Keywords
Hobbes
How to Cite
Abstract
On the Sovereignty of Mothers sets out to “think the political otherwise than as paternal or patriarchal, otherwise than as fraternal”; to “think the political as it has always been: maternal.”[1] Into this project, Anidjar enlists Thomas Hobbes, the only social contract theorist to locate the origin of sovereignty not in the right of the father over the child, nor in the right of the husband over the wife (Pateman, 1989), but in the right of the mother (p. 72). In Elements of Law, Hobbes argues that the mother’s right derives not from her generation of the child but from her preservation of the child (p. 71). In De Cive, he writes that the mother who chooses to raise the child does so on the condition that, “being grown to full age he become not her enemy.” Mothers thus suspend the state of nature as a state of “universal enmity” (p. 72), occupying a double function as both “mother” and “lord.” In Leviathan, Hobbes holds that the mother’s natural dominion derives from the fact that it is she who first decides either to “nourish” or to “expose” the child (pp. 73). The maternal contract, Anidjar suggests, is that which “binds mother and child” but also “two mothers, two maternal functions, two maternal powers”: the power of preservation and the power of destruction (pp. 73), what Walter Benjamin calls founding or instituting power and divine power. It also marks a form of social life that stands between the undifferentiated multiplicity of the state of nature and the undivided unity of the commonwealth: one (the father), two (the mother), many (the state of nature). It is the sovereignty of the mother that mediates between the state of nature and the social contract. It is mothers who make and unmake the collective. It is mothers who “guard the world…preserve it and also guard us from it” (pp. 84-85). It is mothers who force the recognition that nations, unlike Hobbes’ men, are not created equal (pp. 96).
[1] This piece was made possible by my Coombe Trust fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. I am very grateful for the time and space given to me by IASH. Conversations with Anthony Paul Smith helped me work through the ideas and arguments here.
References
Baumgold, D. (Ed.). (2017). Three-Text Edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Political Theory: The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan. Cambridge University Press.
Hirschmann, N. J., & Wright, J. H. (Eds.). (2012). Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes. Penn State Press.
Hobbes, T. (1680). Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners & Religion, of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Written by Himself, by Way of Letter to a Learned Person. William Crooke.
Hobbes, T. (1839). The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (Vol. 5; W. Molesworth, Ed.). John Bohn.
Hobbes, T. (1991). Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck, Cambridge University Press.
Martinich, A. P. (1999). Hobbes: A Biography. Cambridge University Press.
Ng, S. F. (2012). Hobbes and the Bestial Body of Sovereignty. In N. J. Hirschmann & J. H. Wright (Eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes. Penn State Press.
Pateman, C. (1988). The Sexual Contract. Stanford University Press.
Pateman, C. (1989). “God Hath Ordained to Man a Helper”: Hobbes, Patriarchy and Conjugal Right. British Journal of Political Science, 19(4), 445–463.
Rogow, A. A. (1986). Thomas Hobbes: Radical in the Service of Reaction. W. W. Norton.
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