Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T08:11:53.140Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Domestic entanglements: Family, state, hierarchy, and the Hobbesian state of nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2018

Jamie Levin  and
Joseph MacKay
Jamie Levin*
Affiliation:
St Francis Xavier University,
Joseph MacKay
Affiliation:
Australian National University
*
*Corresponding author. Email: jlevin@stfx.ca
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article revisits the Hobbesian account of the state of nature and the formation of states, attending to Hobbes’s account of the family. Drawing on feminist readings, we find in the Leviathan an account of the family as a natural political community. We contend specifically that a focus on conceptions of family life in the Leviathan, and in works by Hobbes’s early modern peers, points to the role of the family as a site of socialisation in the prelude to early state formation and in the formation of political hierarchies more generally – including, we suggest, the formation of international hierarchies. These accounts have thus far been missing from International Relations theory. Contra conventional IR theoretic readings of the Leviathan, the Hobbesian state of nature contains the seeds of both anarchy and hierarchy, as overlapping social configurations. While anarchy emerges clearly in the famous condition of ‘war of all against all’, hierarchy also exists in Hobbes’s depiction of family life as a naturally occurring proto-state setting. On the basis of this contemporary feminist analysis of a classic text, we consider implications for the emerging ‘new hierarchy studies’ in IR.

Keywords

HobbesLeviathanFeminismFamilyInternational Relations TheoryHierarchy
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , April 2019 , pp. 221 - 238
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Schmidt, Brian, ‘On the history and historiography of International Relations’, in Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse-Kappen, and Beth Simmons (eds), The Handbook of International Relations (London: Sage, 2006), pp. 3–23 Google Scholar; Williams, Michael C., ‘Hobbes and International Relations: a reconsideration’, International Organization, 50:2 (1996), pp. 213–236 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donnelly, Jack, Realism in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Williams, ‘Hobbes and International Relations’; Williams, Michael C., The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yurdusev, Nuri, ‘Thomas Hobbes and International Relations: From realism to rationalism’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 60:2 (2006), pp. 305–321 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Doyle, Michael, Ways of War and Peace (New York, NY: Norton, 1997)Google Scholar; Vincent, R. John, ‘The Hobbesian tradition in twentieth-century international thought’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10:2 (1981), pp. 91–101 Google Scholar; Heller, Mark, ‘The use & abuse of Hobbes: the state of nature in International Relations’, Polity, 13:1 (1980), pp. 21–32 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Bull, Hedley, ‘Hobbes and the international anarchy’, Social Research, 48:4 (1981), pp. 717–738 Google Scholar; Navari, Cornelia, ‘Hobbes and the Hobbesian tradition in international thought’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 11:3 (1982), pp. 203–222 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Hirschmann, Nancy and Wright, Joanne (eds), Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Schochet, Gordon, ‘Thomas Hobbes on the family and the state of nature’, Political Science Quarterly, 82:3 (1967), pp. 427–445 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chapman, Richard Allen, ‘ Leviathan writ small: Thomas Hobbes on the family’, The American Political Science Review, 69:1 (1975), pp. 76–90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Abbott, Philip, ‘The three families of Thomas Hobbes’, The Review of Politics, 43:2 (1981), pp. 242–258 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Wright, Joanne, ‘Going against the grain: Hobbes’s case for original maternal dominion’, Journal of Women’s History, 14:1 (2002), pp. 123–148 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boucher, Joanne, The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds (London: Tavistock, 1979)Google Scholar. Relatedly, Kahn reads the Leviathan as existing ‘in dialogue with the contemporary problem of romance’. Kahn, Victoria, ‘Hobbes, romance and the contract of mimesis’, Political Theory, 29:1 (2001), pp. 4–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Chapman, ‘Leviathan writ small’, p. 77.

5 MacPherson treats the state of nature as a metaphor enabling the reader to imagine life without government, not an actual history period. MacPherson, C. B., ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York, NY: Penguin, 1981)Google Scholar. His view contrasts with Schochet’s reading, which claims the state of nature ‘actually existed’. Schochet, ‘Thomas Hobbes on the family and the state of nature’, p. 442. See also Heller ‘The use & abuse of Hobbes’; Chapman, ‘Leviathan writ small’, p. 77.

