In the family, it is clear, for several reasons which lie in its very nature, that the father ought to command. In the first place, the authority ought not to be equally divided between father and mother; the government must be single, and in every division of opinion there must be one preponderant voice to decide. Secondly, however lightly we may regard the disadvantages peculiar to women, yet, as they necessarily occasion intervals of inaction, this is a sufficient reason for excluding them from this supreme authority: for when the balance is perfectly even, a straw is enough to turn the scale. Besides, the husband ought to be able to superintend his wife's conduct, because it is of importance for him to be assured that the children, whom he is obliged to acknowledge and maintain, belong to no one but himself. Thirdly, children should be obedient to their father, at first of necessity, and afterwards from gratitude: after having had their wants satisfied by him during one half of their lives, they ought to consecrate the other half to providing for his. Fourthly, servants owe him their services in exchange for the provision he makes for them, though they may break off the bargain as soon as it ceases to suit them. I say nothing here of slavery, because it is contrary to nature, and cannot be authorised by any right or law.Now, to a certain extent one shouldn't judge Rousseau too harshly for this passage. It was probably no worse, and perhaps even a bit more enlightened, than the conventional wisdom of the day. He at least makes a nod toward the general equality of the sexes, for example. Moreover, this is found in a tract on political economy, not economy in the original sense, pertaining to a single household. The point of discussing the natural patriarchy of a family in this passage is to go on, in the next one, to contrast a political society with a family, and argue that a political ruler does not hold his command by natural right as the father does. The claims he makes in this paragraph are probably best understood as allusions by Rousseau to the conventional wisdom about Topic X for the purpose of making a point about Topic Y. Those mitigating factors aside, however, my god how piggish the ideas in that paragraph are.
There are five claims in this paragraph, four of them denoted with an ordinal numbering and the other addended to claim number two and denoted with "besides." I'll address each of them in turn. They're all wrong. (The final claim, that slavery is contrary to nature and cannot be authorized by any right or law, is so obviously right I won't bother to address it, though since not everyone agreed at the time he does get some points for not just saying this, but saying it in a way that makes clear he thinks it's just as obvious as I do.)
So, the first claim: that there must be one supreme authority in a family. This is wrong. I think Rousseau is invoking a general principle that all government must be single, and that in all cases of disagreement within a government there must be one person with the power to make the decision. The latter is more or less true, if one plays it out with sufficient subtlety, since every decision must be made and in the case where people don't all agree about which decision ought be made, there must be some rule whereby one opinion prevails and others lose out. But it does not imply the former: there is no reason why the same person gets to decide every difference of opinion. This is one way to state the germ of the notion of separation of powers. In the American political system, is there one supreme authority? Nope. (Unless you count the Constitution, but that's kind of a different thing.) Different people in the government have different powers, and get to make different decisions. With regard to a system of a small number of individual persons living together, I would conjecture that the simplest way to arrange things such that the ultimate decision-making authority on various different questions is not always the same person is to have each person, in general, possess that authority on questions concerning their own behavior. In a context where all of the persons in the system genuinely care for one another, it should be practicable to work out the difficulties in starting from that basic premise, often by resort to persuasive authority rather than outright authority. Long story short, Rousseau is wrong.
Rousseau's second claim is in a very literal sense dependent on his first one. If we do not need to choose precisely one of the mother and the father to have absolute authority, his "when two things are evenly balanced, a straw will turn the scale" maneuver becomes simply irrelevant. That could just be the end of this section, but I'll go on. If we accepted that one person from within the family must be chosen to wield authority at all times, then it might be true that pregnancy would rule out the mother (although I'm still somewhat skeptical, particularly if we leave the context where women are basically getting pregnant all the time and enter the more modern framework where couples have one or two or three children at particular points in their lives and at their own choosing). In the division-of-powers system I described above, however, it's not even clear that the logic of pregnancy, one of the few inevitable differences between men and women, acts to the detriment of the woman. During the period of pregnancy, for instance, it would seem to me that, as the woman's needs increase in almost precise proportion to the decline in her ease of satisfying them herself, it would make sense for the husband to increasingly act as his wife's chauffeur, in which context, obviously, her ability to boss him around should increase. (Note that this rests largely on the assumption, hopefully true, that the husband cares about his wife's well-being and will want to help her through the difficulties of pregnancy.) And during the times when the wife isn't pregnant, well then, who cares about pregnancy one way or the other? I would tend to think that in that case we'd just be back into the neutral condition where everyone has authority over themselves as the default, although I suppose one could even suggest that the man should generally defer to the woman as a kind of generalized compensation for the sex-specific ordeal of pregnancy. But we're a long way from any sort of world in which Rousseau is right at this point.
