Title: "Mother Lords and the Power of Preserving Life in Hobbes’s Leviathan"
Meghan Robison
Abstract:
“Every woman that bears children,” says Thomas Hobbes, “becomes both a mother and a lord.” This, however, is a potentially misleading way of making the point. For, in Hobbes’ view, the authority of the mother is not grounded in her natural capacity to generate a living human being within her, but her practical commitment to preserve and sustain that life. A mother’s dominion over a child, he argues, is born out of her original capacity to let him live or make him die. However, her dominion begins the moment she responds to the newborn infant’s cry, not by leaving him to die, or handing him off to someone else, but by taking him to her breast to feed. By nourishing him, moreover, she binds herself to the newborn infant, thereby, making of herself “mother and lord.” A child’s subsequent obligation to obey his mother is due to her decision to care for him when she might otherwise have killed him: “every man is supposed to promise obedience to him in whose power it is to save or destroy him,” says Hobbes.
I open my paper by giving a reading of Hobbes’ account of maternal dominion, focusing on the relationship between obligation and the preservation of life configured therein. Then, I go on to consider on the ways in which this account sheds light on important aspects of the transition from the State of Nature to the making of a Commonwealth. More specifically, I reflect on the similarities and differences between the mother’s commitment to nourish (rather than expose) the newborn infant and her decision to make a pact with a potentially murderous other (rather than fight to the death), along with the obligation each respectively entails.
In closing, I make some promissory remarks about the form of rationality Hobbes sees as involved in the respective decision to preserve human life. I conclude with the proposal that both entail a sense of wellbeing that goes far beyond pure self-interest—one which is discovered not through a mental act of logical deduction, but a physical encounter with another human being.