6 Indeed, we find such accounts were common among his early modern peers – see below.

7 Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society (London: Pan Macmillan, 1977), pp. 44–49 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hobbes scholars in the history of political thought appear to find the analogy nowhere in his works. Malcolm notes that standard readings of Hobbes in political theory generally gloss over international matters briefly, as issues marginal to his thought. Malcolm, Noel, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 543–545 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Malcolm, Armitage, and Christov all dismiss standard IR realist readings of Hobbes. Armitage, David, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 59 Google Scholar; Christov, Theodore, Before Anarchy: Hobbes and his Critics in Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Hobbes, Thomas, The Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), vol. 2, p. 192 Google Scholar.

9 The word ‘state’ presents nomenclatural issues. As Skinner shows, the word fully acquired its current meaning during this period. For Hobbes, the commonwealth was the body politic over which a sovereign ruled; the Leviathan was the institutionalised apparatus of government by which that authority was executed. We intend ‘state’ in its current sense throughout, unless otherwise noted. Skinner, Quentin, ‘A genealogy of the modern state’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 162 (2009), pp. 325–370 Google Scholar.

10 Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 210. The Leviathan may originate as a voluntary contract among individuals but need not: it can be founded either by voluntary authority or by force.

11 Williams, ‘Hobbes and International Relations’.

12 Williams, The Realist Tradition; Williams, ‘Hobbes and International Relations’; Yurdusev, ‘Thomas Hobbes and International Relations’; Doyle, Ways of War and Peace; Vincent, ‘The Hobbesian tradition’; Heller, ‘The use & abuse of Hobbes’; Bull, ‘Hobbes and the international anarchy’; Navari, ‘Hobbes and the Hobbesian tradition’.

13 Bull’s purpose was ‘to determine the limits of the domestic analogy, and thus establish the autonomy of international relations’. Bull, Hedley, ‘Society and anarchy in International Relations’, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 35–50 Google Scholar (pp. 35–6). He aimed to show domestic and international politics were differentiated by more than the presence or absence of hierarchy. Alternately, for Jahn, the state of nature theoretically reframes the problem of cultural diversity (which had confronted early modern Europe in its encounter with the Americas), by reducing difference to the problematique of anarchy. Jahn, Beate, The Cultural Construction of International Relations: The Invention of the State of Nature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Recourse to Hobbes himself tells us strikingly little. Existing accounts in IR (Williams, ‘Hobbes and International Relations’) and in the history of political thought (Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, pp. 432–5; Armitage, Modern International Thought, p. 59; Christov, Before Anarchy) emphasise that Hobbes’s own references to things international are rare, opaque, and subject to multiple interpretations. There is however considerable evidence Hobbes and other social contract theorists derived conceptions of the state of nature in part from colonial knowledge of the Americas. Moloney, Pat, ‘Hobbes, savagery, and international anarchy’, American Political Science Review, 105:1 (2011), pp. 189–204 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martens, Stephanie B., The Americas in Early Modern Political Theory: States of Nature and Aboriginality (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jahn, The Cultural Construction of International Relations.

15 Williams, ‘Hobbes and International Relations’, p. 225.

16 Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 200. Every person, according to Hobbes, maintains the natural right, both in the state of nature and in the Commonwealth, to ‘use his own power … for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own judgement, and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto’ (The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 198).

17 Mansfield, Harvey, ‘Hobbes and the science of indirect government’, The American Political Science Review, 65:1 (1971), pp. 97–110 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Williams, ‘Hobbes and International Relations’, p. 225.

19 On state death in IR, see Fazal, Tanisha, State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

20 Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 340.

21 Bull, ‘Hobbes and the international anarchy’, pp. 723–4. This follows from Hobbes’s third and fourth laws of nature (ch. 15). The third law stipulates, ‘men [must] perform their Covenantes made’ (The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 220, emphasis original). In other words, contracts cannot be revoked. The fourth law concerns gratitude: ‘That a man which receiveth Benefit from another of mere Grace, Endeavour that he which giveth it, have no reasonable cause to repent him of his good will’ (The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 230, emphasis in original). In other words, citizens agree to defend those things from which they derive benefit.

22 Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 338.

