The century following the English Civil War was a remarkable moment in political thought. Longstanding beliefs in the divine right of kings and the authority of the established church were challenged. Classical theories of liberty, commonwealth, and citizenship were resurrected and reformulated. Experiments with an ideology of individual rights, commerce, and limited government were initiated. English intellectuals sensed that they were leaving traditional patriarchal politics behind, saving the best of the past and pioneering new insights for the future. Still, they were not optimists. They deeply feared that enlightened thought raced ahead of people’s ability to know it and live...

There was cause for optimism in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Discontent, protest, civil war, and revolution dealt fatal blows to traditional patriarchal authority. Priests could no longer impose morals; princes could not sustain absolutism. A rigid system organized by coercion could conceivably become an open society based on consent. Men would reclaim ancient liberties and proclaim natural rights, produce wealth and procure prosperity, practice civic virtue and govern themselves according to the dictates of reason. Rebellion against religious and political fathers invited some talk of fraternal democracy. But intellectuals had reason for apprehension. The mob’s murmurings, merchant greed,...

Whigs thought modern men had grown “effeminate.” One symptom was aversion to patriarchal family responsibility. Many men avoided marriage or indefinitely delayed it to indulge in licentious, bachelor lifestyles. Others married for money, neglected wives and children, and squandered family wealth. Still other men spoiled their wives and lovers with luxuries or played the part of petty tyrants and adulterers who fostered female rebelliousness. Their behavior threatened to undo patriarchal family life, unleash women’s treachery, and unhinge social and political stability. The Whig remedy was to lure men back to patriarchal manhood, and the bait was biology and bliss. Intellectuals...

The Spartan story of patriotic parents who gladly gave their sons’ lives for their country has long endured in the Western imagination. The tale honored fathers who sacrificed themselves and their sons to public good and praised mothers who bred courageous warriors and incited them to heroism. It applauded youth who sought their manhood on the battlefield only to die for the state and ennobled veterans who survived trial by military ordeal to attain full citizenship. The moral of the story was that out of the crucible of war came a new generation of males to participate in and perpetuate...

John Locke gave greater prommence to men’s individual rights and materialism than classical thinkers or contemporaries. He was also more adventuresome in exploring men’s freedom and equality, political participation, and popular sovereignty. Thus, he anticipated Louis Hartz’s early American consensus. At the same time, Locke doubted men’s rationality, distrusted women’s passions, feared youthful excesses, and suffered the disenchantment that Gordon Wood identified as the motivation behind the U.S. Constitution. Locke was a harbinger of hope and fear.

His hope was founded on a belief that men had a natural desire for fatherhood that restrained their passions and prompted their civic...

John Locke was Restoration England’s staunchest defender of individualism. He endowed men with natural rights to life, liberty, and property. He asserted that men’s rights preceded and superseded political authority. He made the defense of men’s rights the foremost task of government. Further, Locke associated men’s rights with democratic equality. He insisted that nearly all males were entitled to natural and political rights. Excepting a few lunatics and beastly souls, Locke argued that day laborers, artisans, farmers, merchants, and gentry had equal claims to rights and that young men automatically acquired rights on attaining adulthood. Remarkably, Locke’s devotion to men’s...

John Locke generally used republican rhetoric in his education tracts and liberal language in his political works. His writings on paternal education touted the private virtues associated with fatherhood, filial gratitude, and masculinity. He also advised fathers to school their sons in civic virtue. “I think it every man’s indispensible duty,” Locke wrote, “to do all the service he can to his country.” He added that a gentleman ought to study the “virtues and vices of civil society and the arts of government” in preparation for “service to his country.”² However, Locke’s political treatises honored religious toleration, individual rights, consent,...

Did John Locke pioneer liberal feminism and pacifism? Melissa Butler argues that Locke’s support for greater marital give-and-take prefigured women’s civil and political equality. Samuel Huntington thinks that Lockean liberalism validated individual rights, rationality, and peaceful conflict resolution to elevate diplomacy above war and produce in young men the expectation that they had a right to mature to adulthood without bearing arms for the state.² The historical drift of Locke’s political theory, then, was toward the inclusion of women and young men as free and equal citizens who shared the same rights and responsibilities as all men.

Let me provide...

The rhetoric of liberal individualism in America beckoned the company of republican civic virtue to restrain men’s selfishness, women’s treachery, and young men’s passions. Each generation hosted critics who worried that men’s excessive individualism and materialism threatened to destroy family life, the bonds of society, public order, and national security. Each generation recalled images of Lockean fatherhood, political patriarchy, civic fraternity, companionate marriage, and the youthful struggle for manhood to redeem men’s civic virtue and reduce women’s vices. Middle America’s Lockean consensus was that individualism wed to individual self-sacrifice for family, community, and nation promoted peace and prosperity.

Americans adopted...

A combination of republicanism and liberalism marked the culture and politics of early America. Colonial fathers demonstrated civic virtue by taking up arms against tyranny but also deserted their families to prosecute the Revolution. The Sons of Liberty staged a successful filial rebellion to secure individual and political rights, but the Founding Fathers reestablished political authority to check individuals’ tendency to abuse their rights. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution established formal limits on governmental authority, but citizens’ informal deference to leading families and national leaders ensured a powerful state. For the next two centuries, American men both resisted political...

Support for liberal patriarchy as a constraint on individual excess was accompanied by doubts of its sufficiency. Men’s absence from their homes made fatherhood a part-time employment and an economic specialty. The locus of masculinity shifted to the marketplace where, many feared, the forces of individualism, materialism, and competition invited the male self-indulgence and conflicts that threatened civility. Meanwhile, ongoing fears of political tyranny continued to compromise the bond between citizens and the state. Many Americans heeded Walt Whitman’s dictum to resist much and obey little, provoking middle-class and elite apprehensions that most men were ungovernable. The defenders of social...

Men’s migration from household to workplace created a domestic vacuum that women quickly filled. Traditional dread of the female persisted, and women were still disciplined by patriarchy, but men’s misogynist distrust eased to accommodate a liberal marriage contract that recognized women’s new functions as household manager and primary parent. The ideal of middle-class womanhood became the pious, affectionate wife and nurturing mother whose virtues included making sacrifices for her family and providing a peaceful haven for her men. A Victorian cult of domesticity proclaimed that women perpetuated “private” virtue in the nation’s increasingly corrupt commercial society.

If American men imagined...

Republican mothers were not complete citizens. They lacked formal political rights and were declared deficient in the manly strength, courage, and daring thought necessary to defend the nation in peace and war. Even after women won property and voting rights, they still lacked the informal authority to speak on major affairs of state. Nor were liberal fathers necessarily complete citizens. They might master passion, practice sobriety, consent, vote, and obey law, but equally important, they had to demonstrate a willingness to leave their families, suspend their rights, submit to military discipline, and risk their lives in wartime. Could American individualism...