishing personal authority was not the aim of sovereignty theorists.
On the contrary, they saw themselves as imposing a rational administra-
tive order on the chaos of medieval law, with its multitude of independent
jurisdictions, its secular and canon traditions, and its competing claims of
corporate and personal rights.2 In addition to a jumbled feudal legal inherit-
ance, the more recent rise in the sixteenth century of Machiavellianism and
the doctrine of raison d’etat, emphasizing security over legality, threatened
to pry political rule apart from law entirely.3 Sovereignty as articulated in
Bodin’s writings was an attempt to domesticate the Machiavellian concep-
tion of power by writing it into the law to produce a coherent political-legal
basis for the French monarchy, on a model that every state could potentially
follow.4
Although Bodin intended sovereignty theory to strengthen and ration-
alize the monarchy rather than loose an unbounded despotism of the king’s
arbitrary will on France, the logic of sovereignty remained one of absolute
power, and Bodin never denied it. On the contrary, because the idea of an
absolute public power did not exist in feudal law, Bodin made an extensive
efort to substantiate its existence from other sources, turning away from
the legal history of France and toward a more abstract genealogy of polit-
ical power to do so. His efort to fnd a source or model of absolute power
that would supersede the feudal privileges of the French constitution led him
to the family, where he argued that fathers originally had such power, both
from God and ancient tradition. Te evidence of such power could be seen
in the jus vitae necisque, the power of life and death of Roman fathers over
their children. Elevating a primordial familial model of political power over
the prevailing natural-law account of the family as natural and prior to the
2 Harold Berman, Law and Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), particu-
larly Part II on secular legal systems. Berman emphasizes that the overlapping legal systems of the late
medieval period were actually quite well-ordered and functional in practice despite their complexity,
a view also taken by Bodin’s opponent Francois Hotman, whose contemporaneous Francogallia was
a competing account of French legal history arguing that France was founded on the power of the
people for the purpose of limiting the monarch. In particular, as Daniel Lee has argued, Bodinian
sovereignty was concerned with establishing a frm legal distinction between the king’s public power
over the kingdom and the arbitrary power of a feudal lord over his demesne. See Daniel Lee, “‘Ofce
Is a Ting Borrowed’: Jean Bodin on Ofces and Seigneurial Government,” Political Teory 41 (2013),
409–440.
3 On the doctrine of raison d’etat, see Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Tought,
vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 248–254; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and
Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 2.
4 Bodin rejects Machiavelli in the preface of his Six Books, but there is good reason to see him
as a systemizer and domesticator rather than an outright opponent of Machiavelli. See also Harvey
Mansfeld, Taming the Prince (New York: Free Press, 1989), 153–157.
The Rise of Sovereignty 19
state but not analogous to it was a strategy adopted by sovereignty’s advocates

to overcome the arguments of mixed monarchy proponents like Francois
Hotman in France and Richard Hooker in England.
Bodin’s enlistment and substantial reformulation of the family and paternal
power for this project was taken up by English absolutists, particularly Robert
Filmer, who extended Bodin’s patriarchal logic into legal absurdity, and Tomas
Hobbes, who attempted to fll the gaps in Bodin’s theory with a more consistent
and systematic account of political origins to support absolute sovereignty.
Unlike Filmer, who wholeheartedly adopted Bodin’s suggestions about the pa-
triarchal origins of political power, Hobbes suspected that such origins were in
reality less stable than another account of political origins that Bodin advanced
in his earlier work—consent, or covenant. Hobbes’s sovereignty theory and its
relation to patriarchalism was, as a result, much more complex than the direct
analogies that early sovereignty theorists made between sovereign and pa-
ternal power.
Tis chapter will lay out the logic of sovereignty and its relationship to pa-
ternal power advanced between the sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth cen-
turies. It is not a survey of early modern theories of sovereignty but focuses
on those that made paternal authority central to their understandings of po-
litical power. Tese accounts of political and paternal power form the vista
against which Locke’s and Rousseau’s accounts of authority were set and which
prompted their detailed considerations of the limits of paternal or parental au-
thority over children and their unusually extensive attention to the education
required for their regimes.
Te Purpose of Sovereignty
It becomes clear in his frst major work, the Method for the Easy
Comprehension of History of 1566, that Bodin arrived at the idea of sover-
eignty in an efort to overcome the legal particularities of the French consti-
tution and move toward a universal jurisprudence. Sovereignty is introduced
in the sixth book of the Method as the unifying principle of all government,
the structure or power underlying the whole variety of the world’s polit-
ical arrangements. It is, in his 1576 formulation, “the most high, absolute,
and perpetual power over the citizens and subjects in a commonweale.”5 As
5 Jean Bodin, Te Six Books of the Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles (London, 1606), I.8. Te
question of editions of the Six Books is fraught, since Bodin translated his own French edition into
20 Liberal States
such, it is an indivisible power, characterized by fve “marks,” or legislative

