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 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996).
ECHU Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
LCT Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James Tully (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983).
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 fngers (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 advanced against them, their children have correctly intuited the liberal tradition’s prevailing suspicion of authority, and especially personal authority. 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 political theories of individual right, natural equality, contract, and constitutionalism elevated impersonal and neutral states and put what was lef of the clergy and the nobility on the defensive. Tis was no mere historical coincidence 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
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 obvious 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 liberalism 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 tension. In the United States, courts and legislatures have struggled to establish 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).
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 weakened 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 unwillingness 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 position 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
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 lamented that so irrational a foundation as the “morality of authority” is required 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 punitive 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 justifable 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 commonly 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 notable 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.
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 homogenous) 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 infuence 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, “convert 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 liberal 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.
be controlled primarily by the disinterested and centralized state, since parental 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 educational theory has become that of “congruence” between the public and private realms, the structure of the state, and its families and schools.16 Since the liberal democratic state turns on equality and individual liberty, children are best prepared for citizenship in it by experiencing egalitarian social relations and rehearsing rights in the pre-p olitical spheres they inhabit. Te democratic school, with its emphasis on neutral exposure to and experimentation 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 decisionmaking.” Levinson, Demands of Liberal Education, 60–62.
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 understanding 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 neediness 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 liberal 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 fgures.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 “attachment 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).
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 anxiety 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 relationship 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 anything but a desperate clinging to what appears to be strong. . . . On the other hand, there is a pattern characterized chiefy by afectionate, basically 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 political 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 association between private authority and political despotism that was pervasive in postwar American discourse, and it is telling that the source of such despotism 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 trustworthiness 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.
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 pedagogical 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 liberty grows where authority declines, so that overthrowing authority wherever possible would always conduce to progress.23 Liberals had confated authority with coercive power, and while most theorists in the twentieth century 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 authority 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 circumvent it.
But Arendt points out the irony of this proposition in a democracy. An education that suppresses adult authority for the sake of facilitating selfgovernment 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 nonliberal 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.
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 authority, 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 extreme caricature of the corporally punishing, Latin-reciting scholastic education that liberalism initially set out to banish. Te logic of congruence that turns the family and school into miniature liberal democracies to better cultivate liberal 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 democratic, but academic achievement has stagnated or declined since the 1970s.26 Parents have tried to enhance their children’s autonomy, but depression, anxiety, 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 domestically, 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.
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 selfcontrol, 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 education 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 independence, 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 intensely personal authority of individual adults whose guidance and instruction 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 authorities, never proposed to liberate children from their parents. Indeed, a notable feature of some of the most politically anti-authoritarian thought of early modernity—John Locke’s and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s—is that it devoted 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 democratic, 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.
tyranny that liberal, commercial states would develop. Undermining traditional 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 children 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 anchor 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 liberty. 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 subordination of the pre-political child.
Plan of the Book
Tis study begins from Arendt’s insight that education is an inherently authoritarian 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
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 congruence 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 because 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 absolute 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 authoritarian family to a liberal state. In particular, in Locke, we fnd a profoundly anti-authoritarian state and epistemological theory coupled with an authoritarian 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 democratic sovereignty, we fnd an even more expansive embrace of personal authority, 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 infuence 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 redefnition 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 paternal power is absolute, but he saw that naturalistic sources of authority like paternity are highly unstable relative to conventional sources like contract.
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 sovereign 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 representative 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 political 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 sovereign could not direct or control public opinion, and “fashion” and “reputation” 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 account 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 private authority. Rousseau is of interest to us because he responds directly to Locke and Hobbes and ofers the most elaborate account of the relation between 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
not as Hobbes claims, by the sovereign, but rather by outstanding individuals 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 private 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 intellectual 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 contemporary 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 authority 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