23 See fn. 21.

24 Williams, ‘Hobbes and International Relations’, p. 220.

25 Another, very different social-theoretic tradition treats individual self-interest as itself a social construct. On these accounts, collective actions problems arise not from a state of nature, but through the constitution of individuals as individuals by the broader social order. Such approaches are found in relational sociological approaches, and in pragmatist social and political philosophy. Dewey sums up the approach neatly: ‘Society, as a real whole, is the normal order, and the mass as an aggregate of isolated units is the fiction.’ Such approaches render collective action problems moot. For Hobbes, in contrast, binding the individual into the polity is the central, overarching problem of social order. Dewey, John, ‘The ethics of democracy’, in The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882–1898 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 1:227–250 Google Scholar, p. 232. For a relational critique of IR, predicated on its Hobbesian individualism, see Epstein, Charlotte, ‘Theorizing agency in Hobbes’s wake: the rational actor, the self, or the speaking subject?’, International Organization, 67:2 (2013), pp. 287–316 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Epstein offers a linguistic, non-individualist reading of Hobbes.

26 Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 16.

27 Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, pp. 347–8. This part of our reading tracks Skinner’s closely.

28 The practice of that authority may only nominally be the sovereign’s. Several recent readings suggest a distinction can be drawn between the state, in which sovereign authority is formally and conceptually vested, and government, which carries on the quotidian work of administration. While the latter is tasked with the activity of governing; the former carries the ontological status of statehood: the unified identity of the body politic, taken as a whole. For Hobbes and many of his contemporaries, the two need not be the same. Skinner, ‘A genealogy of the modern state’; Tuck, Richard, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Hirschmann and Wright (eds), Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes; Schochet, ‘Thomas Hobbes on the family and the state of nature’; Chapman, ‘Leviathan writ small’; Abbott, ‘The three families’; Pateman, The Sexual Contract; Wright, ‘Going against the grain’; Schochet, Gordon, ‘Intending (political) obligation: Hobbes and the voluntary basis of society’, in Mary Dietz (ed.), Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1994), pp. 55–73 Google Scholar; Pateman, Carole, ‘“God hath ordained to man a helper”: Hobbes, patriarchy and conjugal right’, British Journal of Political Science, 19:4 (1989), pp. 445–463 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boucher, Joanne, ‘Male power and contract theory: Hobbes and Locke in Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract ’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 36:1 (2003), pp. 23–38 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nancy Hirschmann, ‘Gordon Schochet on Hobbes, gratitude, and women’, in Hirschmann and Wright (eds), Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes, pp. 125–48.

30 Schochet, ‘Thomas Hobbes on the family and the state of nature’, p. 430.

31 Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 314.

32 Ibid., p. 262.

33 Christov, Before Anarchy, p. 89.

34 Chapman, ‘Leviathan writ small’, p. 76.

35 Christov, Before Anarchy, p. 90.

36 This ‘consent’ is tacit – infants cannot grant permission. Wright, Joanne, Origin Stories in Political Thought: Discourses on Gender, Power, and Citizenship (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, Hobbes equates conquest and enforced submission to consent: ‘Submission to overwhelming power in return for protection’, Pateman writes, ‘Whether the power is that of the conqueror’s sword or of the mother’s power over her newly born infant, is always a valid sign of agreement for Hobbes.’ Pateman, ‘“God hath ordained to man”’, p. 454.

37 Chapman, ‘Leviathan writ small’, p. 89.

38 Schochet, ‘Intending (political) obligation’; Wright, Origin Stories in Political Thought; Pateman, ‘“God hath ordained to man”’, p. 453.

39 Hobbes’s contractual conception of the family has sometimes been characterised as an ‘empty shell’. Abbott, ‘The three families’. In one often quoted section of De Cive (‘On the Citizen’) Hobbes refers to ‘men as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms, and grown up without any obligation to each other’. Hobbes, Thomas, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 102 Google Scholar. But Hobbes insists the formulation of naturally individuated persons is ‘as if’, suggesting an analytical construct rather than a true characterisation of humanity in a state of nature. These mushroom men ‘reside in the mind alone and have never actually existed’. Christov, Before Anarchy, p. 57. For a reading of the Hobbesian state as an analytical construct, necessarily and intentionally distinct from empirical reality, see McClure, Christopher Scott, ‘War, madness, and death: the paradox of honor in Hobbes’s Leviathan ’, The Journal of Politics, 76:1 (2014), pp. 114–125 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As McClure and others imply, Hobbes’s purpose in this formulation was linked to civic education or indoctrination as much as explanation. The Leviathan is a pedagogical as much as theoretical text, aimed to socialise the individual reader into the commonwealth. See Bejan, Theresa M., ‘Teaching the Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on education’, Oxford Review of Education, 36:5 (2010), pp. 607–626 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Pateman, The Sexual Contract, p. 49.

