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The Three Families of Thomas Hobbes*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Philip Abbott
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Extract

The extreme rational individualism of Thomas Hobbes has been the subject of rebuttal since the publication of Leviathan in 1651. A good portion of the critiques of Hobbes have centered around his famous description of the state of nature as a condition of individualized warfare. Hobbes's contemporaries based their opposition to his individualism on the historical inadequacy of the state of nature. Filmer, for instance, complained about Hobbes's assumptions that men sprang from the earth as “mushrooms … without any obligation to another.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , April 1981 , pp. 242 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1981

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References

1 SirFilmer, Robert, “Observations concerning the Originall of Government” in Patriarcha and Other Works, ed. Laslett, Peter (Oxford, 1949), p. 241.Google Scholar

2 Schochet, Gordon J., “Thomas Hobbes on the Family and the State of Nature,” Political Science Quarterly, 82 (09 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Similar views which see Hobbes as presenting a consistent patriarchalism can be found in Chapman, Richard, “Leviathan Writ Small,” American Political Science Review 69 (03 1975), 76–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and King, Preston, The Ideology of Order (London, 1974), pp. 178–221.Google Scholar

3 de Jouvenal, Bertrand, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good (Chicago, 1957), p. 244.Google Scholar

4 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Macpherson, C. B. (Baltimore, 1968), p. 254.Google Scholar

5 Most relevant here is the new family economics which assesses children as “producer durables” or “consumer durables.” For a helpful critique see Blake, Judith, “Are Babies Consumer Durables?” Population Studies, 22 (03 1968), 5–25.Google ScholarPubMed

6 Hobbes, , Leviathan, p. 255.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., p. 345.

8 Ibid., p. 254. Even sympathetic interpreters have difficulty in connecting this passage with Hobbes's remarks about the standing of children in regard to contracts. Thus Warrender, writes: “… the propriety on Hobbes' part of applying the notion of tacit covenant to the child-parent relationship is very doubtful” (The Political Philosophy of Hobbes [Oxford, 1957], p. 124; also see p. 256, note 1.)Google Scholar

9 Ibid., Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 209.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Hobbes, Thomas, Man and Citizen, ed. Gert, Bernard (Garden City, New York, 1972), p. 215.Google Scholar

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid. Note that the son is placed in the same category as all those freed from subjection, “whether he be servant, son, or/some colony.”

16 Ibid.

17 For a brief analysis of Hobbes's use of gratitude and contract in regard to commonwealth by acquisition in general see my The Shotgun Behind the Door: Liberalism and the Problem of Political Obligation (Athens, Georgia, 1976), pp. 109–114.Google Scholar

18 Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo, trans. Brill, A. A. (New York, 1946), p. 146.Google Scholar

19 Hobbes, , Man and Citizen, p. 117Google Scholar. This passage challenges the interpretation by Schochet that the logical discrepancy of Hobbes “would be removed if the tacit compacts of children were equivalent to the consents that would be forthcoming as soon as each child came of age and became master of his own reason” (p. 435).

20 Hobbes, , Leviathan, p. 257Google Scholar. Yet even this description ultimately assumes a certain ambivalence. For a few lines later, Hobbes is comparing this great family to a small group of soldiers who, when surprised by an army, may each “use his own reason” to save himself “as he shall think best.” How secure are the patriarch's rights in the state of nature?

21 Goode, William J., “Family Disorganization” in Contemporary Social Problems, eds. Merton, Robert K. and Nisbet, Robert (New York, 1976), p. 543.Google Scholar

22 Hobbes, , Man and Citizen, pp. 112–13.Google Scholar

23 Hobbes, , Leviathan, p. 253.Google Scholar

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid. Had Hobbes been willing to develop his argument along the lines later offered by Freud, he may have been able to resolve the inconsistency of the patriarchal family.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., p. 250.

28 Hobbes, , Man and Citizen, p. 219.Google Scholar

29 Schochet, , “Thomas Hobbes on the Family and the State of Nature,” p. 435.Google Scholar

30 Hobbes, , Leviathan, p. 254.Google Scholar

31 Engels, Frederick, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York, 1972).Google Scholar

32 Hobbes, , Leviathan, p. 185.Google Scholar

33 Engels, , The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, p. 109.Google Scholar

34 Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Strachey, James (New York, 1961), p. 46.Google Scholar

35 Hobbes, , Leviathan, p. 253Google Scholar. Compare Hobbes's treatment of mother right discussed above to that of Engels's (p. 106).

36 Bettelheim, Bruno, The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self (New York 1967), pp. 63–67; 77–78.Google Scholar

37 Strauss, , The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Chicago, 1952), p. 66Google Scholar. For an extended treatment of the limitation of the extreme condition as a basis for political philosophy, see my “Philosophers & the Abortion Question,” Political Theory 6 (08 1978), 313–15.Google Scholar

38 Turnbull, Colin, The Mountain People (New York, 1972), pp. 135–36Google Scholar. Children who survived lived among other youths in roving bands.

39 Ibid., p. 253.

40 Ibid., p. 290.

41 This approach is not limited to a Hobbesian analysis. But see Jones, Beverly, “The Dynamics of Marriage and Motherhood” in Morgan, Robin, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful (New York, 1970)Google Scholar who argues that the “open weapon that a man uses to control his wife is the threat of force or force itself”; Rich, Adrienne, Of Woman Born (New York, 1976)Google Scholar who suggests that infanticide has its rational basis as a form of liberation from the family; Brownmiller, Susan, Against Our Will (New York, 1975)Google Scholar who has described the relations between man and woman in terms of rape.

42 Thus Chapman, Richard in “Leviathan Writ Small,” p. 90Google Scholar, writes: “For all of its flaws, however, Hobbes' view of the family has its virtue the premise that the family can be viewed in political terms. We can equally well criticize it according to political values. If one objects to the unjustifiable use of force and the exercise of unlimited power, then surely such objections apply in the family as well as in the state. Sexism institutionalized in society, and children who learn violence in the home are not likely to be easily converted to the use of words in their later years.”