Family Feuds

Compares the role of the family in the political thought of Rousseau, Burke, and Wollstonecraft.

Family Feuds is the first sustained comparative study of the place of the family in the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Eileen Hunt Botting argues that Wollstonecraft recognized both Rousseau’s and Burke’s influential stature in late eighteenth-century debates about the family. Wollstonecraft critically identified them as philosophical and political partners in the defense of the patriarchal structure of the family, yet she used Rousseau’s conceptions of childhood education and maternal empowerment and Burke’s understanding of the family as the affective basis for political socialization as a theoretical foundation for her own egalitarian vision of the family. It is this ideal of the egalitarian family, Botting contends, that is one of the most important yet least appreciated legacies of Enlightenment political thought.

“...valuable for anyone who is interested in eighteenth-century political thought regarding the transformation of the family.” — Journal for the Study of Marriage & Spirituality

“Commendable are the range of writings engaged, lack of discrimination between non-fictional and fictional works, and welcome restraint in not discrediting any of their views on family…” — American Historical Review

“This book reminds us of the importance of theorizing the family/state relationship. Botting makes an invaluable contribution to a rethinking of the genesis of the Western commitment to gender equality in the family.” — Perspectives on Politics

“Family Feuds is an impressively innovative study of the family and of imaginative models of family life in late eighteenth-century political writings. In particular, it successfully transforms the stature of Mary Wollstonecraft as a leading theorist on the family, as well as on women’s rights, and establishes the continuity and continuing relevance of her thought. This is a timely and original book; in its ambitious scope, freshness, and readability unlike any other. It is bound to change simplistic perceptions of Wollstonecraft.” — Lyndall Gordon, author of Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft

“Among this book's substantial merits are its systematic treatment of the family as a site and source of political attitudes, values, and feelings in each of the three theorists’ work. The richness of the book and the obvious analytic strengths of the author suggest that Family Feuds will be a significant and accessible study.” — Elizabeth Rose Wingrove, author of Rousseau’s Republican Romance

“Family Feuds demonstrates the central role of the family in Enlightenment political thought. It is a beautifully written book.” — Wendy Gunther-Canada, author of Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics

Eileen Hunt Botting is Thomas J. and Robert T. Rolfs Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.