functions of its bearer, and subject to no higher authority save the ambig-
uous and unenforceable “laws of God, of nature, and of nations.”6 Because
such power precedes law and is necessary to make law in the frst place, the
sovereign cannot be held to the laws he makes, though Bodin strongly urges
self-restraint for prudential reasons. Sovereignty consists in the power to act
“despite the law,” the most visible and routine demonstration of which is the
power to pardon.7
Sovereign power narrows the fexible Aristotelian idea of rule, divisible into
kinds based on the nature of the ruler and ruled, into the single form of com-
mand.8 Te activities that Aristotle put at the center of politics—deliberation
and judgment—are insufcient on their own to create order. Bodin does not
exclude them from politics but relegates them to lower ofcials like judges
and counselors who answer to the sovereign. Te highest magistracies are
marked rather by their capacity to “command and execute.”9 Tis narrowing
of rule was made possible by Bodin’s confation of authority (imperium)
with power (potestas).10 Roman jurists had distinguished these modes of
rule, denying that all political life is a matter of command and subjection,
but Bodin rejected such distinctions as mere “rules of grammarians.”11 Right
and infuence are not power because power must be visible and have a di-
rect efect on whoever it is exercised upon—its object must be, in Bodin’s
examples, summoned to trial, appointed to ofce, executed by his prince.
Although the nature of public and private property difers for Bodin, the
nature of public and private power does not. Te power of a father is no
diferent in character than that of a prince: “Tis word Power, is common
unto all such as have power to command over others, either publickly or pri-
vately.”12 Because power is only command for Bodin, it is essential to identify
Latin with modifcations, and there remains only one unabridged English translation, from 1606, on
which I rely here.
6 Bodin, Six Books, I.8.

7 Jean Bodin, Method for an Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds
(New York: Octagon Books, 1966), 170; Bodin, Six Books, I.10.
8 Te most signifcant of these distinctions is between mastery and political rule. Te error of the
tyrant is to imagine that there is no diference between a large household and a small city (Aristotle,
Politics, 1252a5). But for Bodin, these are merely two approaches to governing—the “seigniorial” and
the “legal.” He encourages the latter but recognizes the legitimacy of the former.
9 Bodin, Method, 170; Six Books, I.1.
10 Bodin, Method, 170–171.
11 Bodin, Method, 170–171.
and make it visible to subjects, most straightforwardly by embodying it in a

single ofce.13 Tis is signifcant not simply because it permits administrative
centralization, as many scholars have observed, but because it creates a defn-
itive locus of supremacy for subjects who are simultaneously subordinated to
other feudal, familial, and ecclesiastical superiors.
But it was not sufcient for Bodin to assert that France was an absolute
monarchy when opponents like Hotman pointed out that never in its own
legal history had it been conceived this way. He addressed this difculty in
part by ofering a competing constitutional history of France that empha-
sized instances when the king had governed independently of the Estates and
the parlements. But what was more striking than this historical counterargu-
ment was Bodin’s introduction of an idealized image of the Roman-biblical
family as a model for absolute power. He turned to the pre-history of the
state to develop the family into a model of the regime whose natural and pre-
historical primacy necessarily preempts the authority of more recent consti-
tutional history. Te result is a distinct alternative source of constitutional
authority able to supersede both feudal and civil law.
Fathers and Sovereigns
Bodin frst substantiates the possibility of such a unitary, absolute power by

reference to God’s power, since “the prince is the lively image of almightie
God. . . . [T]‌he law of the prince should be framed unto the modell of the
law of God.”14 Despite his invocation of divine power, however, Bodin is not
a divine right theorist. Te monarch is an image of God, but God’s power is
not the direct source of the monarch’s power.15 Moreover, the state is neither
13 Mansfeld notes, “Bodin frequently criticizes Aristotle for situating sovereignty in something
so indeterminate as deliberation. Te legislative power will never be precisely located if one has to
look for men who deliberate; it is safer and surer to look for one who commands. Law is then com-
mand, and command is not merely a necessary feature of law . . . but sufcient to defne it.” Mansfeld,
Taming the Prince, 155. Lee tempers this reading by pointing out that Bodin does attempt to put cer-
tain state ofces beyond the reach of the sovereign’s command, but this will be discussed on p. 16.
14 Bodin, Six Books, I.8. Tis phrase is here in the context of an exhortation to the prince to follow
the law of nature, but in this case by violating the law of nations. In the next usage, it is an exhortation
to subjects not to resist a king who is “the image of God.”
15 A clearer example of a divine right theory where a monarch’s power is directly created and
sustained by God may be found in Filmer and, later, in Books III–IV of Jacques Bossuet’s Politics
Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, trans. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990).
22 Liberal States
the direct creation of God nor the natural product of human sociability. Te
power that does arise spontaneously in nature is paternal power:
Tis word power, is common unto all such as have power to command
others. . . . So the prince (saith Seneca) hath power over his subjects, the
magistrate over privat men, the father over his children, the maister over
his schollers, the captaine over his souldiers, the lord over his slaves. But
of all these the right and power to command, is not by nature given to any
beside the father, who is the true image of the great and Almightie God the
Father of all things.16
In addition to being the image of God, the father is endowed with a power
to command by nature. Te natural primacy of the family is reinforced by
Bodin’s claim that the family can exist and persist without a state, but not vice
versa.17
When examined closely, however, Bodin’s stress on the naturalness of the
family actually jeopardizes the authority of the sovereign, which is by con-
trast unnatural, or only indirectly natural. Two difculties follow from the
identifcation of paternity with the basis of sovereign power: frst, the correct
arrangement of the family is elevated to an urgent political consideration in
its own right, since the arrangement of political power in the state nears the
natural and divine standard as it more closely resembles the arrangement of
the family. Second, as the father’s powers expand to better model absolute
sovereignty, they increasingly confict with the sovereign’s powers. Te result
is an unresolved tension in Bodin’s politics between the conventional power
of the civil sovereign and the natural right of the father.
In order to augment the father’s legal power so that he more closely