41 Hobbes, On the Citizen, p. 140.

42 Schochet, ‘Thomas Hobbes on the family and the state of nature’; Chapman, ‘Leviathan writ small’; Ingrid Makus, Women, Politics, and Reproduction: The Liberal Legacy (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 38; Wright, Origin Stories in Political Thought; Teresa Brennan and Carole Pateman, ‘“Mere auxiliaries to the commonwealth”: Women and the origins of liberalism’, Political Studies, XXVII:2 (1978), pp. 183–200.

43 Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 528; Chapman, ‘Leviathan writ small, p. 75.

44 Chapman, ‘Leviathan writ small’, p. 89; see also Makus, Women, Politics, and Reproduction, p. 38.

45 Williams, ‘Hobbes and International Relations’, p. 220.

46 Hirschmann, ‘Gordon Schochet on Hobbes’, p. 138.

47 Makus, Women, Politics, and Reproduction, p. 38.

48 Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 528. On the pedagogical role of the state, see fn. 43 above.

49 In this way, family helps lay groundwork for what Anderson would later term an ‘imagined community’: a collective far too large for all its members to be immediately familiar with one another. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983)Google Scholar. An eventual imagined community is possible, Hobbes implies, because a much smaller but very real one has already been present to the subject, from birth.

50 Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 314.

51 Martinich, A. P., A Hobbes Dictionary (Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), pp. 117–118 Google Scholar.

52 Hobbes, On the Citizen, p. 102, emphasis in original.

53 Hirschmann, ‘Gordon Schochet on Hobbes’, p. 134.

54 Hobbes, On the Citizen, p. 140.

55 All that said, Hirschmann (‘Gordon Schochet on Hobbes’, p. 137) concludes children are a source of power for mothers: ‘a child would not need to be very old to serve as useful confederates, after all; a two-year-old could distract an adult, a five-year-old could steal unobtrusively’. This provides a strategic advantage over those without such ‘confederates’.

56 Chapman, ‘Leviathan writ small’, p. 76.

57 Tellingly, Mansfield, Skinner, multiple feminist interpreters, and others we cite above, come from varying interpretive traditions in the history of political thought, but nonetheless converge on the family as an issue. These aspects of Hobbes’s text appear to resonate across contextualist and non-contextualist readings alike. For a discussion of the relative persistence of some theoretical categories on a contextualist account, with an eye to reading Hobbes and his peers, see McQueen, Alison, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 17–20 Google Scholar.

58 This is without considering longer-term shifts in, for example, motivations for marriage. See a synoptic historical account in Coontz, Stephanie, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York, NY: Viking, 2005)Google Scholar. Perhaps more to the point, family life has long been varied – we do not intend to posit the prior existence of a ‘traditional family’ model, from which practice has only recently diverged. See, for example, Coontz, Stephanie, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1993)Google Scholar.

59 All that said, variation across family structures appears not to be unlimited. Anthropologists, while disinclined to emphasise persistent, cross-contextual structures, nonetheless note the potential persistence of kinship as such over time. Indeed, kinship has experienced a revival as a core analytical category in anthropology. Carsten, Janet (ed.), Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Stone, Linda (ed.), New Directions in Anthropological Kinship (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001)Google Scholar; Sahlins, Marshall, ‘What kinship is (Part One)’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17:1 (2011), pp. 2–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hobbes does not specify the family’s structure. While he likely had in mind a delimited family unit, not an extended kinship network, we should not retrospectively project an industrial-era nuclear family into his state of nature.

60 Similarly, we use the word ‘gender’ in its contemporary sense of something essentially social or performative. See, for example, West, Candace and Zimmermann, Don H., ‘Doing gender’, Gender & Society, 1:2 (1987), pp. 125–151 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

The word appears nowhere in Hobbes – he uses the word ‘sex’ only, by which he appears broadly to mean biological sex, assigned at birth. We thus avoid talk of gender above, to avoid anachronism, but employ it below, in the context of (unavoidably anachronistic) theory building.

