Comments Elsewhere

Kevin,

I agree with you that the argument given by Hoppe and other paleos is hardly dealt with in our essay in its full weight. I think this is a matter of what we had time and space to emphasize more than anything, but you are probably right that at least some clarificatory comments in a footnote would be worthwhile.

I agree with both you and Hoppe that there are historical cases in which father-right and State prerogatives come into conflict with one another, and with you that part of what needs to be said to Hoppe is that just because patriarchy in the family has, in some historical instances come into conflict with State power, does not mean that it is either a good state of affairs or conducive to liberty. (If you accept, as we do the essay, the radical feminist analysis of patriarchy as, among other things, a violent political order autonomous from the violent political order of statism, that makes for good reasons to say that it’s not even consistent with liberty.)

Fair enough; but I think it’s also important to mention (as we do, if with relatively little argument, in the essay) that there are good reasons to think that Hoppe et al. drastically overestimate the degree to which father-right and State prerogatives come into conflict with each other. It’s true that there are notable cases where they’ve come into conflict with one another in certain respects—e.g., revolutionary state socialist movements have typically included critiques of patriarchy in the family, and Bolshevik governments have made direct efforts of various sorts to undermine it. But that’s mostly a fairly new feature on the scene, and the vast bulk of lawmaking for the vast majority of recorded history, insofar as it touched on the matter, has been directed at recognizing, strengthening, and perpetuating men’s power over women through coverture, protection of marital rape and battery, power over children, “protective” legislation banning women from specific fields of work, etc. (Some of these are now—mainly thanks to concerted feminist activism—gone; others remain. And many things that are nominally illegal are still widely enforced de facto, more or less with impunity.)

(Similar remarks could be made in the opposite direction, i.e., the patriarchal family’s traditional wholesale allegiance to the state. It’s no accident that the most statist wings of the Right in the U.S. today are also the people most keen on a culture of strict discipline within the family, “traditional” father-dominated households, etc. Nor is it an accident that the Princes and potentates of history have so often adopted the language of fatherhood and family in order to explain the nature of their own authority over their victims.)

There are also some points I’d like to make about your comments on comparisons between statism and patriarchy as class systems, but I’ll leave those for another post after I’ve thought about it a bit more.

In any case, you’re definitely right that this material deserves more discussion. Possibly in a footnote, possibly in expansion within the text. How exactly to handle it depends in part on where we decide to take the material we have, in terms of expansion, re-arrangement, etc.