The value of the strategy is clear: most people view families as both necessary and natural. Even in our current age of widespread divorce and single parents, the idea of “family” (variously defined) remains enduringly popular. Thus, for a politician looking to increase the perceived legitimacy of the state, it only makes sense to attempt to show that the family is analogous to the state—that the state is a type of family writ large.
This comparison may seem, to some, as plausible on the surface. But any serious look at the methods used to govern families reveal that the two institutions are thoroughly dissimilar.
Because the family has long been regarded as both natural and popular, however, state builders have been unable to resist trying to use the family to build their political and ideological agendas.
This goes back to some of earliest theorists of the sovereign state and absolutism, such as Jean Bodin who described the family as the “true image of a Commonweal.” The absolutist king James I of England declared in 1609 that “Kings are compared to fathers in families: for a king is truly parens patriae, the politic father of his people.”
Thomas Hobbes, who differed with Bodin on the state’s ideal form, nonetheless employed a similar strategy of invoking the ancient and fundamental character of the family as a model of authoritarian state power. According to Hobbes: “the beginning of all dominion amongst men was in families. In which, first, the father of the family by the law of nature was absolute lord of his wife and children.” […]
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