resembles an absolute sovereign, Bodin argues for the restoration to fathers
of the long-defunct right of life and death over his children (and under cer-
tain circumstances, his wife as well), “which by the law of God and nature is
given to them.”18 Tis right is, in addition to its harmony with divine and nat-
ural law, original to the Hebrews, Romans, and the French.19 Bodin’s desire
for a return to this form of patria potestas (paternal power) is remarkable in

17 Bodin, Six Books, I.6. On the uniqueness of this assertion in this period, see Anna Becker,
Gendering the Renaissance Commonwealth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020),
114–115.
19 Bodin, Method, 250–251; Six Books, I.4.
its context, since, like slavery, whose abolition Bodin endorses, the jus vitae
necisque was a pre-Christian practice abolished in the name of Christianity.20
But to view Bodin’s efort to restore this right as an efort to transform the
family into a despotism is as mistaken as to view absolutism itself as a des-
potic doctrine rather than an efort to strengthen and rationalize the state.
Bodin conceives of the family as fundamentally an association held together
by bonds of afection: he permits divorce and claims parental love will almost
always prevent fathers from exercising their restored powers.21
Te recovery of this extraordinary power is not intended to alter existing
family relations, but is rather a formal necessity for Bodin’s family to fully model
absolute sovereignty—to become “the true seminarie and beginning of every
commonweale”—that it never was under previous legal arrangements, so that
the state can follow suit.22 A correct orientation toward the authority of his fa-
ther would form the moral basis for the subject’s reverence for his king: “If it is
servile to bear the authority of a king, it ought also to seem servile to obey one’s
parents.”23 Making this claim plausible requires that the form of the family be
modifed to better refect the logic of sovereignty, and that it be brought into
closer parallel with the state so that it may plausibly model its power. Tis is the
introduction of the logic of congruence into modern political thought, and it is
important to note that this logic appears in defense of absolutism.
Te parallel forms and extent of paternal and political power are precisely
what generates the tension between fathers and kings in the Six Books. If
paternal power is to be expanded into a power of life and death over some
subjects (i.e., one’s own children) at the same time that sovereignty is to be
understood as the fnal decision in all cases, including capital cases, these two
claims must confict. Any father who executes his children deprives the sov-
ereign of his pardon power. On the other hand, any son raised to regard his
father as his absolute sovereign will have little reason to replace him with the
monarch, especially while the father remains alive. Where loyalty to a father
conficts with loyalty to a prince, Bodin privileges flial relations. Even “if the
father shall be a theefe, a murtherer, a traytor to his countrey . . . yet I say, it is
not for the sonne to put his hand thereunto.”24 For the child who is, as Hobbes
20 Bodin himself associates its decline with the reigns of Constantine and Teodosius. Six Books, I.4.
Becker shows that Bodin’s claim about patria potestas was entirely at odds with his contemporaries.
Gendering the Renaissance Commonwealth, 121–123.
23 Bodin, Method, 277.
24 Bodin, Six Books, II.4.
24 Liberal States
would later say, made to “obey two masters,” the lesson of a Bodinian com-
monwealth regarding allegiance is contradictory.25 Tere is an additional dif-
fculty with family property, whose disposal Bodin prefers to leave to fathers,
in keeping with the principle of patria potestas, but which he permits the sov-
ereign to interfere in.26 He faces the same difculty with the feudal privileges
of particular noble families. “Certaine particular statutes” are permissible,
but subject to the pleasure of the prince, and should only be preserved if they
serve the public good. “For it is not without great cause to bee sufered, that
the lawes of privat families should derogat from the customes of the country,
and so, much lesse from the generall laws and ordinances.”27
Although everything about the structure of the Bodinian family tends to
collapse the distinction between family and state, Bodin is adamant that the
distinction between public and private is natural and necessary. Richard Tuck
describes the Six Books as “[taking] its start from an attack on Aristotle, and
in particular on his distinction between political communities or cities and
other social groups, notably the family,” but even as Bodin disputes Aristotle’s
distinctions between kinds of rule and confates them all into a single form
of command, he insists that a large family is not a small state, and that the
worst kind of regime is that proposed by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, which
dissolves the boundary between public and private.28 Although the family is
“the true image of a Citie, and . . . so also is the manner of the government of
an house or familie, the true modell for the government of a commonweale,”
Bodin nonetheless insists that the family not be mistaken for a polity.29 What
“chiefy distinguishes the family from the state [is] that the latter has the fnal
and public authority, the former limited and private rule.”30 Yet how these
two identical forms of authority over the same subjects may coexist without
one subsuming the other is unclear.
25 Actually, three masters, but as for Hobbes, the highest master is the least efective.
26 Bodin, Six Books, I.4; Skinner, Foundations, vol. 2, 296.
27 Bodin, Six Books, I.2. Tis rejection of feudal privilege is in line with Preston King’s argument
that Bodin’s “normative aim . . . was primarily to make intermediate (or ‘private corporate’) bodies
more susceptible to sovereign control,” but King assumes the family itself “presented no particular
obstacle to sovereign control,” which this passage indicates is not so, since at least the noble family
ofen had corporate legal privileges. Preston King, Te Ideology of Order (London: Allen and Unwin,
1974), 154.
28 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 26. See also Becker, Gendering the Renaissance
Commonwealth, 150–152. On the distinction between a small state and a large family, see Bodin, Six
Books, I.2. For his criticisms of Plato, see Method, 268–269; Six Books, I.2.
30 Bodin, Method, 158.
Announcing the absolute supremacy of the sovereign resolves the problem

