Though not above an occasional appeal to the “experience of fathers,” Hobbes was not a patriarchalist in his view of the family. Rather, he quite deliberately represented the family as a small Leviathan, and he used it to illustrate the principles of Hobbesian political science. In the family, as in the state, there is a mutual relationship between protection and obedience; sovereignty is undivided, based on necessity, and justified by performance; authority is absolute and derives from consent. In the state of nature, Hobbes views the family in structure and function as a small state. In commonwealth, the family sovereign relinquishes his absolute power over wife, servant, and child, but he is still entitled to obedience and honor for having raised and educated his children. The content of family education consists of the principles of Hobbesian political science, and the children thereby are properly receptive to sovereign power as they leave the family, whether for the university or for independence.Hobbes's conception of the family is derived from the patria potestas of republican Rome, and not from common law. His use of the family is fully integrated with his political theory, and it is designed to reinforce both the theory and practice of Leviathan.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S000305540024135X

Leviathan Writ Small: Thomas Hobbes on the Family

How modern philosophers use and perpetuate myths about prehistory.The state of nature, the origin of property, the origin of government, the primordial nature of inequality and war – why do political philosophers talk so much about the Stone Age? And are they talking about a Stone Age that really happened, or is it just a convenient thought experiment to illustrate their points?Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall take a philosophical look at the origin of civilisation, examining political theories to show how claims about prehistory are used. Drawing on the best available evidence from archaeology and anthropology, they show that much of what we think we know about human origins comes from philosophers' imagination, not scientific investigation.Key FeaturesShows how modern political theories employ ambiguous factual claims about prehistoryBrings archaeological and anthropological evidence to bear on those claimsTells the story of human origins in a way that reveals many commonly held misconceptions

/pdf/prehistoric-myths-in-modern-political-philosophy-2f15luv27p.pdf

Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy

Philip Boucher analyzes the images-and the realities-of European relations with the people known as Island Caribs during the first three centuries after Columbus. Based on literary sources, travelers' observations, and missionary accounts, as well as on French and English colonial archives and administrative correspondence, Cannibal Encounters offers a vivid portrait of a troubled chapter in the history of European-Amerindian relations.

Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763

The article defines indirect government as self-government through intermediaries authorized by the people, as opposed to the direct rule of the people. It requires that the people abstain from government after authorizing it, and hence that political debate center on whether or how the government is representative, not on what it should do. Almost all modern government is indirect and based on the indirect question of representation. Hobbes, though not the founder of indirect government, was the founder of the science by which men could be induced to consent to be governed not in accordance with their opinions of good and bad but on the basis of their passions, particularly fear. To achieve a form of consent that was voluntary and yet not based on opinion, he was forced to understand consent almost as resigning to the inevitable, yet his purpose in attempting to expel opinions from politics was to clear away divisions of opinion, especially religious opinion, and thus remove the obstacle to progress in human power. Hobbes' doctrine and modern representative government must both be understood from the historical standpoint of Hobbes' hostility to Christianity.

Hobbes and the Science of Indirect Government

Hobbes' political science is based on the claim that civil society hitherto has been founded improperly and is apt to dissolve into civil war. The historical evidence for this claim, however, is not presented systematically in Hobbes' political treatises; it must be reconstructed from his diverse historical writings. In these writings Hobbes analyzes the history of man from barbarism to civilization, and shows that the evolution of political authority from its original basis in natural force to its later foundation on opinion has been the ruin of civilization. This account, I argue, constitutes a genuine theory of history and reveals the problem of civilization which Hobbes' political science is designed to solve.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2130326.pdf

Hobbes on Barbarism and Civilization

Among the most celebrated passages in the literature of political philosophy is Thomas Hobbes' classic description of the incommodious, barren, and uncertain life in the state of nature: "no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." Seventeenth-century critics, assuming that even the most rudimentary social unit, the family, was excluded from the Hobbesian state of nature, often opposed this view of "the NATURALL CONDITION of Mankind" with the patriarchally governed household and insisted that the natural "warre of every man against every man"1 never existed. The reaction of Bishop John Bramhall was typical:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2146773.pdf

Gordon J. Schochet

Papers

Thomas Hobbes on the Family and the State of Nature

Hobbes's Science of Politics