ABSTRACT
This re-formulation o f the public and the private was to do with making sense o f a world which was changing very rapidly and in which pre-existing definitions and boundaries no longer fitted very well. Central to this was the develop ment o f the market and o f wage labour and the subsequent decline o f paternalism in its eighteenth-century form. The social relations o f industrial capitalism were not easily con tained within a pre-industrial mode o f thought. Not surpris ingly, however, the traditions o f classical liberal theory re mained very important in the struggle to establish new values and beliefs. The work o f Hobbes and Locke, resting squarely as it did on the notion o f theoretical individualism, at least in the public sphere, had marked the initial course. They were both concerned to critique and undermine the case made by Filmer for the divine right o f kings - which rested on a notion o f patriarchal power as natural and given by God. The line of command for Filmer passed from God to the king and then to the father in the household. He insisted on an analogy between kingly civil authority and husbandly familial power. There was no split between the public and the private - the family was politicised and the state familiarised. Hobbes and Locke both rejected familial authority as the paradigm for political authority and rejected divine sanction in favour o f rationality. Locke saw the development o f rationality as going together
with a split between public and private. Reason was for him separate from passion. Reason existed in the public world, where individuals were free and equal and made contracts. Passion or desire survived in the private world, a world in which contracts and rationality had no place. In arguing against Filmer’s case for patriarchy Locke had presented women almost as men’s equals for he claimed that both male and female parents had power over children. He claimed that the fifth commandment called for the child to honour his father and his mother and that the father should do nothing to discourage respect for the mother. But although he used parental equality to combat absolutism in the political realm he concluded elsewhere that there was a natural foundation to the customary and legal subjection o f wives to their husbands. He assumed that fathers would represent the interests o f their families in the wider society. For both Hobbes and Locke the fundamental subject matter o f political philosophy was not the adult human individual but the male-headed family.
