ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to clarify methods that radical philosophers can use to criticize conventional uses of the family without being antifamily. Some conventional philosophers have drawn on common intuitions about the goodness of the family in general and used that approval to add weight to an argument for a form of government that depends on and gives rise to a specific form of the family. Plato's endorsement of community property in order to preserve a primary loyalty to the state within the guardian class has two radical consequences. First, knowledge of which ones parents and children are becomes a state secret, and second, ruling-class women are freed from private domestic duties to the extent that their talents and energies can be mobilized in athletics, statecraft, and war. Locke also universalized a restricted form of the family. Locke projected the model of a married couple, united for the sake of procreation, onto a pre-governmental state of nature.