by subordinating and relegating the family to a smaller but still important
sphere, which is Bodin’s general, though inexplicit, intention. Preston King
goes further to claim that there is no confict here at all, because there is no
point at which the powers of the state and family can confict.31 To the extent
that Bodin assumes that no sovereign will use his power to abolish or radi-
cally restructure the family and that no particular exercise of private patria
postestas will rise to the level of a national controversy, King is right. However,
like the prudential limits he places on direct taxation, Bodin’s restoration of
patria potestas to fathers relies on the faithful preservation of a private sphere
by a sovereign who has in principle an unlimited right to interfere in it, so
that the whole structure of the Bodinian state rests on an entirely voluntary,
prudential decision of the prince. At the same time, Bodin’s sovereign father,
whose power is actually a revocable grant of the monarch, must behave toward
his family as though he has independent control of them. More problemati-
cally, it is the father’s natural right (however unenforceable) over children that
is superior to the sovereign’s merely conventional power over subjects, for the
father’s right is prior to the monarch’s, detachable from it, and established di-
rectly by God through nature. Bodin never resolves this difculty. Fusing or
confusing royal and paternal authority is one possible resolution of this con-
fict (one to which Filmer resorts), while de-naturalizing the family so that it
may be defnitively subordinate to the sovereign is the other (as Hobbes does).
Both were arguments that Bodin himself was at pains to avoid.
Te Aferlife of Bodinian Sovereignty

We should be careful not to caricature Bodin as trying to justify despotism

or rule by one man’s arbitrary and uncontrollable will. His theory of sover-
eignty grew out of the same impulse as the century’s constitutionalism—
to rationalize and de- personalize the administration of the state— and
he recommended limiting sovereign power in many of the ways that
constitutionalists had wanted. Even given its absolutist potential, however,
Bodinian sovereignty remains incomplete, or at least incompletely worked
out. Bodin leaves residual authority over the sovereign’s will in natural
and divine law, in the autonomy of some of the ofces of the state and the
31 King, Ideology of Order, 87.
26 Liberal States
constitutional limits on taxation, and the continuation of the privileges of

