Family as a model for the state
Encyclopedia
The family
as a model for the organization of the state
is a theory of political philosophy
. It either explains the structure of certain kinds of state in terms of the structure of the family (as a model or as a claim about the historical growth of the state), or it attempts to justify certain types of state by appeal to the structure of the family. The first writer to use it (certainly in any clear and developed way) was Aristotle
, who argued that the natural progression of human beings was from the family via small communities to the polis
.
Many writers from ancient times to the present have seen parallels between the family and the forms of the state. In particular, monarchists
have argued that the state mirrors the patriarchal
family, with the people obeying the king
as children obey their father.
rule.
Confucius
believed the child should be subordinate to the parent, younger brother to the older, wife to husband, and subject to the sovereign who is to be regarded as the father of the nation
. The state as the family writ large was the most harmonious, orderly, and natural form of government. This was later expanded to cover international relations
(i.e. the emperor of China
is treated as the older brother of the Korean king). Confucian family theory is still espoused in North Korea
to justify their method of leadership succession.
Plutarch
records a laconic saying of the Dorians attributed to Lycurgus. Asked why he didn't establish a democracy in the Lacedæmon, Lycurgus responded: “Begin, friend, and set it up in your family”. The Dorians of Crete and Sparta seemed to mirror the family institution and organization in their form of government. (see Plutarch's The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans — Lycurgus, p. 65)
Aristotle
often describes personal and domestic relationships in terms of different forms of government. He gives examples such as men and their domestic animals, wives, slaves, and children. He says, for example: “the government of a household is a monarchy, since every house is governed by a single ruler”.(2) Later in the same text he says that husbands exercise a republic
an government over their wives and monarchical government over their children, and that they exhibit political office over slaves and royal office over the family in general. (Politics Bk I, §v, 1–2; 1259a 35–1259b 1)
However, while he is prepared to use political terms as metaphors for domestic relationships, he is equally clear that such metaphors are limited:
After discussing the various domestic relationships, he concludes: “mastership and statesmanship are not identical, nor are all forms of power the same, as some thinkers suppose.” (Politics Bk I, §vi)
Aristotle's main notion is that the ancient Greek polis or city-state is the natural end of human beings; they start in family groups, progress naturally to forming villages, and finally come together in cities. Thus the family forms the root of human relationships, but the city is the flower.
Arius Didymus
in Stobaeus, 1st century CE, writes: “A primary kind of association (politeia) is the legal union of a man and woman for begetting children and for sharing life.” From the collection of households a village is formed and from villages a city, “[s] o just as the household yields for the city the seeds of its formation, thus it yields the constitution (politeia)”. Further, he claims: “Connected with the house is a pattern of monarchy, of aristocracy and of democracy. The relationship of parents to children is monarchic, of husbands to wives aristocratic, of children to one another democratic.” (Hellenistic Commentary to the New Testament, edd Boring, Berger, & Colpe)
Of course, the structure of the family in ancient times was generally far more hierarchical – and patriarchal – than today.
:
De Bonald also sees divorce as the first stage of disorder in the state (the principle of macrocosm/microcosm). He insists that the deconstitution of the family brings about the deconstitution of state, with “The Kyklos” not far behind. (On Divorce, pp 88–89; 149.)
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
draws a connection between the family and monarchy:
's famous “Massacres of Chios” (1824), which helped galvanise philo-Hellenism in France. Delacroix's symbol for the oppressed Greek nation was a family employed as a conceptual and visual structuring device. A reviewer encapsulated Fraser's argument:
More recently, George Lakoff
has claimed that the left/right distinction
in politics comes from a difference between ideals of the family in the mind of the person in question; for right-wing people, the ideal is a patriarchical and moralistic family; for left-wing people, the ideal is an unconditionally loving family. As a result, Lakoff argues, both sides find each other's views not only immoral, but incomprehensible, since they appear to violate each side's deeply held beliefs about personal morality in the sphere of the family.http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:QrE1-cb8_CEJ:www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp%3FArticleID%3D515+family+metaphor+state&hl=en&lr=lang_en.
Such a model is not a recent addition to modern discourse; J. Vernon Jenson discussed “British Voices on the Eve of the American Revolution: Trapped by the Family Metaphor” in the Quarterly Journal of Speech 63 (1977), pp 43–50.
The idea of the commonwealth
as a family is close to cliché
; it permeates political discourse at every level:
Family
In human context, a family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, or co-residence. In most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children...
as a model for the organization of the state
State (polity)
A state is an organized political community, living under a government. States may be sovereign and may enjoy a monopoly on the legal initiation of force and are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union...
is a theory of political philosophy
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...
