The Commonwealth of Fathers
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Britain was enjoying an economic boom stimulated by international trade. New businesses were slowly but steadily providing alternatives to family-based production.
Still, King James I hoped to create a Great Britain, uniting both countries under a Catholic banner and familial obligation. He pronounced himself the father of his people, commissioning a book to this effect to be read by all students and purchased by all householders.4 The book was not entirely persuasive, and James’s son and heir, Charles I, proved unpopular with Parliament. The civil war that ensued prompted a famous reconsideration of the origins of polity itself.The liberal political theorist Thomas Hobbes inverted the religious narrative of an idyllic Garden of Eden before the Fall. In the original State of Nature, he argued, it was every man for himself. The war of all against all made economic progress impossible: ‘‘In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth.’’5 Political initiative saved the day. Men (at least those inhabiting civilized countries such as England) agreed to subject themselves to a sovereign power that would offer them protection from one another in return for obedience. This Leviathan could take the form of a single man or an assembly of men, but its authority must be permanent and absolute, else the war of all against all resume.
This fear was not unwarranted. After four years of fighting between 1642 and 1646, Charles lost both the war and his head. A Republic was declared, and Oliver Cromwell, Protestant leader of the Parliamentarian cause, came to power. The many warring factions could not agree on a constitution, and two years after Cromwell’s death in 1658, the son of the executed king was invited to resume the monarchy.
Most of those unhappy with the restoration of Charles II agreed that he was, nonetheless, preferable to anarchy. Yet royalists scoffed at the notion of a social contract. To agree that ordinary men consented to subjection would be to concede the relevance of their consent.Despite his many references to the Artificer as divine watchmaker, Hobbes denied the Deity any direct role in choice of the secular Sovereign. As a result, his account of the social contract was deemed heretical. His individualism also came under attack. Oxford Dons denounced the notion that ‘‘self-preservation, being the fundamental law of nature, supersedes the obligation of all others.’’6 The new political science emphasized the force of self-interest. Leviathan was not created by struggle between right and wrong but by the tension between short-run and long-run advantage. Men should sacrifice some freedom in order to pursue the promise of prosperity, a trade-off over which political economists—and others—would haggle for centuries to come.
Hobbes assumed rough equality among men negotiating a mutually beneficial social contract. Others were more inclined to emphasize its uneven benefits. As the protesters labeled Levellers and Diggers pointed out, laws such as primogeniture had been imposed by Norman conquerors.7 Hobbes avoided consideration of such inconvenient details. But he did refer, in passing, to civil laws that gave fathers rather than mothers authority over children. In his view this was a natural result of the fact that men rather than women had formed the state.8
Like most of his contemporaries, Hobbes located women in a separate world. His image of the war of all against all evoked individuals who had neither collective interests nor family ties, men ‘‘sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of engagement to each other.’’9 Men, acting intentionally and out of self-interest, chose a sovereign. Women and children, though subject to this sovereign, had no choice. Hobbes's ideas reflected seventeenth-century realities: men ruled their wives and children.10 Not even the Levellers proposed to give women the vote.