Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes

Introduction: The Many Faces of ‘‘Mr. Hobs’’

Introduction The Many Faces of ‘‘Mr. Hobs’’ Joanne H. Wright and Nancy J. Hirschmann The very idea of a volume of feminist essays on Hobbes may seem at first glance to be puzzling, if not futile.1 As a theorist whose trademark is a relentlessly logical argument for absolute sovereignty, Hobbes may seem initially to have little to offer twenty-first-century feminist thought. Hobbes makes few references to women throughout his corpus, being explicitly concerned with political power, which—in seventeenthcentury England, a period in which Elizabeth’s recent reign was fodder for a burgeoning literature on patriarchal theories of politics—for the most part excluded women from its concerns. Unlike Locke, who explicitly recognized women’s entitlement to authority and respect in the bourgeois family (and explicitly recognized their need to work in poor families), Hobbes’s comments on women, sex, and the family are scant. 2 Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes Readers of Hobbes might interpret his remarks on gender as offhand, made in passing as he moves through ‘‘larger’’ arguments about power, freedom, and order. Further, Hobbes is often cast as the founding figure of a rationalist hyperindividualistic political vision that is inimical to a twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminism committed to democracy, participation, and mutual relations of care and community. Consider, for example, Jean Bethke Elshtain’s early characterization in Public Man, Private Woman in 1981: ‘‘If Hobbes’s epistemology is methodological individualism, his ontology is abstract individualism.’’2 This understanding of Hobbes dominated feminist interpretations; as Christine Di Stefano noted in her in- fluential Configurations of Masculinity, Hobbes’s ontology demonstrated a ‘‘distinctively modern masculinist orientation to the realm of social life.’’3 Yet despite Hobbes’s stark language and unsentimental portrayal of the social and political world—or possibly because of it—he has held a fascination for feminists since the early days of feminist political thought. This is especially evident in Teresa Brennan and Carole Pateman’s ‘‘‘Mere Auxiliaries to the Commonwealth’: Women and the Origins of Liberalism’’ (1979) and in Pateman’s later work The Sexual Contract (1988), both of which pay particular attention to Hobbes as a figure relevant to unpacking the politics of gender, sex, and the family.4 At the same time, however, Hobbes has been undertreated in the history of feminist thought. None of the other early feminist classics treat Hobbes as significant enough to warrant a separate chapter. From Susan Moller Okin’s Women in Western Political Thought and Lorenne Clark and Lynda Lange’s The Sexism of Social and Political Theory, to Elshtain’s Public Man, Private Woman and Zillah Eisenstein’s The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism , Hobbes’s work only merits a few pages.5 Did early feminists not deem his thought patriarchal enough to require deeper investigation? Or did they perhaps think that he was so far beyond rescue for feminism that a deeper investigation would be fruitless? Our contributors show that the exercise of unpacking Hobbes’s assumptions about gender is worth the trouble. But the dearth of feminist analysis of Hobbes is also a product of his larger reception in political thought. In his book Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction, Richard Tuck suggests that Hobbes is the most undertreated of great Western thinkers—not just by feminists, but by historians of political thought of all stripes.6 As unbelievable as this might seem, especially in light of his frequent designation as the greatest philosopher in the English language, it may be that Introduction 3 Hobbes’s status as a theorist of absolute power writing at the outset of more liberal and, later, democratic ideas about politics has contributed to this eclipse. As we endeavor to give Hobbes his due, as well as to acknowledge a huge debt to some of the important ground broken by the early feminist interpretations, this volume of feminist interpretations seeks to investigate more deeply what his significance for feminism might be. Ranging from an argument that the right to self-preservation may leave room for a defense of modern abortion rights, to a radical and libertarian theory of sexuality, to an understanding of the will and consent that choice feminism can deploy, to a portrayal of the powerful mother in the state of nature who becomes an outcast in civil society like the she-wolf displaced by the swineherd, feminists in this volume have plumbed a rich trove of...