The addendum to the second claim is perhaps the most hilarious of the bunch. It's basically the original double standard: because we always know who the mother of a child is, men can sleep around an unlimited amount without imperiling the legitimacy of the children to whom his wife gives birth, but the wife absolutely mustn't have an affair, as to do so would obviously be to throw the paternity of any child into utter doubt. Now, the positive claim about affairs and the "legitimacy" of children is certainly true. The bigger question, though, is (as it so often is), so what? That a wife should not, as a general rule, have an affair (unless she's honest about it with her husband and he's okay with it) seems a pretty sound statement. Marriage, after all, like relationships in general but perhaps to a greater degree, involves a commitment, among other things to exclusivity. This is a promise and it should not be broken (though the other party can release the promiser from their obligation). That's not to say that it's a promise which everyone must make, or that relationships without such a promise are sinful or improper or whatever, but if such a promise has been made, it should be kept. Of course, that logic applies every last little bit as much to the man as to the woman. Oops, there went our double standard. And as for the whole paternity thing, I'm very much of an eccentric on this score but, why do we care so much? People vastly overstate the importance of DNA. To a first approximation, personality is not in a person's DNA. When a modern paternity test "reveals" that someone is not actually the son or daughter of the person they thought was their father, it is essentially lying. Or, the test isn't lying, but in our society we tend to interpret it as saying more than it is. Souls are made of stories, in the words of the Doctor, and the experience of living with and being raised by a person matters much, much more than precisely from whom you got your deoxyribonucleic acid base pair sequences. Adoptive parents will often, and rightly, insist that their adopted children are truly their children; by precisely the same logic, a couple's bastard child raised by that couple as if their own is their own. Bastardy and illegitimacy is a social convention, and it's one we could just decide to stop caring about if we wanted to. So, Rousseau: wrong, and batting 0-3.
Claim #3 is somewhat less wholeheartedly wrong. It really is true that, particularly when of a truly young age, there will be some extent to which children simply must obey their parents. To my mind this will consist mainly of times when the child wants to do something that simply is dangerous, and the kind of dangerous that you can't in good conscience let someone learn about the hard way. Parents care about their children and they know a lot more about which parts of the universe are dangerous; they are justified in protecting their children even when they are, in a sense, protecting them against their will.* (I do imagine, however, that Rousseau probably thought that the necessary obedience goes considerably beyond that minimum, whereas I tend to think that in most/all other cases parents should exercise only persuasive authority.) The second part of this sentence, though, is the wrong part, and also the interesting part. Once the necessity of obedience has receded, he says, children should still obey their parents out of gratitude. He then seems to restate this as saying that they should, as repayment for having had their wants satisfied during their youth, "consecrate" their adulthood to satisfying the wants of their parents, to whom they are in a kind of moral debt. But this seems to me to conflate two different things: to obey someone and to care to their needs. The way I'd describe the process Rousseau mentions here is that, hopefully, over the course of their youth children will grow exceedingly fond of their parents. This is not a given, nor is it a right of the parents if they do not treat their children in a manner deserving of their fondness. Then, as the children reach adulthood and their parents reach their old age, the balance of payments, in a sense, between the two will shift, simply because you take care of someone you care about if you can and if they need you to. At first this logic applies to the parents caring for the children; the economics of the situation cause it to invert later in life, so long as the parents have genuinely maintained a close, caring relationship with their children.
The fourth claim, and the final one I care to discuss, is perhaps not so much wrong as outdated. Few people these days have proper servants in the way that families used to. Servanthood, like most things, has become commoditized; a family might employ someone to clean their house periodically, or to take care of their young children while they're out working, or what-have-you. These are not really servants, however, but people from whom certain services are being purchased. Obviously the services, for which money is being given, must be performed according to the specifications of the customer (though in the child-care case, there are obviously certain things which no babysitter ought to do, because no person ought to do them, and which they should tell the authorities about if someone tries to contract them to do those things). Just as obviously, the purchase of services confers upon the purchaser no broader authority over their employee's life. But I would even express some doubt that a statement as thorough as the one Rousseau makes here should hold for a true live-in, dependent servant. The argument here is essentially Lockean in form: there is a limit to how much, in a free society, of the servant's liberty their service contract can alienate to their master. I don't doubt that the family which is providing for the servant's living, their room and board and salary, has considerable authority to set the terms of the servant's behavior while around the family. I do doubt that this extends to, say, authority over whom the servant dates. (The question of whether they should be allowed to bring their dates home and have sex with them in the house is a potentially stickier one, which I shan't address because, well, I don't honestly care that much about the details of the political theory of the live-in servant arrangement right now.) But again, Rousseau's claim of unitary natural authority within the family is exaggerated at best.
So, he's 0-5. Well, 1-6 if we score him on the final statement, about slavery. And I'd judge the first three to have been strikeouts. This paragraph just reeks of unthinking patriarchism, sexism, chauvinism, etc. The fact that it's just routine now to think that people you encounter in public, even ones who hold relatively regressive views on social issues, don't hold views like these ones, that a great and by-and-large progressive philosopher such as Rousseau blithely asserted, is a sign of truly amazing progress. That people used to hold these views makes it much harder to take old political theory seriously.
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