Feminism’s Hobbeses—past, present, and future—are brought together in this collection, the latest in the Re-Reading the Canon series. A first wave of feminist studies highlighted the masculinist bias of his methodological individualism and the gap between maternal power in the state of nature and patriarchy within civil society. A second wave, represented here, is more positive about his utility for feminists but continues to debate women’s position in the social-contract story. Thirdly, looking ahead, the volume points to several paths for future work. A feminist “new History” would attend to women in his world or mentioned in his writings, as well as to early-modern female writers heretofore excluded from the canon. His thinking also has enduring relevance for current issues and debates, as illustrated here in discussions of abortion, choice feminism, and sexual ethics.
The collection is framed by an introductory conversation between Carole Pateman and Quentin Skinner covering both methodological approaches and substantive foci. Their differences of approach come down to an analytic/historical divide, which has the useful effect of locating feminist interpretations within these broader schools. For Pateman, feminist interpretation consists in bringing philosophical analysis to bear on gender issues, specifically on analyzing significant lacunae in Hobbes’s arguments. Although hopeful that feminist history has already had an impact, Skinner suggests that Hobbes’s thought presents a rich field for new work, since a number of women authorities figured in his life and thought: there was Elizabeth I, who ruled England in his youth; Bess of Hardwick, the Elizabethan matriarch of the Devonshire clan; and Christian Bruce, widow of the second Devonshire earl and his employer after the earl’s death. On the literary side, there are the Amazons whom he described as having dominion in a state of nature. The conversation carries through in the organization of the collection: several sections of essays in an analytic vein are followed by a historical section; a concluding section has essays on Hobbes’s relevance for our time.
A trio of essays treat Pateman’s path-breaking insight that Hobbes’s logic implies a marriage contract of female subordination. It drew on an article by Gordon Schochet, reprinted here and accompanied by Nancy Hirschmann’s commentary, that uncovered patriarchy in Leviathan. In The Sexual Contract, Pateman argued that Hobbes’s social-contract narrative has a silent step. Where at the start, in the state of nature, women are free and powerful, the political covenant is said to be a compact between the fathers of families; hence there must be an intervening sexual contract instituting male domination. This contract, she thought, must precede the political covenant; but Hirschmann, noting that the institution of marriage does not exist in the state of nature, defends a reverse sequence. (A fourth essay, “Hobbes on the Bestial Body of Sovereignty” by Su Fang Ng, contests their shared patriarchal reading through a Foucaultian lens.)
In contrast to the Schochet-Pateman-Hirschmann critique, the theory appears in more positive light in other analytic essays. Hobbes’s theory is gender neutral, S.A. Lloyd argues, in virtue, first, of his refusal to recommend substantive content for civil law generally: his sovereign is as entitled to legislate in favor of women as against them. Moreover, his state of nature is also gender neutral: he did not see natural inequalities of power as always or exclusively gender-based, witness the Amazon example. “Hobbes,” she concludes, “has as sturdy and sound a philosophical basis as did Rawls to establish the political equality of women” (p. 60). Jane Jaquette goes further, deriving from the observation that Hobbes’s “geometry of politics” was “fundamentally egalitarian,” the conclusion that he was remarkably unsexist and that his (liberal) values of equality and universality are tools for challenging discrimination (p. 77). Whereas Lloyd’s argument is correct about logical possibilities and Jaquette correct regarding Hobbes’s assumption of natural equality, the emancipatory significance of abstract liberal principles is a more controversial assertion. We would not make the same argument about (say) Jefferson, although there is the difference that he failed to grant natural equality between master and slave.
Analytic interpretation lends itself to contemporary applications of classic theory, and this volume concludes with three splendid examples. Susanne Sreedhar finds in Hobbes’s scattered discussions of sexual relationships a remarkable openness to diversity and rejection of the “three of the structuring pillars of heteronormativity: (1) heterosexuality; (2) monogamy, and (3) lifelong partnerships” (p. 266-67). Sexual law was, for Hobbes, just a matter of policy “analogous to the decision . . . to drive on the right- or left-hand side of the road” (p. 268) and was to be decided based on the pragmatic goal of population growth. In “Thomas Hobbes and the Problem of Fetal Personhood,” Joanne Boucher traces back to Hobbesian logic the Thomson-McDonagh linkage of abortion rights to a primary right to self-defense. If a fetus is a person, then pregnancy consists in the intrusion of one person in the life and liberty of another. The parallel of this argument to Hobbes on the inalienable right of self-defense is obvious: “an unwanted pregnancy [is] akin to ‘Chayns, and Imprisonment’” (p. 235). Striking though the analogy is, it also points to a reverse Hobbes-inspired question: Why do women commonly accept this “imprisonment”? Joanne Wright, on “Choice Talk,” discusses Hobbism’s legacy to that brand of popular feminism that validates women’s choices regardless of any and all coercive circumstances. It recalls, she observes, Hobbes’s well-known claim that liberty is consistent with coercion: “Hobbes’s legacy is alive and well in a liberalism that believes consent can be taken at face value” (p. 256).
Skinner’s side in the opening conversation is intended to be represented in a section of essays on “Hobbes and His(torical) Women.” However, rather than treat “his” women, it covers early-modern female critics of his ideas: Margaret Cavendish, wife of Hobbes’s patron, the Duke of Newcastle; Mary Astell, a turn-of-the-(eighteenth)-century advocate of education for women; and Catherine Macaulay, the influential, republican eighteenth-century historian of England. Only one of the essays discusses a direct response to Hobbes: Macaulay’s “Loose Remarks” on De Cive. Wendy Gunther-Canada traces her transposition of the idea that the sovereign personifies the nation into a conception of marriage as a relationship in which husband personifies wife and she legally vanishes. But Hobbes, of course, did not draw that analogy, nor did he, as stated here (p. 199), serve as a member of the House of Commons. Essays by Karen Detlefsen on Cavendish and Karen Green on Astell and Macauley are less directly focused on Hobbes and more concerned with using Hobbism as a foil for bringing out these thinkers’ legacies for later feminism.
Skinner is right that the time is ripe for examination of Hobbes’s remarks on women in his world, from Elizabeth I to Christian Bruce, as well as his comments on such figures as the Amazons. I suggest looking to Sreedhar’s chapter as a model for building compelling interpretation out of scattered remarks. We may hope that feminist interpretation will soon be as well developed in the historical dimension as it is, demonstrated in this volume, in the analytic one.
