“The family,” Koganzon writes, “does prepare the child for citizenship, but not by having him rehearse civic principles from a young age. Rather it does so by inoculating him against the worst tendencies of liberalism—the tendencies to be ruled by fashion, custom, and the opinions of the majority.” This essential rootedness is in urgent demand today in a society tossed about by passions that make unbridled democracy a threat to the freedom not only of individuals, but also of families and religious communities.
Parental authority has been an issue of lively and often bitter public debate over the past two centuries, and it seems likely to play a significant role in the 2022 elections and beyond. As I write, a lead story in the Washington Post features a new nationwide organization called “Moms for Liberty,” which insists, “We do NOT CO-PARENT with the GOVERNMENT,” and objects to a variety of practices of local public schools, including mandatory masking and purported indoctrination of children in Critical Race Theory.
Rita Koganzon does not address these current controversies; she discusses how John Locke and other political theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries understood parental authority in relation to wider civic goals. For Thomas Hobbes, it was essential to minimize any threat the family posed to the authority of the sovereign. The child should learn “to appreciate the curbs that the sovereign’s law places on what would otherwise have been their fathers’ complete power over them and to anticipate the day they are freed from their fathers to be subject only to a distant and largely non-interfering master.”
Hobbes sought to delegitimize the family and other independent sources of formation, thereby creating a monopoly of authority within the state. This vision became public policy during the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, during subsequent eras of nation-building in Europe and the Americas in the nineteenth century, and under authoritarian regimes worldwide in the twentieth.
Government policies in many countries have sought to use popular schooling to inculcate loyalty to the nation, and to overcome divisions that might arise from community traditions, religious convictions, and other differences among the population. The child belongs to the state, with parents enjoying a temporary guardianship subject to cancellation at any point if they are guilty of providing an understanding of life that is in tension with the state orthodoxy.
Koganzon goes on to discuss the very different role of the family in John Locke’s essays on education, society, and government. Unlike Hobbes, Locke had a pluralistic vision of society. He sought to weaken the role of authority in civic life. And he argued that doing so required emphasizing authority within the family. “It is precisely to provide a hedge against the power of fashion, custom, and opinion,” Koganzon writes, “that Locke re-introduces a narrow and strictly pedagogical form of authority over children into the family after he has delegitimized it everywhere else.”