some feudal corporations. Although none of these checks is enforceable,
they provide a theological-political basis from which to argue against sover-
eign misrule. As much as Bodin insists that power and authority are coeval,
natural law persists as a competing source of authority in his thought, since it
is identifed with God’s law and serves as the standard of justice. As we have
seen, the natural primacy of the family relative to the monarch is the basis
of a claim against his overreach into the private sphere. Similar claims may
be made by the over-taxed, or those denied trial, and so on. Subjects are for-
bidden to act on these claims, and the structure of sovereignty permits no
enforcement from below, either by subjects or magistrates, but these eforts
by Bodin to head of active resistance are not sufcient to prevent its ideo-
logical formation. Tis may seem to be a mere quibble over the absoluteness
of Bodin’s absolutism, but as Hobbes would discover, it is as crucial to elimi-
nate ideological sources of resistance to the sovereign as it is to prevent open
revolt.
Bodin’s exposition of sovereignty was extremely infuential, and its
standing tensions—between his combination of power and authority in one
political ofce and his insistence on the potentially competing authority
of natural law, between the absolute powers of sovereigns and fathers, be-
tween the voluntary and potentially contractual origins of the state and the
impossibility of resisting or altering the sovereignty established from this
beginning—ironically resulted in its adoption, in whole or in part, by nearly
every political thinker of the frst half of the seventeenth century. In a sense—
and not unlike Hobbes afer him—Bodin ofered something for every
partisan, including even those who sought to justify the rebellion whose le-
gitimacy he denied.32
One fgure of particular interest for understanding the efect of Bodin’s
sovereignty theory on conceptions of personal authority is the English roy-
alist pamphleteer Robert Filmer, who wrote one generation afer Bodin.
Bodin played a central role in all of Filmer’s writings, one of which is simply a
series of excerpts from the 1606 English translation of the Six Books empha-
sizing the sovereign’s exemption from law, published by Filmer as “Te
Necessity of the Absolute Power of All Kings.” Others, like “Te Anarchy of
a Mixed Monarchy” and Patriarcha borrow liberally from Bodin.33 Filmer’s
32Skinner, Foundations, vol. 1, 286.

33Constance Smith, “Filmer, and the Knolles Translation of Bodin,” Philosophical Quarterly 52
(1963), 248–252.
overriding concern was to fnd a principle of political origins that would re-
liably preempt any claim against the exercise of absolute monarchical sov-
ereignty, to close the gap between power and authority that Bodin had lef
open. He escaped from entanglements with popular sovereignty and consent
by grounding his pre-history of the state directly in Scripture rather than nat-
ural law,
for it is not possible for the wit of man to search out the frst grounds or
principles of government (which necessarily depend upon the original of
property) except he know that at the creation one man alone was made, to
whom the dominion of all things as given and from whom all men derive
their title. Tis point can be learnt only from the Scriptures.34
Te error of even fellow royalists was to accept the authority of pagan writers
and particularly of Aristotle on the origin of government. Against them,
Filmer asserts that only the frst human government expressly approved by
God can be a reliable blueprint for subsequent government, and all others are
efectively heretical, because “a natural freedom of mankind cannot be sup-
posed without the denial of the creation of Adam.”35 God’s creation of Adam
is the source of right in Filmer because it can be subject to no further ap-
peal; neither natural law nor speculative principles drawn from philosophy
can supersede it. (Although, as Locke demonstrated, a contrary reading of
Genesis may do the trick.)
But divine creation on its own does not specify the nature or extent of po-
litical power, since, unlike God, kings do not command obedience by virtue
of having created their subjects. By emphasizing instead the paternal char-
acter of God’s relation to Adam, Filmer fnds a humanly transferable basis

for right and obedience and avoids imputing direct divinity to monarchs.
God’s creation of Adam is the concentrated source of “all power on earth,”
which “is either derived or usurped from the fatherly power, there being
no other original to be found of any power whatsoever. . . . [T]‌he power
which God himself exerciseth over mankind is by right of fatherhood.”36
Te only natural right then is paternal right, so that “obedience to parents
34 Filmer, “Observations upon Aristotles Politiques,” 252–253.

35 Filmer, “Observations upon Aristotles Politiques,” 236–237. Filmer directly accuses Hobbes
of this heresy as well when he points out that the state of nature cannot, according to Genesis, be
the state of scarcity Hobbes claims it was. Filmer, “Observations Concerning the Originall of
Government,” 188.
36 Filmer, “Observations upon Aristotles Politiques,” 284.
28 Liberal States
be immediately due by a natural law.”37 Deriving the origins of government

from God’s paternal right over Adam and his descendants allows Filmer to
account in a stroke for a single source of power, authority, and property, and
to preempt appeals to any competing authority.
Filmer’s biblical originalism is astonishingly simple: the frst man was the
frst monarch, his children his frst subjects, his family the frst state, and
the world his personal property. “A son, a subject, and a servant or a slave,
were one and the same thing at frst.”38 We need not concern ourselves with
the particulars of the law of succession or property, nor speculate about the
abstract principles of power or human nature, although Filmer does make
brief eforts to square his family-state with both legal history and human na-
ture.39 All principles of politics are contained in this beginning from Adam,
with minor alterations required to accommodate instances of usurpation.40
Sovereignty operates just as in Bodin’s Six Books, only paternal power is no
longer a pattern for, but the entire substance of, political power:
If we compare the natural duties of a father with those of a king, we fnd