61 Hirschmann, ‘Gordon Schochet on Hobbes’, p. 126; Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, pp. 308–10.

62 Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 368.

63 This is the ‘myth of protection’: a ‘familiar rescue romance’ whereby men, and by extension states, take on the role protector of defenceless women and children on the home front. Sjoberg, Laura, ‘Gendered realities and the immunity principle: Why gender analysis needs feminism’, International Studies Quarterly, 50:4 (2006), pp. 889–910 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tickner, J. Ann and Sjoberg, Laura, ‘Feminism’, in Timothy Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith (eds), International Relations Theory: Discipline and Diversity (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 196–212 Google Scholar; Pettman, Jan Jindy, ‘Feminist International Relations after 9/11’, The Brown Journal of World Affairs, X:2 (2004), pp. 85–96 Google Scholar. It becomes a powerful tool in legitimating states’ use of force, and in enlisting its citizens to it.

64 Pateman, The Sexual Contract, pp. 44–50. Importantly, Pateman’s larger project is a critique of Hobbesian contract as a form of domination between the sexes.

65 For Hobbes, in the state of nature, absent a marriage contract, dominion over a child falls to their mother, not father, for ‘it cannot be known who is the Father, unlesse it be declared by the Mother: and therefore the right of Dominion over the Child dependeth on her will, and is consequently hers’. Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol, 2, p. 310. Inversely, should she abandon the child, and another care for it, dominion falls to that caretaker, to whom the child owes survival.

66 The broader debate surrounding contextualism in international and political thought exceeds the scope of this article. For a defence of contextualism in the history of international thought, see Bell, Duncan, ‘Language, legitimacy, and the project of critique’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 27:3 (2002), pp. 327–350 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Devetak, Richard, ‘“The battler is all there is”: Philosophy and history in International Relations theory’, International Relations, 31:3 (2017), pp. 261–281 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Epstein notes, the appropriation and repurposing of Hobbes and his ideas is, for better or worse, endemic to the discipline. Epstein, ‘Theorizing agency in Hobbes’s wake’, p. 289.

67 Tuck, Richard, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 261 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Jóhann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 1–11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 303–318 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Locke on family politics, see Pfeffer, who finds Locke (like Hobbes) saw the family as a site of political education. Pfeffer, Jacqueline L., ‘The family in John Locke’s political thought’, Polity, 33:4 (2001), pp. 593–618 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Cumberland, Richard, A Treatise of the Law of Nature, trans. John Maxwell (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005), p. 245 Google Scholar.

70 More, Thomas, Utopia, eds George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 59 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Bacon, Francis, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 472–475 Google Scholar. Hobbes was Bacon’s translator and note taker, early in his career, and knew Bacon’s work well. Bunce, Robin, ‘Thomas Hobbes’ relationship with Francis Bacon – an introduction’, Hobbes Studies, 16:1 (2003), pp. 41–83 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 It also spread to monarchs themselves. James I/VI, in his political works, wrote that, ‘By the Law of Nature the King becomes a naturall Father to all his Lieges at his Coronnation’, with a variety of rights and obligations following. Subjects’ obedience then ‘ought to be to him, as to Gods Lieutenant in earth … louing him as their father’. James I, The Political Works of James I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), pp. 55, 61. The meaning differs in some respects, but the analogy remains. Rousseau is exceptional in stressing the limits of the analogy, in his third discourse. He nonetheless notes the analogy was common. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), pp. 111–112 Google Scholar.

73 Nor are such analogies uniquely early modern. Aristotle considers precisely this analogy at the beginning of his Politics, if only to immediately reject it. Aristotle, The Politics and The Constitution of Athens, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 11. Perhaps tellingly, family-polity analogies appear not to be central in works by women during the period. Talk of family is relatively rare in the political writings of (for example) Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, and Marie le Jars de Gournay. See Fonte, Moderata, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, trans. Virginia Cox (Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marinella, Lucrezia, The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, trans. Anne Dunhill (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar; de Gournay, Marie le Jars, Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works, trans. Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Possibly, they understood the family as a site of potential or actual oppression and were disinclined to endorse it as a model for political order. See Pateman, The Sexual Contract, discussion below.

