Bringing the Family Back into Early Modern Political Thought: Bodin, Hobbes, and Filmer

This dissertation explores the role of the family in early modern political thought by examining how Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, and Robert Filmer critically reframed a classical view of the family-politics relationship and accommodated the family in their conceptions of sovereignty and the state. I argue that the family presents issues and plays roles as both a structure and a lineage, concerning the origin of authority, the foundation, and the continuity of the political society. This dissertation sheds new light on the scholarship on sovereignty that understates the role of the family, and contributes to early scholarship that relates the family to patriarchalism and gender, and that approaches the family’s metaphorical nature in political languages. The classical model presented in Aristotle treats the family primarily as a structural unit with various kinds of authority, in contrast to political rule, and as a pre-political community of kinship, as well as a natural community of friendship, being the foundation of the polis. Bodin advocated a legal concept of sovereignty that unites all subjects, including family heads, wives, children, servants, and slaves, into the state, while recognising the family's authority and property based on natural law, appealing to historical evolution and a moral bond between the fatherly sovereign and citizens to reconcile the natural family and the artificial state. Hobbes and Filmer rejected the structural diversity of rulership and argued for a single source of authority and a universal foundation of political obligation in all relationships. Both made radical politicisation of the family, especially the ‘original’ condition of mankind, indicated by children's subjection. While Hobbes reconceptualised the despotic and paternal relationship as dominion by consent and covenant, he then situated the family within the state as a private-civil institution. Filmer constructed the political society as a divinely originated lineage of the first father, separating the sovereign right from natural fatherhood and suggesting that political obligation is based on a moral recognition of fatherly protection. While the new conception of sovereignty established an artificial bond between every individual and the sovereign, I show that natural-familial relationships between human beings and the lineage-historical existence of mankind appeared inescapable and persist in early modern political thinking.<p></p>