them to be all one, without any diference at all but only in the latitude or
extent of them. As the father over one family, so the king, as father over
many families, extends his care to preserve, feed, clothe, instruct and de-
fend the whole commonwealth.41
Tis is, in efect, the perfection of the logic of congruence. Even more than
in the Six Books, the family and state are structured along identical principles
and for identical ends in Filmer’s thought.
37 Filmer, Patriarcha, 12. Tis power extends to usurpers: “It is true, all kings be not the nat-
ural parents of their subjects, yet they all either are, or are to be reputed as the next heirs to those
progenitors who were at frst the natural parents of the whole people, and the right to succeed to the
exercise of supreme jurisdiction.” Patriarcha, 10.
38 Filmer, “Observations upon Aristotles Politiques,” 237. It is noteworthy that Filmer’s reduction
of all power to paternal power leaves him completely unable to account for any civil association that
is not a family, or even for any familial relations other those between fathers and sons.
39 Interesting among these eforts is his claim that even where there is popular government, what
really holds the state together is the continued absolute power of fathers over their families, so that in
efect, patriarchal absolutism is always the government of every state, either expressly in monarchies
or indirectly when private fathers must rule where the state has devolved from monarchy. “It is ob-
servable that Rome in her chief popularity was of beholding for her preservation to the monarchical
power of the father over the children.” Filmer, “Observations upon Aristotles Politiques,” 260.
40 Filmer was, in this sense, a consummate originalist, for all political right and duty for him
follows from a single, actual beginning, to which nothing can be added, and elements can only be
removed by unfortunate corruption.
41 Filmer, Patriarcha, 12.
Filmer collapsed the public into the private to produce a politically un-
tenable simplicity. But it is a simplicity that at least in theory accomplishes
Bodin’s goal of centralizing and concretizing political authority against the
constitutionalists of the sixteenth century who sought to balance the parts
of the regime against one another and preserve a distinction between nat-
ural power and political ofce. For Filmer, “these four words, command,
authority, power, and majesty signify ordinarily one and the same thing, to
wit, the sovereignty or supreme power.”42 Tat power is the paternal right of
the monarch, which is both the origin and substance of politics, law being
nothing more than the personal will of this monarch. Tat Filmer’s denial
of any distinction between the family and the state was a practical dead-end
does not entirely detract from its theoretical and rhetorical power. Filmer’s
lasting contribution lies far more in his astute criticism of natural rights the-
ories than in the practicality of his proposed alternative. What he saw very
early was that the efort to ground sovereignty in popular consent—an efort
undertaken by monarchists and even absolutists no less than republicans—
was doomed to devolve into popular sovereignty and to weaken the monar-
chical authority it was intended to buttress. Any efort to justify absolute
monarchy required a wholly diferent account of political origins, and the
family was in fact a much stronger theoretical model for the sovereign state.
Sovereignty, Authority, and the Problem of Congruence
Congruence between the structure of authority in the family and the state
was not a political aim prior to Bodin. Sixteenth-century constitutionalists
contrasted patriarchal rule against their own aim: rational and impersonal
administration according to standing laws. It was Bodin’s sovereignty theory,
also a rationalizing enterprise but with a very diferent grounding, that frst
advanced paternal authority as a plausible model for the monarch’s power.
Tis model had to overcome an important difculty, however, because al-
though paternal authority was widely held to be an expansive spontaneous
grant of both divine and natural law, it was hardly held to be the kind of ab-
solute, lifelong power over children that would make it an educative parallel
to the sovereign power that Bodin was trying to construct. Drawing on pa-
ternal authority as a model for his sovereign required Bodin to substantially
42 Filmer, “Observations upon Aristotles Politiques,” 261.
30 Liberal States
strengthen that authority by demanding the reinstatement of the long-

