Family values, fathers' dreams, mama grizzlies, family dynasties: We talk about politics in family terms. In his intelligent and illuminating study of democratic theory and contemporary politics, Brian Duff explores both the reasons for and dangers of this habit of ours.

Critical attention to parenting as central to politics is hardly new. Feminist, care, and queer theorists have been on to this issue for decades. But Duff takes a new angle, exploring ways in which theorists of citizenship and democracy have cast parenthood as a political resource: “This book examines how the creation of a sovereign self became enmeshed with the creation of another person through parenthood and how becoming a worthy citizen became intertwined with the creation of new citizens” (p. 2). Further, and crucially, Duff exposes the antidemocratic consequences of this move. The insights here are new, compelling, and well worth careful attention by those who have long been thinking about liberal democratic politics and the family, and anyone concerned with democratic theory and bio- and modern democratic politics.

Duff organizes his study around two traditions of theorizing citizenship. Virtue theories hold that healthy political life depends on citizens possessing particular characteristics and values. Contest theories emphasize political conflict and insist that citizens be open to reconsidering and changing even deeply held commitments. The author examines two influential theorists of citizenship, Jean Jacques Rousseau, theorist of virtue, and Friedrich Nietzsche, theorist of contest. He uncovers two surprising similarities in these apparently incompatible thinkers.

First, both theorists turn to the experience of being a parent to supply central but most elusive resources of their politics. For those used to thinking of Rousseau as relying on the Legislator and civic religion to instill virtue, Duff's argument—that he, in fact, turns to parenthood—will be illuminating. Nietzsche, no democrat, is a favorite of contemporary theorists who side with more contestatory varieties of democracy. Duff convincingly shows that Nietzsche (and those who draw on him—Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and even, at moments, Bonnie Honig) also introduces a kind of virtue into his theory through the figure of the parent. For Nietzsche, parenthood can inspire openness to the struggles of self-transformation essential to a politics of contest. The parent, or more accurately, the father, Nietzsche thinks, is moved to the hard work of self-overcoming by a desire to pass his ideals on to the next generation.

The second similarity, Duff shows, is that for both, the move to parenthood ultimately threatens their most basic political commitments. For Rousseau, the promise of parenthood is illusory: Virtuous parenthood turns out to be an almost impossible achievement. Yet so much depends on its success. In the final analysis, for Rousseau, the turn to parenthood produces only unbearable insecurity and political despair. For Nietzsche, the problem is this: Parents might have unique motivation and means to pass on the results of self-transformative work. But they are also likely to become attached to the particular results of that work and, thus, unlikely to remain open to questioning them. So, where parenthood is called on to promote openness, in fact it leads to inflexibility and even fundamentalism.

These problems are exacerbated in contemporary democratic theory. In the second half of the book, Duff turns to contemporary theorists—Richard Rorty and Cornel West—who attempt to bridge the gap between virtue and contest models of democracy. The results, he argues, are dismal. Rorty and West cast parenthood as an almost miraculous source of democratic virtue. Both see parenting as capable of inspiring a set of values that can ground and withstand genuine political contest. Instead of a miracle, Duff shows, the parent as citizen serves as a Trojan horse for decidedly antidemocratic impulses. In Rorty's hands, parenthood produces “a sort of helpless and stagnant politics in which citizens wait for family-centered stories to tweak the sentiments of the powerful” (p. 201). In West's, parenthood underwrites “calls for an intrusive government that reinforces virtue by law and protects citizens from the difficulties of political contest” (p. 201). Far from reconciling virtue and contest, Rorty and West inadvertently undermine the best of both.

In the final, especially compelling, chapter, Duff brings his insights to bear on contemporary theory and politics. He shows that “weak ontologists” (e.g., William Connolly, George Kateb, Judith Butler, and Charles Taylor) who draw on Nietzsche unwittingly import echoes of the stagnant fundamentalism of his parent-based virtue. Turning to Giorgio Agamben, he makes a powerful case that the operations of modern biopolitics cannot be fully understood without careful attention to the place of parenthood in citizens' lives and the public imagination. Our ideas about creating new life, he argues, are a key site of the peculiar “interlacement of zoe and bios” (p. 214) that produces a politics of the Nazi death camps. Overcoming such politics, therefore, requires careful attention to the trope of parent as citizen.

In light of Duff's analysis, white reaction to school integration and the reactionary backlash to the 1960s appear as striking examples of parent-as-citizen-centered politics. President Barack Obama's campaign rhetoric and his approach to urban poverty can also be understood as troubling examples of the “micropolitics” of parent-as-citizen biopolitics. Sometimes, Duff's arguments come in provocative terms, as when he likens Obama's Harlem Children's Zone–inspired poverty program to “a sort of mild Maoism in the name of parenthood-centered cultural revolution among the poor” (p. 223). But the provocations are supported by sound analysis: In this instance, the trope of parent as citizen justifies government policies that sacrifice adults' freedom in some of the most intimate decisions imaginable to the needs of the body politic.

One wonders how Duff's insights about parenting and democracy would be different had he chosen to attend more thoroughly to what is conspicuously absent from the accounts he considers. Duff shows that all four of his (male) theorists think of parenting, first and foremost, in terms of imitation and passing on ideals. Mundane realities of parenting, historically the purview of women—of giving care to utterly dependent human beings—are missing from their accounts and, largely, from the author's analysis of them. And so we are left to wonder, first, about the significance of the fact that contemporary democratic theory and politics seem to ignore the actual human labor upon which they depend; and second, whether a fuller, more realistic account of parenting would produce a thinking about politics less susceptible to the pathologies of insecurity and reactionary rigidity identified by Duff. Perhaps. Work by some feminist and care theorists suggest that it might. In any case, it seems clear that a more realistic picture of parenthood would less easily serve as a veil for disguising antidemocratic impulses.

None of this is to detract from the accomplishments of an important and timely study. Bereft of other metaphysical comforts, postmodern citizens increasingly turn to parenthood as a primary source of meaning. Citizens and theorists alike are therefore liable to look to parenting as a resource for giving democracy what it needs, whether that is virtue, openness to contest, or some way to bridge the two.