74 Bodin, long associated with French absolutism (Julian Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)), has recently been re-evaluated as an early constitutionalist. See for example Lee, Daniel, ‘“Office is a thing borrowed”: Jean Bodin on the right of offices and seigneurial government’, Political Theory, 41:3 (2013), pp. 409–440 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign, pp. 1–63. He receives little attention in IR – exceptionally, see Reus-Smit, Christian, The Moral Purpose of the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 95–99 Google Scholar; Glanville, Luke, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect: A New History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 34–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Hobbes read Bodin (Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, p. 458), and cited him ‘respectfully’. Skinner, Quentin, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 192 Google Scholar. Like Hobbes, Bodin wrote his major work in the shadow of civil conflict: Hobbes in the aftermath of the English civil war, Bodin in response to the French Heguenot revolts of the previous century.

76 We rely on Tooley’s partial translation. Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, trans. M. J. Tooley (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955). The more recent Franklin translation comprises only a few chapters of the original voluminous work, and excises discussion of the family. Bodin, Jean, On Sovereignty, trans. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

77 Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, p. 1.

78 Ibid., pp. 6–7.

79 For Bodin, the right form of that political order was a not society of free or equal people governed by a benevolent sovereign, but, like the family, hierarchically stratified (Bodin, ibid., pp. 9–10). Hierarchies, Bodin implies, are nested: individuals within families (‘households’), and families within states. Those political orders contain relationships of command and obedience. We find a similar nestedness implicit in Hobbes.

80 Lee, Daniel, Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 190 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, p. 25.

82 See discussion in Lee (Popular Sovereignty, p. 11). The word referred to the commonwealth’s unitary legal personality, as distinct from its coercive capacity. In this respect, Bodin’s conception of the sovereign state anticipated the fictional account of the state in Hobbes (Skinner, ‘A genealogy of the modern state’). For Bodin, as for Hobbes, sovereign power was vested in the institution of the state, not the specific person of a given prince – Bodin rejected personalistic rule (Lee, ‘“Office is a thing borrowed”’, pp. 412–15.

83 In contrast to Hobbes, it is difficult to imagine a feminist reading of Bodin, who adamantly endorses the authority of husbands over wives and children (Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, pp. 10–13). We emphasise him here chiefly as indicative of the family or household politics that preceded the commonwealth for many early modern theorists – we know of no research emphasising his account of the family or offering feminist critiques.

84 Our thanks to Chris LaRoche for advice on constructing this review.

85 See fn. 59.

86 Hobson, John M. and Sharman, J. C., ‘The enduring place of hierarchy in world politics: Tracing the social logics of hierarchy and political change’, European Journal of International Relations, 11:1 (2005), pp. 63–98 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, Ji-Young, China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lake begins his analysis of hierarchy by briefly contrasting his position with that of Hobbes. Lake, David A., Hierarchy in International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), pp. 1–2 Google Scholar. Our account, while largely consistent with Lake’s, suggests the contrast with Hobbes is easily exaggerated.

87 Hobbes’s classic definition of the commonwealth insists on a unified juridical ‘Person, of whose Acts a great Multitude, by mutuall Covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the Author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their Peace and Common Defence’ (Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, pp. 260–2, emphasis in original. This definition is strikingly silent on how the commonwealth might relate to outside sources of power. See also a distinct but related argument in Forsyth, Murray, ‘Hobbes and the external relations of states’, British Journal of International Studies, 5:3 (1979), pp. 196–209 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Anthropologists have long insisted that kinship relations are constructed, that is, they are in no way necessarily hereditary. For us, it is enough that the idea of kinship or familial bond is persistent. Hobbes himself appears to be silent on matters of heredity. What matter for him and his feminist readers are the relations of protection and obedience that emerge from parent-child relationships.