discarded Roman patria potestas that gave fathers a lifelong right to dispose
of their children’s property and lives. However, this proposed expansion of
paternal power created an immediate theoretical difculty by bringing pa-
ternal power into confict with sovereign or political power, since both
powers could now claim jurisdiction over the lives and property of children,
and Bodin ofered only a weak legal distinction to hold this confict at bay.
Te project of early modern sovereignty theorists demanded the construc-
tion of an impersonal state on the basis of a highly personal form of authority,
and this project inevitably created internal contradictions.
Bodin did not promote despotism but rather rationalized an impersonal
administration. He sought to prevent the sovereign from treating the realm
as an alienable personal property and his subjects’ property as his own to tax
at will. He encouraged the sovereign to abide by his own laws and to submit
to the judgments of the parlements. Te doctrine of sovereignty is designed
to regularize the exercise of political power and bring it within the compass
of law by centralizing and concretizing political authority into one clear
head, clearing away the confusions generated by the competing and over-
lapping authority that characterized feudal and mixed regimes. Bodin brings
in paternal authority as a clear model of such an indisputable authority to
serve as the natural-divine mirror of the monarch’s. Nonetheless, we should
be equally careful not to assimilate Bodin into either the constitutionalist
traditions of his predecessors or the natural-law and social contract theo-
ries of authority of his successors. Bodin’s limitations on sovereign power are
recommendations, not enforceable by any contrary power in the state, and
sovereignty theory is fundamentally a theory of absolute power.
But Bodin relied on an internal logic of power and ofered little in the way
of political origins that could demonstrate why an absolute monarchical sov-
ereign had come to be. When Hugo Grotius and the modern natural lawyers
tried to fll out this gap in Bodin’s theory, they did so by elaborating an ac-
count of political origins according to which free men had come together
and agreed to establish the regime under which they lived. A version of
this account of a choice of regimes and the selection of monarchy had been
a standby of pre-sovereignty thinkers, but with the introduction of sover-
eignty, the old understanding of popular consent now seemed to point to
popular sovereignty. Yet if all sovereignty originates in popular consent, then
how, asks Filmer, are the people ever persuaded to transfer their right to rule
to a clique of aristocrats or, even less plausibly, an absolute monarch? Filmer
ofers an answer that extends the patriarchal suggestion in Bodin, that kings
are spontaneous absolute rulers appointed by God, and their relation to
subjects is one of direct paternal authority. Te absolutists’ pursuit of family-
state congruence would receive its most complex treatment in Hobbes,
however, in his efort to account for an absolute monarchical sovereign that
originates in popular consent and not nature or God, but is nonetheless per-
manent, indivisible, and total.
2
Hobbesian Sovereignty and
the Denaturalization of Authority
While Filmer sought to tighten the connection between paternal and sover-
eign power, Hobbes was the frst sovereignty thinker to resolve Bodin’s ten-
sion between these two by rejecting the naturalness of paternal authority and
the family altogether, and thereby preempting any threat that natural fathers
could pose to the artifcial sovereign. Hobbes understood more clearly than
Bodin that the possession of power is not a self-evident truth recognizable
to all, but that it needs the support of popular opinion (that “reputation of
power is power”). Sovereignty could not sustain itself on abstract prohib-
itions alone but required in addition a means of managing popular opinion
in its favor. Where Bodin and his followers had been content to deny a right
to resistance, Hobbes sought to root out the desire for it in subjects, since
he saw that where such desire was sparked in popular opinion and infamed
by “the popularity of a potent subject,” neither prohibition nor even forcible
suppression would sufce to put out the fre (L, 29.20). For “a state can con-
strain obedience, but convince no error, nor alter the minds of them that be-
lieve they have the better reason” (B, 62).
Te need to manipulate public opinion to favor the sovereign’s power
resulted in Hobbes’s much greater attention to what we now call mass psy-
chology, both in the design of his commonwealth and in the tools he ofered
the sovereign to manage the passions and opinions of his subjects. By closing
of appeal to natural or divine law, whose autonomy Bodin had been content
to leave intact, Hobbes elaborated a constitution from which restive subjects
had as little access as possible to “private judgment of good and evil” by which
they might accuse the sovereign of misrule. By arguing that all human rela-
tions that had been legitimated by appeal to nature or long legal usage were
in fact legitimated only by the artifcial means of covenant and were thus in-
ferior to the original, foundational covenant with the sovereign, he sought
to suppress personal loyalties and passions that made subjects susceptible
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197568804.003.0003
34 Liberal States
to popular demagogues. In short, Hobbes reduced law to sovereign will and

leveled all those intermediary associations—the church, the corporation,
and even the family—which could pose a threat to the sovereign’s absolute
supremacy. By subordinating all possible competing sources of authority—
divine, natural, paternal, constitutional—to the absolute discretion of the
sovereign will, Hobbes perfected the sovereignty theory that Bodin had lef
incomplete.
Sovereignty is not for Hobbes, as it was for Bodin, exclusively a formal
description of the nature of political power. It is not because it ofers the
true account of the organization of power in France or England that sov-
ereignty is useful, but because it is the only political organization that can
stabilize the volatile psychological constitution of man. Hobbes’s efort to
level competing authorities within the state resulted in a straightforward
denunciation of the independence of all those feudal and ecclesiastical
associations—“worms in the entrails of a natural man”—that Bodin had lef
relatively intact (L, 29.21).1 While Hobbes’s suppression and subordination
of competing authorities has appeared to some scholars to indicate a latent
liberal individualism, since it has the efect of liberating individuals from
traditional social controls, it actually weakens individuals by demolishing
the associations through which individuals could hope to challenge the
sovereign, leaving them isolated from one another, wholly and directly de-
pendent on him.2
But the familial association is a more difcult and interesting case, and
Hobbes makes the most original use of it. Richard Boyd argues that the
family, to which Hobbes “concedes a primordial natural existence,” is the sole
exception to his “denial that any group exists by nature.”3 Tis is a reading of
Hobbes on the family shared by many scholars, who assume that the natural-
ness of the family is beyond question, even by Hobbes, despite their recogni-
tion of the depth of Hobbes’s aversion to any conception of human relations
grounded in nature. But Hobbes is actually consistent in his anti-naturalism
and makes no exception for the family. Indeed, the extent of his radically
1 Bodin was wary of such medieval holdovers and he permitted the sovereign to curtail their
privileges but cautioned him to tolerate their traditional independence where necessary. Richard
Boyd has drawn attention to Hobbes’s suppression of mediating institutions because of their ability to
divert subjects’ loyalties away from the sovereign and encourage many forms of sedition (e.g., L, 29,
42.9). Boyd, Uncivil Society (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), ch. 1.
2 Boyd, Uncivil Society, 65–68.
3 Boyd, Uncivil Society, 61.
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Liberal States Authoritarian Families Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought Rita Koganzon Full Chapter

