In this thoughtful and illuminating study of the ethical implications of the parent–child relationship in the political thought of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, Rita Koganzon posits and then defends a provocative claim: modern liberal political thought assumes and requires the practice of a temporary and benevolent authoritarianism by parents toward children within the family. By carefully comparing and contrasting Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau on essential features of this argument, Koganzon is able to show how each of them feared, to varying degrees, the ways that people “resist being ruled” (p. 16) from the level of the family on up. Subsequently, she reveals how each responded differently to this fundamental problem of political organization through their theories of the relationship between the family and the state.

Key to Koganzon’s argument is her hermeneutical rubric, “the logic of congruence.” By this term, she means the modern view that “there could or should be congruence between the structure of authority in the family and the state” (p. 17). The logic of congruence, she argues in chapter 1, has become a norm of modern political thought but only emerged after Jean Bodin promulgated his influential theory of absolute sovereignty in the sixteenth century. Before Bodin, the governing assumption of post-Reformation European constitutionalism was that “patriarchal” governments grounded in the structures of family life were “incompatible” with “modern government,” which “required standing laws,” not simply appeals to the power of the father as a primordial ruler-figure to garner legitimacy (p. 17). In her words, “It was Bodin’s sovereignty theory … that first advanced paternal authority as a plausible model for the monarch’s power” (p. 29).

Hobbes, she argues in chapter 2, offered the most complex challenge to Bodin’s congruency model of family–state relations. Although Hobbes shared Bodin’s political aim of defending absolute sovereignty in the figure of a single monarch, he did not share his predecessor’s sanguine view of the patriarchal family as a model for absolute state power. Rather, Hobbes established a trend in early modern thought that Koganzon traces through Locke and Rousseau. This trend grew from these thinkers’ recurring fear of the patriarchal (or father-led) family’s passionate, chaotic, and even violent pull against the order and power of a centralized state authority.

Locke’s fears about political order ran in two directions, she contends in chapter 3. Even as he established himself as the great critic of absolute sovereignty and the paternalistic and patriarchal logic of congruence, Locke directed much of his epistemological, educational, and political philosophy toward the problem of the tyranny of public opinion. The people could not be expected to be free and equal subjects united in a self-governing community, let alone establish a legitimate government grounded in the legislative power’s representation of their majority will, if they were raised to be unthinking replicators of the opinions of their times. Given such an upbringing, they might simply accept the logic of congruence that had generated laughable equations of paternal and political power, like Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680). For this reason, Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) was concerned with the raising of a boy into a gentleman, who would be imbued with the intelligence, good taste, and self-control to obey the laws and political authorities while cultivating the reason necessary to discern the value of autonomy over subservience to any would-be sovereign power—whether it was public opinion or a despotic monarch.

Chapter 4 continues in this vein by examining Rousseau’s treatment of the tensions between the power of public opinion and the realization of legitimate government. Like Locke, Rousseau saw the double-sided power of opinion to shape people in good and bad ways. Rousseau’s answer was not to tame opinion through education, but rather to make opinion (or what he calls “moeurs”) the most fundamental form of law in his ideal republic (p. 130). His ideal republic was a state with a legitimate government grounded in the will of the people who constitute its citizenry. It would make use of the power of opinion to shape the ideas, morals, and virtues of its citizenry, from the cradle to the grave. This “authoritarian” educational process would begin in the family, according to Koganzon, with both men and women playing intensive roles in inculcating the opinions and values necessary for the next generation to take up the duties (and correlate rights) of citizenship.

Indeed, many a scholar has read Rousseau’s vastly influential novels Emile (1762) and Julie (1761) as philosophical attempts to rewrite Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education in a way that might generate the cultural conditions for the realization of his theory of popular sovereignty as found in the Social Contract (1762). Athough Koganzon touches on the ideas of these novels and points out some of their patriarchal views that stand in tension with Rousseau’s abstract theory of modern republicanism, she does not dwell on the analysis of the gender troubles that pervade much of early modern theories of family–state relations from Bodin to Rousseau. In the historiographical rush to illuminate, in retrospect, the paradox that authoritarian models of family life and education were essential to the early modern theorization of republics and liberal constitutional regimes, Koganzon does not spend enough time explaining why some forms of authority are contrary to the principles of modern democracy (i.e., patriarchal and gender-biased forms of authority).

A now canonical, late eighteenth-century feminist political theorist, Mary Wollstonecraft, made very similar criticisms of the views of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau on the family as does Koganzon, yet she is absent from this book. Wollstonecraft advanced an influential model of the egalitarian family that sought to coeducate women and men citizens for the republics that emerged after the American and French Revolutions. At the same time, she argued that parents must have a temporary and benevolent authority over their children in their youth. This relationship eventually and ideally would reverse when the children became adults and their parents were in need of care and companionship. If the parents had been good to their children, then the children would freely return the favor in their adulthood. Even then, Wollstonecraft insisted that the relationship between an adult child and older parent must always be one of free and mutual respect and friendship, rendering them equals. She offered a model of congruence between the egalitarian family and free and legitimate government that has arguably been institutionalized in many of the laws and cultures of modern democracies. She was most certainly the opposite of Bodin, but Wollstonecraft, too, followed the logic of congruence in theorizing the social basis of legitimate political power.

If she writes a sequel to Liberal States, Authoritarian Families, Koganzon could productively add Wollstonecraft and other women philosophers to the intriguing story of how parenting and family have been variously conceived as both congruent and incongruent to the architecture of legitimate state power since the first stirrings of modern European constitutionalism.