89 Hobbes, On the Citizen, p. 102.

90 Skinner, ‘A geneaology of the modern state’, p. 346.

91 See, for example, Burton on persistent contestation within the British Empire. Burton, Elizabeth, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

92 The literature on international hierarchies is not large – see review in Mattern, Janice Bially and Zarakol, Ayşe, ‘Hierarchies in world politics’, International Organization, 70:3 (2016), pp. 623–654 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 Our argument thus resonates with, but differs from, Owens’s account of oikonimia, or household governance, in the nineteenth-century emergence of modern social theory. For Owens, the broad analytical category of the social papers over the extent to which modern political order remains shot through with household (ergo, domestic) modes of governance. For Owens, the consequence is a need to go back and more seriously historicise analytical categories. Because we are concerned chiefly with explanatory theory building, we emphasise theory building rather than historiographical implications. Owens, Patricia, Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations.

95 Hobson and Sharman, ‘The enduring place of hierarchy in world politics’; Mattern, Bially andZarakol, , ‘Hierarchies in world politics’; Ayşe Zarakol (ed.), Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

96 See, respectively, Ikenberry, G. John, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Nexon, Daniel H. and Wright, Thomas, ‘What’s at stake in the American empire debate’, American Political Science Review, 101:2 (2007), pp. 253–271 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kang, David C., East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Zhang, Feng, ‘Rethinking the “tribute system”: Broadening the conceptual horizon of historical East Asian politics’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2:4 (2009), pp. 545–574 Google Scholar; Khong, Yuen Foong, ‘The American tributary system’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 6:1 (2013), pp. 1–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

97 See review in Bially Mattern and Zarakol, ‘Hierarchies in world politics’, pp. 629–31.

98 Enloe, Cynthia, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 198 Google Scholar; Peterson, V. Spike, ‘A “gendered global hierarchy”?’, in Greg Fry and Jacinda O’Hagan (eds), Contending Images of World Politics (London: MacMillan, 2000)Google Scholar; Laura Sjoberg, ‘Revealing international hierarchy through gender lenses’, in Zarakol (ed.), Hierarchies in World Politics. Inversely, on the historical exclusion and erasure of women from the history of international theory, see Owens, Patricia, ‘Women and the history of international thought’, International Studies Quarterly, 62:3 (2018), pp. 1–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

99 See, for example, Chowdhry, Geeta and Nair, Sheila (eds), Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class (London: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar; Agathangelou, Anna M. and Ling, L. H. M., ‘Power, borders, security, wealth: Lessons of violence and desire from September 11’, International Studies Quarterly, 48:3 (2004), pp. 517–538 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Strikingly, Hobbes may, for his own part, have been suspicious of empire. See Polansky, David, ‘Drawing out the leviathan: Kenneth Waltz, Hobbes, and the neorealist theory of the state’, International Studies Review, 18:2 (2016), pp. 275, 278 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for whom ‘the ideal Hobbesian state is largely nonimperial’ and ‘more watchful than acquisitive’. On this reading, Hobbes inveighs normatively against imperial expansion: ‘the insatiable appetite, or bulimia, of enlarging dominion’ (Hobbes quoted in Polansky, ‘Drawing out the leviathan’, p. 275) – although not against nested authority structures as such.

100 See Weber on the generative or productive effects of sovereignty discourse. Weber, Cynthia, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

101 Wright, Origin Stories in Political Thought, p. 88. See also Hirschmann, ‘Gordon Schochet on Hobbes’, p. 128; Pateman, ‘“God hath ordained to man”’, p. 457.

102 Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, pp. 188–90.

103 Hirschmann, ‘Gordon Schochet on Hobbes’, p. 133; Schochet, ‘Intending (political) obligation’; Pateman, ‘“God hath ordained to man”’. Indeed, Hobbes elides the role of women completely in defining the family as ‘a man and his children; or of a man and his servants; or of a man, and his children, and his servants together’ (The Leviathan, p. 257). Elsewhere, where women are mentioned, they are treated as property and completely subsumed under the male head of household (Hirschman, ‘Gordon Schochet on Hobbes’, pp. 131, 135; Pateman, ‘“God hath ordained to man”’, p. 447).

104 Hirschmann, ‘Gordon Schochet on Hobbes’, p. 134; Schochet, ‘Intending (political) obligation’; Pateman, ‘“God hath ordained to man”’, p. 457). Haraway is, perhaps, the most prominent critic of these and other assumptions. In her work on primatology she argues that a focus on competition in the state of nature – to the exclusion of communication, cooperation, and others – lends itself to masculine metaphors about the state of nature. Haraway, Donna, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar.

