Theory & Event

Most human adults become parents. Brian Duff’s book asks this important question: what does it mean for people as citizens in contemporary democracies that they are also parents? In framing the question this way, Duff makes what might seem somewhat familiar territory—the relationship of the family to citizenship—into a landscape marked by complexity and ambiguity. His strength as a political theorist is to take his readers through this land without coming to any definite prescriptions, but to make us aware of the political, social, and psychological difficulties that are entailed in his final assertion that “For the purpose of politics … the experience of having children and the lessons one takes from it … should be recognized as first and foremost political…” (225).

Duff begins by noting the importance of children in contemporary political rhetoric: whether we listen to George W. Bush or Barack Obama, the experience of being a parent is taken to be key. But Duff notes that what is significant, politically, about being a parent is the need, not to imitate others in their styles of being parents, but to be imitated (6). Yet, he observes, “to be worthy of imitation has dire consequences,” among them is a “persistent anxiety that in seeking to make oneself worthy of imitation, a citizen becomes a mere imitator in his or her own right—struggling to pass on values that we did not author and have never truly made our own” (9). In turning, then, to political theorists, Duff notes they are ambiguous about how to face these consequences. Exploring the thought of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Richard Rorty and Cornel West, he notes that they all “recoil from the prospect of relying on the experiences of parenthood to offer their account of proper citizenship. Yet none of them could resist it” (9). Duff has thus set the stage to write an engaging work in political theory: since the authors are all deeply ambivalent in their own answers to his question, his complex and wide-ranging engagement with each of these authors provides rich and open-textured, rather than narrowing or singularly definitive, readings of their works. The readings are engaging and excellent; one learns much about these authors by reading them through Duff’s exposition.

Duff’s reading of Rousseau, engaging with numerous scholars who have already tread these paths, is innovative and powerful. Rousseau actually had a great deal to say about parents, from his own father and mother to the Spartan Mother and tutor in Emile to the characters in his novels to the claims about slavery in The Social Contract. (Duff provocatively begins his chapter: “The first thing Jean-Jacques Rousseau ever did was kill his mother” 29.) He has sorted through the entire corpus of Rousseau’s writings to consider the ways in which parents are described. He concludes that Rousseau wanted to shape passions in order to transform them into republican virtues captured and reproduced in the household.

In Duff’s view, Rousseau’s difficulty in offering a modern account of the self forced him to confront this unprecedented issue: “Rousseau replaces the old patriarchy with a new paternity” (16). As Duff spells out the difficulties of this new paternity, he explains why Rousseau himself did not think he could meet these standards, thus offering a fairly sympathetic account of why Rousseau left his own infants at the orphanage (53–55). Duff notes that, despite the widespread appeal of Emile and his other works, “Rousseau would write books and create characters that inspired thousands to re-create themselves—yet he suspected that his own way of living would not inspire one child to imitate him” (55). For a writer concerned with virtue, as Duff argues Rousseau was, how convincing can the project of self-creation be if one’s own child would not want to imitate it? Duff thus offers a reading of Rousseau that makes it clear how the...