. It either explains the structure of certain kinds of state in terms of the structure of the family (as a model or as a claim about the historical growth of the state), or it attempts to justify certain types of state by appeal to the structure of the family. The first writer to use it (certainly in any clear and developed way) was Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, who argued that the natural progression of human beings was from the family via small communities to the polis
Polis
Polis , plural poleis , literally means city in Greek. It could also mean citizenship and body of citizens. In modern historiography "polis" is normally used to indicate the ancient Greek city-states, like Classical Athens and its contemporaries, so polis is often translated as "city-state."The...
.
Many writers from ancient times to the present have seen parallels between the family and the forms of the state. In particular, monarchists
Monarchy
A monarchy is a form of government in which the office of head of state is usually held until death or abdication and is often hereditary and includes a royal house. In some cases, the monarch is elected...
have argued that the state mirrors the patriarchal
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and entails female subordination...
family, with the people obeying the king
Monarch
A monarch is the person who heads a monarchy. This is a form of government in which a state or polity is ruled or controlled by an individual who typically inherits the throne by birth and occasionally rules for life or until abdication...
as children obey their father.
Ancient thought
The family–state model was first expressed in ancient times, often as a form of justification for aristocraticAristocracy
Aristocracy , is a form of government in which a few elite citizens rule. The term derives from the Greek aristokratia, meaning "rule of the best". In origin in Ancient Greece, it was conceived of as rule by the best qualified citizens, and contrasted with monarchy...
rule.
Confucius
Confucius
Confucius , literally "Master Kong", was a Chinese thinker and social philosopher of the Spring and Autumn Period....
believed the child should be subordinate to the parent, younger brother to the older, wife to husband, and subject to the sovereign who is to be regarded as the father of the nation
Father of the Nation
Father of the Nation is an honorific title given to a man considered the driving force behind the establishment of their country, state or nation...
. The state as the family writ large was the most harmonious, orderly, and natural form of government. This was later expanded to cover international relations
International relations
International relations is the study of relationships between countries, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations , international nongovernmental organizations , non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations...
(i.e. the emperor of China
Emperor of China
The Emperor of China refers to any sovereign of Imperial China reigning between the founding of Qin Dynasty of China, united by the King of Qin in 221 BCE, and the fall of Yuan Shikai's Empire of China in 1916. When referred to as the Son of Heaven , a title that predates the Qin unification, the...
is treated as the older brother of the Korean king). Confucian family theory is still espoused in North Korea
North Korea
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea , , is a country in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. The Korean Demilitarized Zone serves as the buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea...
to justify their method of leadership succession.
Plutarch
Plutarch
Plutarch then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia...
records a laconic saying of the Dorians attributed to Lycurgus. Asked why he didn't establish a democracy in the Lacedæmon, Lycurgus responded: “Begin, friend, and set it up in your family”. The Dorians of Crete and Sparta seemed to mirror the family institution and organization in their form of government. (see Plutarch's The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans — Lycurgus, p. 65)
Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
often describes personal and domestic relationships in terms of different forms of government. He gives examples such as men and their domestic animals, wives, slaves, and children. He says, for example: “the government of a household is a monarchy, since every house is governed by a single ruler”.(2) Later in the same text he says that husbands exercise a republic
Republic
A republic is a form of government in which the people, or some significant portion of them, have supreme control over the government and where offices of state are elected or chosen by elected people. In modern times, a common simplified definition of a republic is a government where the head of...
an government over their wives and monarchical government over their children, and that they exhibit political office over slaves and royal office over the family in general. (Politics Bk I, §v, 1–2; 1259a 35–1259b 1)
However, while he is prepared to use political terms as metaphors for domestic relationships, he is equally clear that such metaphors are limited:
- “Some thinkers, however, suppose that statesman, king, estate manager, and master of a family have a common character. This is a mistake; they think that the distinction between them is not a difference in kind, but a simple, numerical difference.” (Politics Bk I, §i)
After discussing the various domestic relationships, he concludes: “mastership and statesmanship are not identical, nor are all forms of power the same, as some thinkers suppose.” (Politics Bk I, §vi)
Aristotle's main notion is that the ancient Greek polis or city-state is the natural end of human beings; they start in family groups, progress naturally to forming villages, and finally come together in cities. Thus the family forms the root of human relationships, but the city is the flower.
Arius Didymus
Arius Didymus
Arius Didymus of Alexandria, was a Stoic philosopher and teacher of Augustus. Fragments of his handbooks summarizing Stoic and Peripatetic doctrines are preserved by Stobaeus and Eusebius.-Life:...
in Stobaeus, 1st century CE, writes: “A primary kind of association (politeia) is the legal union of a man and woman for begetting children and for sharing life.” From the collection of households a village is formed and from villages a city, “
Of course, the structure of the family in ancient times was generally far more hierarchical – and patriarchal – than today.