105 Quoted in Hirschmann, ‘Gordon Schochet on Hobbes’, p. 123. Nevertheless, if the patriarchal family results in security for all its members it would be legitimate for Hobbes even were it coerced. Hobbes treats covenants given under duress as consensual if they result in security ‘much as the vanquished will agree to be a servant to avoid death’ (Hirschmann, ‘Gordon Schochet on Hobbes’, p. 133).

106 United Nations, UNiTE to End Violence Against Women: Violence Against Women, United Nations Department of Public Information (2011), available at: {http://www.un.org/en/women/endviolence/pdf/pressmaterials/unite_the_situation_en.pdf} accessed 26 April 2018.

107 See, for example, Altinay on gender and militarism in Turkey, discussion in Cockburn. Altinay, Ayse Gul, The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cockburn, Cynthia, ‘War and security, women and gender: an overview of the issues’, Gender & Development, 21:3 (2013), pp. 433–452 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (pp. 436–8). Zarkov shows the discursive productions of male and female bodies in the Croatian and Serbian press laid groundwork for the ethnicisation of politics, and with it the conditions for war. Zarkov, Dubravka, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

108 Cockburn, ‘War and security’. Women’s distinctive experience of wartime violence occurs distinctively as nested or overlapping hierarchies break down, as in the experience of systematic wartime sexual violence during the Yugoslav breakup. Carmichael, Cathie, Concise History of Bosnia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 144–1245 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On theoretical problems problem surrounding wartime sexual violence, see Alison, Miranda, ‘Wartime sexual violence: Women’s human rights and questions of masculinity’, Review of International Studies, 33:1 (2007), pp. 75–90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on civil wars specifically, see Cohen, Dara Kay, Rape During Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; for quantification, see Cohen, Dara Kay and Nordås, Ragnhild, ‘Sexual violence in armed conflict: Introducing the SVAC dataset, 1989–2009’, Journal of Peace Research, 51:3 (2014), pp. 418–428 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Some feminist IR security scholarship has focused on reframing accounts of armed conflict away from IR’s usual analytical frames, and towards war as experienced by those who live through it. Sylvester, Christine, ‘War experiences/war practices/war theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 40:3 (2012), pp. 483–503 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also discussion of militarism and masculinity in Cohn, Carol and Enloe, Cynthia, ‘A conversation with Cynthia Enloe: Feminists look at masculinity and the men who wage war’, Signs, 28:4 (2003), pp. 1187–11107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Inversely, the practice of international politics may shape masculinities. Hooper, Charlotte, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

109 Sjoberg, Laura, ‘Gender, structure, and war: What Waltz couldn’t see’, International Theory, 4:1 (2012), pp. 1–38 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sjoberg goes further, to consider how the construction of gender roles shapes international structure – as do other feminists in other ways.

110 Thus, Owens documents empires referring to and treating their possessions as households. In consequence, premodern household governance persists within modern ‘public’ life (Owens, Economy of Force, for example, p. 278, passim).

111 Hobbes, The Leviathan, vol. 2, p. 254.

112 Whether or not IR feminism should concern itself with the theoretical concerns of IR’s mainstream – anarchy, hierarchy, and so on – is another matter. Wibben, for example, finds much IR feminism interested increasingly in asking and answering its own questions, not tracking with the dictates of the wider discipline. Wibben, Annick T. R., ‘Researching feminist security studies’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 49:4 (2014), pp. 743–755 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113 Sjoberg, ‘Gender, structure, and war’, p. 11. See discussion in Joseph MacKay and Christopher David LaRoche, ‘The conduct of history in International Relations: Rethinking philosophy of history in IR theory’, International Theory, 9:2 (2017), pp. 203–36 (pp. 227–8).

114 Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1979), pp. 114–116 Google Scholar.

115 Bull, The Anarchical Society.

116 Bially Mattern and Zarakol, ‘Hierarchies in world politics’.

117 Chapman, ‘Leviathan writ small’, p. 89.

118 Tickner, J. Ann, ‘Hans Morgenthau’s principles of political realism: a feminist reformulation’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 17:3 (1988), pp. 429–440 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 438). See also Tickner, J. Ann, Gender in International Relations: A Feminist Perspective on Achieving Global Security (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.