An Intellectual History of Cannibalism by Avramescu Catalin; Blyth Alistair Ian;

Author:Avramescu, Catalin; Blyth, Alistair Ian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Anthropophagus in the City

ABERRANT FAMILIES

RATHER THAN SOLITARY INDIVIDUALS, a traveler through the state of nature described by the philosophers would have encountered primitive families, dominated, each, by a despotic father. Although the natural condition is one in which humans live unassociated in any state, it is not, for a majority of classical and modern authors, a solitary condition. As Lord Bolingbroke stated, there was never a time when individuals led isolated lives, because “we are born to assist, and be assisted by one another.”1 Even Hobbes, often considered to be the most extreme supporter of individualism in the state of nature, admitted, in his polemic with Bishop Bramhall: “It is very likely to be true, that since the Creation there very likely never was a time when Mankind was totally without Society.”2 Thus those persons who are marginal in relation to the political order because they are incapable of an independent existence—women, children, and slaves—become fellows with the man of nature. The latter is seen simultaneously as parent and master, and his power is regarded as natural, because it is anterior to any form of political association properly speaking.

The second direction whence the family penetrates into classical theories is from the analysis of the nature of the body politic. Aristotle's definition, according to which the polis is an association of families, is the best known among those hypotheses that make the family a cell of the social body.3 In Utopia, Thomas More argues that a commonwealth “is as it were one family or household.”4 In the Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire says that “a country is a composite of numerous families.”5 Both conceptions, that of the natural family and of the civilized family as a constitutive element of the republic, are ultimately similar. In both cases we are dealing with a similar move, whereby analysis breaks down the state into its raw materials: uncivilized individuals and their dependents, in the case of the state of nature, and the heads of free but associated families, in the case of the civil order.

Without necessarily being a political entity, the family is a touchstone for some of the major categories of the science of the state. Whether it is a matter of the natural or the civil family, the authority of the father is the object of special attention. The principal problem that demands clarification is that of the relations between this power and political power. If the polis should be understood, in terms of its origins or nature, as an association of families, then it means that the power of the father somehow enters into the composition of political power, at least as a stage that demands to be left behind. On the other hand, the state seems to furnish a convenient model for the analysis of the family, which some authors such as Filmer see as a kind of primitive monarchy.6 Patriarchal power and regal power: these are the two terms that political philosophy's discourse on the family is called on to elucidate.

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