Liberal States, Authoritarian Families

How can liberals justify adult authority over children? Children are born requiring both subordination to adults and education to equip them for citizenship. These requirements are especially vexing for liberal democracies, for whom the exercise of authority is at odds with the natural liberty and equality of citizens. This difficulty has led some liberal theorists to appeal to the liberal state as a model for familial relations and reject parental authority. My book shows that this effort is misguided, and that early liberals understood parental authority as a necessary protection for children’s own future liberty. It was early modern absolutist theorists—Bodin, Filmer, and Hobbes—who sought congruence between the family and the state, arguing that absolute paternal authority was a salutary education for absolutism’s subjects. But early liberals like Locke and Rousseau opposed congruence. Even as they sought to restrict public authority and limit the formal power of parents, they nonetheless sought to strengthen their private authority over children. They saw that undermining traditional authorities would not issue straightforwardly in freedom but would instead elevate the authority of public opinion to new heights and subject citizens to a new tyranny of opinion. To counteract this threat, they buttressed the pedagogical authority of the family to protect children’s future intellectual liberty and defend liberal citizenship. Their educational writings reveal an important corrective insight for modern liberalism: authority is not only not the enemy of liberty, but actually a necessary prerequisite for it.