Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes

Chapter 6: Gordon Schochet on Hobbes ,Gratitude, and Women

6 Gordon Schochet on Hobbes, Gratitude, and Women Nancy J. Hirschmann It is oddly fitting that the first contemporary ‘‘feminist’’ essay on Thomas Hobbes was written by a man. Gordon Schochet’s ‘‘Thomas Hobbes on the Family and the State of Nature,’’ published in 1967—and reprinted with some modifications in Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Attitudes in Seventeenth-Century England, published by Basil Blackwell in 19751 —took up the central issue of feminist political thought before ‘‘feminist political thought’’ was really a term. His essay preceded by several years the very earliest feminist analyses of An earlier version of this paper was originally presented at Gladly Learn and Gladly Teach: A Conference in Honor of Gordon Schochet, Rutgers University, May 5, 2009. Thanks to conference participants, particularly Lois Schworer and Gordon Schochet, for their comments. 126 Gendered Politics historical canonical figures by such feminists as Susan Okin, Molly Shanley , and Julia Annas. Schochet was, in fact, an important resource for Carole Pateman’s The Problem of Political Obligation even before her work on women, consent, and contract. And he has gone on to write several essays that explicitly take up feminist questions in early modern British political thought.2 As Quentin Skinner pointed out in the interview that opened this volume, Hobbes didn’t really care whether the sovereign was a man or a woman; what he cared about was that the sovereign be obeyed. In this sense, Hobbes was blind to sex and would most likely maintain that it didn’t matter whether a woman or a man wrote the ‘‘first’’ twentiethcentury feminist interpretation of Thomas Hobbes. But Hobbes’s ‘‘blindness ’’ was not just to sex but to sexism as well, making him at best an ambiguous feminist idol, as various essays in the present volume attest. Schochet’s essay, too, is an ambiguous model for feminist interpretations of Hobbes. I here take up a particular problem in Hobbes’s text that Schochet has somewhat identified, and somewhat ignored. Specifically, he has identified the overtly patriarchal nature of the family in modern political thought and recognized that the state, as a result, takes a similarly patriarchal form. The family, accordingly, is inherently political in nature, and the apparent bifurcation of public and private that supposedly sits at the heart of liberalism is in fact illusory. This is radical and powerful stuff for feminist theorizing to make use of. But what Schochet has ignored is how women fit into this patriarchal family, and how they got there, as he acknowledged later.3 It is as if Schochet gives us feminism without women. However, his work on the role of gratitude in Hobbes’s theory of political obligation might provide a solution to the paradox that feminists have identified in Hobbes’s construction of the family and the state: How is it that free and equal natural women are subordinated in the patriarchal family? The Problem of Patriarchalism On the face of it, this looks like a pointless question. Hobbes is writing in the seventeenth century—where else could women be but in a subordinated position in the patriarchal family?4 Schochet indeed makes his case for patriarchalism as the foundation for Hobbes’s political thought by noting Hobbes’s infamous—at least to feminists—definition of a family Schochet on Hobbes, Gratitude, and Women 127 as ‘‘a man and his children; or of a man and his servants; or of a man, and his children, and servants together’’ (Leviathan, ch. 20, 257).5 This quote clearly shows that fathers are not just fathers but rulers of families in Hobbes’s view—political sovereigns by virtue of being fathers. But even if we would expect this, the complete absence of mothers from this ‘‘family’’ looks odd: Why not say ‘‘a man, his wife, his children, and servants’’? Wouldn’t that reinforce, rather than weaken, the patriarch’s position? Schochet takes no notice of the mother’s absence from Hobbes’s definition . Yet on the very next page he rightly observes Hobbes’s declaration that dominion over children normally lies with the mother, absent any contract to the contrary (including the social contract, which might establish matrimonial law).6 And three pages later Schochet notes, Authority over the child in the state of nature belonged to anyone who had the power to kill it. In the first instance...