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Liberal States, Authoritarian Families:

Childhood and Education in Early

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021933261

Tis book began as a dissertation for Harvard’s Department of Government,

EL Elements of Law, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University

FT and ST Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett

of the Understanding, ed. Nathan Tarcov and Ruth Grant

Dionysius, the tyrant, when expelled from Syracuse, kept school at

Te Problem with Authority

for pedagogical and parenting practices throughout the twentieth century.1

1 Ann Hulbert, Raising America (New York: Vintage, 2004).

Contemporary Liberalism’s Problem with Authority

At issue in Yoder was a contention by Amish parents that their children

parents—​fundamentalists and evangelicals—​to justify removing their far

Public Afairs 9 (1980), 344.

among a range of competing conceptions of the good life.”8 Some authority

be controlled primarily by the disinterested and centralized state, since pa-

If we follow these arguments, we must admit that children have a point

and Political Identity,” Hofstra Law Review 32 (2003), 145–​170.

Tere is an appealing and logical simplicity to this assumption, and as a

ideas about the infuence of parental authority on healthy development,

described in Hulbert, Raising America.

Chua in Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother, have occasionally made a splash by

A basically hierarchical, authoritarian, exploitive parent-​child relation-

Adorno and his coauthors drew a straightforward parallel between po-

treated as an equal grows up to be an egalitarian. Te book refected an asso-

Te Case for Incongruence

Liberalism’s postwar efort to purge itself of authority was not without

Authority is not abolished but merely transferred to an even more malicious

What begins as a project to facilitate the development of children’s autonomy

story. Nonetheless, it is striking that as straightforward adult authority over

Americans, 1938–​2007: A Cross-​Temporal Meta-​Analysis of the MMPI,” Clinical Psychology Review

than Rawlsian liberals have so far been able to ofer.

28 Jean Twenge, iGen (New York: Atria Books, 2017), ch. 4.

tyranny that liberal, commercial states would develop. Undermining tradi-

Plan of the Book

alongside—​and in opposition to—​the growth of the neutral, impersonal

general antipathy to authority is their fear of precisely the power of public

not as Hobbes claims, by the sovereign, but rather by outstanding individ-

for private authority to counter public opinion’s threats to freedom. Modern

sovereign’s power by establishing a parallel between familial and political au-

Te idea that there could or should be congruence between the structure of

hardly seems to be at odds with rule by personal authority. Monarchical

state but not analogous to it was a strategy adopted by sovereignty’s advocates

such, it is an indivisible power, characterized by fve “marks,” or legislative

vately.”12 Because power is only command for Bodin, it is essential to identify

6 Bodin, Six Books, I.8.

and make it visible to subjects, most straightforwardly by embodying it in a

Fathers and Sovereigns

Bodin frst substantiates the possibility of such a unitary, absolute power by

In order to augment the father’s legal power so that he more closely

16 Bodin, Six Books, I.4.

one subsuming the other is unclear.

Announcing the absolute supremacy of the sovereign resolves the problem

Te Aferlife of Bodinian Sovereignty

We should be careful not to caricature Bodin as trying to justify despotism

31 King, Ideology of Order, 87.

constitutional limits on taxation, and the continuation of the privileges of

32Skinner, Foundations, vol. 1, 286.

parents—fundamentalists and evangelicals—to justify removing their far

and Political Identity,” Hofstra Law Review 32 (2003), 145–170.

A basically hierarchical, authoritarian, exploitive parent-child relation-

Americans, 1938–2007: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of the MMPI,” Clinical Psychology Review

alongside—and in opposition to—the growth of the neutral, impersonal

34 Filmer, “Observations upon Aristotles Politiques,” 252–253.

strengthen that authority by demanding the reinstatement of the long-