Modern thought
Louis de Bonald wrote as if the family were a miniature state. In his analysis of the family relationships of father, mother and child, De Bonald related these to the functions of a state: the father is the power, the mother is the minister and the child as subject. As the father is “active and strong” and the child is “passive or weak”, the mother is the “median term between the two extremes of this continuous proportion”. De Bonald justified his analysis by quoting and interpreting passages from the BibleBible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
:
- “
[It] calls man the reason, the head, the power of woman: Vir caput est mulieris {man is head of woman} says St Paul. It calls woman the helper or minister of man: ‘Let us make man,’ says Genesis, ‘a helper similar to him.’ It calls the child a subject, since it tells it, in a thousand places, to obey its parents”. (On Divorce pp 44–46)
De Bonald also sees divorce as the first stage of disorder in the state (the principle of macrocosm/microcosm). He insists that the deconstitution of the family brings about the deconstitution of state, with “The Kyklos” not far behind. (On Divorce, pp 88–89; 149.)
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was an Austrian Catholic nobleman and socio-political theorist...
draws a connection between the family and monarchy:
- “Due to its inherent patriarchalism, monarchy fits organically into the ecclesiastic and familistic pattern of a Christian society. (Compare the teaching of Pope Leo XIII: 'Likewise the powers of fathers of families preseves expressly a certain image and form of the authority which is in God, from which all paternity in heaven and earth receives its name — Eph 3.15') The relationship between the King as 'father of the fatherland' and the people is one of mutual love”. (Liberty or Equality, p.155)
Politics and the family
In her book, Delacroix, Art and Patrimony in Post-Revolutionary France, Elisabeth Fraser analyses Eugène DelacroixEugène Delacroix
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...
's famous “Massacres of Chios” (1824), which helped galvanise philo-Hellenism in France. Delacroix's symbol for the oppressed Greek nation was a family employed as a conceptual and visual structuring device. A reviewer encapsulated Fraser's argument:
- “Equating patriarchal family metaphor with government paternalism and imperialist protectionism, the chapter argues that such familial intimations, heightened by acute emotionalism and hints of a Western culture soiled by Eastern penetration, corresponded to and reflected a paternalistic government urge to protect the victimized Greeks, a thinly veiled justification for French colonial intervention in the Mediterranean.” Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer
More recently, George Lakoff
George Lakoff
George P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972...
has claimed that the left/right distinction
Left-Right politics
The left–right political spectrum is a common way of classifying political positions, political ideologies, or political parties along a one-dimensional political spectrum. The perspective of Left vs. Right is a binary interpretation of complex questions...
in politics comes from a difference between ideals of the family in the mind of the person in question; for right-wing people, the ideal is a patriarchical and moralistic family; for left-wing people, the ideal is an unconditionally loving family. As a result, Lakoff argues, both sides find each other's views not only immoral, but incomprehensible, since they appear to violate each side's deeply held beliefs about personal morality in the sphere of the family.http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:QrE1-cb8_CEJ:www.texasobserver.org/showArticle.asp%3FArticleID%3D515+family+metaphor+state&hl=en&lr=lang_en.
Such a model is not a recent addition to modern discourse; J. Vernon Jenson discussed “British Voices on the Eve of the American Revolution: Trapped by the Family Metaphor” in the Quarterly Journal of Speech 63 (1977), pp 43–50.
The idea of the commonwealth
Commonwealth
Commonwealth is a traditional English term for a political community founded for the common good. Historically, it has sometimes been synonymous with "republic."More recently it has been used for fraternal associations of some sovereign nations...
as a family is close to cliché
Cliché
A cliché or cliche is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning,...
; it permeates political discourse at every level:
- “There is an historic American National Family metaphor .. That American National Family frame is like any real extended family-fractious but in the end functional. There are people in it who aren't just like you, but they are still family and we still have to try to solve our problems together, despite our differences.” — Susan C. Strong, Our 'One Big Family' Frame
See also
- PaternalismPaternalismPaternalism refers to attitudes or states of affairs that exemplify a traditional relationship between father and child. Two conditions of paternalism are usually identified: interference with liberty and a beneficent intention towards those whose liberty is interfered with...
- Pater patriaePater PatriaePater Patriae , also seen as Parens Patriae, is a Latin honorific meaning "Father of the Country," or more literally, "Father of the Fatherland".- Roman history :...
- FatherlandFatherlandFatherland is the nation of one's "fathers", "forefathers" or "patriarchs". It can be viewed as a nationalist concept, insofar as it relates to nations...
- Family dictatorshipFamily dictatorshipA hereditary dictatorship, or family dictatorship, in political science terms a personalistic regime, is a form of dictatorship that occurs in a nominally or formally republican regime, but operates in practice like an absolute monarchy, in that political power passes within the dictator's family...
- Robert FilmerRobert Filmerthumbnail|150px|right|Robert Filmer Sir Robert Filmer was an English political theorist who defended the divine right of kings...
External links
- Patriarchia by Robert FilmerRobert Filmerthumbnail|150px|right|Robert Filmer Sir Robert Filmer was an English political theorist who defended the divine right of kings...