The “racial contract”, as Mills states in his introduction, was influenced by Carole Pateman’s “Sexual Contract.” In what ways can you use the Fox-Genovese article and Coleman together to reconstruct different aspects of the sexual contract that underpins the racial contract? What are the specific logics that only appear when we counterpose these histories this way? These need not be logics in which the “sexual contract” and “racial contract” work symbiotically. How do the Hobbesian histories of sociology and international relations that we have studied for the last two weeks shape how you think about the implications of gendering Leviathan?
The student responses quoted below were informed by the following readings:
- Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (1998)
- Frank Coleman, Hobbes and America: Exploring the Constitutional Foundations (1977)
- Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Property and Patriarchy in Classical Bourgeois Political Theory” (1977)
Mixing both the racial contract and the sexual contract bring about interesting questions of intersectionality and nuance to the ideas of race and sexism in modern society, since the groups at play are no longer just men and women or white and non-white but now white men, white women, non-white men, and non-white women. Who has the upper hand when?
I think denoting an absence is just as important as denoting a presence. Noting the absence of women from the original social contract and noting how Hobbes discusses women or how women would be placed in classical contract theories is important in making a more complete understanding of not only Hobbes’s work but also a more complete understanding of how to continue to discuss his work in the present day. While the answer might seem obvious and self-evident (that Hobbes upholds societal patriarchy through Leviathan and other works), understanding the reasons for why could help to illuminate similar patterns that still exist today from Hobbes’s time and provide direction towards deconstructing them.
– Aryan Ashraf
I think the obvious connection running through Pateman, Mills, and Coleman is the sharp focus on the individual and its consequences. All three stress how the individual features prominently in the social contract and, consequently, the construction of the individual as male (for Pateman) and white (for Mills) means that the current contract rests on the domination of non-whites and non-men.
I really like Fox-Genovese because, pace Coleman, she stresses Hobbes’s discontinuity with the liberal tradition—he denudes the liberals of their ideological cover and pulls back the veil on oppression. Specifically, and again contra Coleman, she describes how Hobbes “shuddered at the logic of possessive individualis[m]” and strove to “guard against its political expression”—he was not writing for the interests of the Protestant middle-classes, but against them (42). Moreover, and particularly with regards to gender, Hobbes makes manifest the domination inherent in our society, such a move prompting later theorists to try and “mitigate its brutality” (43). Pateman too mentions how Hobbes was “too revealing about the civil order”—he made explicit that sexual relations were political and did not allow them to hide in civil society like other theorists (44). I don’t think Hobbes’s use lies in viewing him as just another liberal—this seems fundamentally uninteresting—but as someone who pierced the veil of “bourgeois hegemony” and saw society for what it was and, consequently, what it is (Fox-Genovese 43).
– J. Doe
Coleman argues that Hobbes is the “true ancestor” to American constitutionalism and the ideals of a liberal democracy. He claims that the modern American political process, as well as “secessionism, civil disobedience, social Darwinism, and pluralism,” are all descendants of Hobbesian thought (p. 55).… Thus, if America as a liberal democracy owes its founding principles to Hobbes, the question of who receives treatment as an actual “individual” is vital to ask. A clear example in the failure to expand modern America’s definition of the “individual” to all (in practice, not just theory) is in the lack of political rights, enfranchisement for instance, for people of color, women, queer people, and countless other groups discriminated against throughout history.
Additionally, Pateman, Coleman, and Fox-Genovese all discuss the role of patriarchalism—the view that political right is sourced from fatherhood, and whether Hobbesian political right is from fatherhood or masculinity itself. Fox-Genovese writes, “Had [Hobbes and Locke] not, on some level, accepted the patriarchalist notion of family as mirror of the polity, they would never have been drawn…into asserting the equality of women within the family” (p. 55). Fox-Genovese also addresses the failure of the slave contract to recognize the enslaved person’s “freedom as an individual” (p. 55), which thus returns to Coleman’s notion that a contract in which one party renounces their whole freedom is not reciprocal and is therefore “itself null and void” (p. 76).
– Emily Lathers
The readings for this week mostly describe the various groups of people that are less represented under Hobbesian Contract Theory. Coleman established that the American constitution is in large part derived from the same ideas that went into Hobbes’s Leviathan, primarily how the source of power of the government is those who are being governed. This includes all those who are being disenfranchised though, which is what Pateman and Mills are attempting to address in their pieces. Pateman shows how this is being done to women subtly, by addressing individuals and people and then in practice applying those terms to men. Mills describes how racial boundaries are perpetuated in modern day society despite the equality proposed by contract theory.
– Kip Rodes
Following Coleman’s analysis of Hobbesian thought’s influence on western contractarianism, and comparing it to the history of colonialism, we can source the differing treatment of gender and racial minorities to differing spheres of thought surrounding the mixing of different demographics—maybe the division between natural and social laws, and the placement of different minorities into those social spheres following that revolution in thought. For instance, the division between White and African American colonists in the U.S., and the resultant economic and subjugation systems, follows a Hobbesian moral division between whites and nonwhites. Conversely, the division between men and women may have been present before the contractarian revolution—which is why there is not a similar moral disparity between gender minorities and the majority. We can also track the economic implications of the moral disparity by looking at the Fox-Genovese article, and the ways in which the subjugation of nonwhites on moral grounds. The subjugation of another race suits the majority economically—not so for a specific gender. I’m unsure about the international relations we have studied in HIST 020 and their implications for gendering leviathan—except for the division between the king and queen’s courts, and the need for the queen’s court to prove it’s political might through its connection to Hobbes—in an effort to combat the inherent inequality between women and men justified by Hobbes’s own writing.
– Walter Ben Rosin
The issue of power in the family is fraught with contradictions and confusing arguments as well as the right of power was transferred from the mother to the father. As the protestant’s and Hobbes understood, their is a direct connection between ownership (of land, property) and power. And we see this idea taken up in how Hobbes and others deal with issues of the paternal and patriarchal rule in the family. The mother and childrens consent to the patriarchal power is justified in confusing and contradictory ways but ultimately ends with the father as the sovereign of the family and their loss of individual rights, in a way becoming his property.
The implications of gendering Leviathan are that we begin to see the inherent inequality in contracts beyond the sexual and racial ones. As Pateman calls attention once again to the role of property in relations of power and contract, we are drawn to see how unequal contracts are constantly made.
– Kestrel Valdez
Coleman claims that the Lockean translation of Hobbesian politics as adopted into American ideals of government marries political power with social power. Because American constitutionalism relies on representative bodies comprised of self-nominated individuals, only those who possess a certain amount of social influence are equipped to seize power. The Fox-Genovese adds that patriarchal households hold the father figure as a domestic Leviathan, setting the expectation for civil structures. In and outside of the family, women, then, are not governed by consent but by the authoritative and managerial powers of the governing man.
Thus, civil structures are ground-up constructions founded upon the individual understanding of family. Despite the imagined equality of gender and sex that classic writers believe existed within familial dynamics, true power lies in the self-entitled seizure of it. The act of seizing power is a forceful act of acquisition that only free individuals are privy to. The Leviathan figure, then, must always be cisgender, heterosexual, white, and, most importantly, male. It is only this specific genre of masculinity that has the social influence necessary to seize power in modern American politics because he is the only kind of person that convince himself and the democratic public that he is deserving of the powers of the Leviathan.
– Nina Zhuo