All Happy Families Are Illiberal

April 3, 2025

By Rita Koganzon

The poor bourgeois family. Can it ever get a break? The left stands ever-ready to dismember it, and while the right tries so hard to fortify it that it romanticizes it beyond recognition. Deirdre McCloskey wishes, I think, to do the family a favor in her essay calling for social science and public policy to re-orient itself away from utility-maximizing individuals and instead around “little liberal groups” like families to defend liberalism from the encroachment of the leviathan state that rises when we reduce and atomize people as economists like to do. It is a well-intentioned proposition, but in the end, partisans of both the family and liberalism might wish to keep their distance from it. The bourgeois family is a valuable institution and one worth saving, but not on the ambiguous and contradictory terms McCloskey holds out.

The Illiberal Family

We should begin with the sober truth that the family, because it comprises adults and children, is a fundamentally illiberal organization. It is not a “little liberal group” like the groups of friends with which McCloskey equates it. What makes an interpersonal relationship “liberal” in McCloskey’s telling is an “equality of permission, which is an equality of respect, and even of pizza.” This may accurately characterize friendship, but equality of permission is just about the last thing you’ll find in a family. Parents do not rule children as equals, but as subjects, and asking for permission and being told no – no to the checkout aisle candy bar, no to the cell phone, the TikTok account, the things that so-and-so’s indulgent parents allowed her to do – is a defining experience of childhood. Except in the most extreme cases, there is no appeal beyond the family against the denial of permission, the rule of no.

Family even in a liberal regime is structured by hierarchy, and that hierarchy is not elective, as McCloskey oddly suggests. Parents are not at all like “quarterbacks chosen for the time being” who merely dispense occasional “wise suggestions”; they are imposed on us at birth and the law gives them near-absolute authority over us during our minority. They choose where we live, where we go to school, whom we associate with, what we eat, read, wear, watch. If we attempted to make such choices for our friends, we would very soon cease to have any.

Parents are authoritarians in the strict sense of the term, but they need not be harsh. After all, they often say yes instead of no. McCloskey insists on the “loving” character of the family as part of what makes life in it preferable to rule by the state, and love is indeed a defining and distinguishing characteristic. Coworkers and citizens may respect one another, but they rarely love each other. But she hardly entertains the possibility that the love of parents for their children will necessitate forms of discipline that are not always desired or appreciated by those children. Such love manifests itself as “tough love,” restraint, and doing what is in children’s long-term best interest, even and especially when it diverges from their short-term preferences. When I deny my children their wish to eat candy for every meal or to look at social media for hours on end, I am doing it out of love and concern for their good, but unsurprisingly, they don’t always see it that way!

Could the Family be Liberal?

The family in its current incarnation may be an illiberal organization, but perhaps that is only by mistake and not political necessity. McCloskey implies as much when she rejects the “patriarchal” family and insists instead that the liberal family is one that “engages in continuous conversation” and arrive at decisions dialogically. In fact, to hope that the family can be “liberal” in the same way as the state – that is, that its members can be as free and equal in the household as citizens are in the public realm – is a frequent misunderstanding. I have elsewhere called this misunderstanding “the logic of congruence,” which arises when we assume that the form of the regime – whether it be a liberal democracy or an absolute monarchy – should dictate the form of all the mediating institutions within it (the family, school, church, fraternal organization, workplace, etc) so that all these organizations teach and reinforce the civic values of the regime. Just as to be a good absolutist subject, one must begin by obeying one’s father absolutely, so to be a good democratic citizen, we must practice living as equals with our parents and siblings. When theorists and policymakers call for democratic schools or democratic workplaces, they are operating according to the logic of congruence.

There is an intuitive appeal to the logic of congruence. Democracies value equality and object to hierarchy, so why not have equality all the way down? How better to teach the habits and orientations of democratic citizenship than by having children practice them from the youngest possible age? It’s a straightforward and tempting paradigm, but it is completely wrong. The error is clear in the contradiction right below the surface of this sort of “democratic” education. We, the adults, decide on the education children are to have, so the freedom and equality we bestow on them is always a pretense. Through it all, we remain in charge and stand ready to revoke it when we determine that it’s being misused. Why?

The Liberal Virtue of Self-Control

Because we do not believe children are reasonable. “Children, I confess, are not born in this full state of equality, though they are born to it,” says John Locke, whom McCloskey mistakes for a theorist of selfish individualism when he is in fact the greatest theorist of the liberal family. The whole purpose of childhood (and, by extension, of the family) is to educate children to reason, and more precisely, to educate their reason to control their desires and guide their wills. The family exists to teach my children first why eating candy for dinner is bad for them, and then – and this is a crucial step often overlooked – to be able to resist such desires themselves, so that ultimately, even in my absence, they will voluntarily select sufficiently nutritious food to stay healthy. We call this outcome “self-control,” and it is the signal virtue of liberalism. But until children’s wills are mature enough to discipline their desires this way, “he that understands for him, must will for him too.” 

Unless we abolish the age of majority, the distinction between children and adults, children can never be the equals of adults. Every “democratic school” or “liberal family” is a mere simulacrum, a puppet show with adults backstage manipulating their subjects into believing they are in charge while the entire performance is contingent on their permission. Moreover, it is a politically dangerous simulacrum, since in it, adults abdicate the task of saying no and correcting children’s wayward desires. In doing so, they risk failing to instill self-control. This spells trouble not only for individuals, but for the whole regime, since what makes limited government possible is the capacity of citizens to govern themselves and consequently to live together without constant correction and repression by the state.

It is a great irony that a “liberal” family in McCloskey’s sense – that is, a permissive one that treats all members equally without regard for their capacity to exercise their liberty reasonably – is best-suited to an illiberal regime. In an authoritarian or absolutist state, it is not necessary for families to discipline children or for them to grow up with any significant amount of self-control, because the state can more reliably impose order from above, through fear and repression. As Montesquieu pointed out, unlike republics and monarchies, which depend on specific civic educations to form citizens, education in despotic states, “is reduced to putting fear in the heart and teaching a few very simple religious principles.” Such fear alone is sufficient to keep subjects in line. But a liberal regime depends on an extensive formation that is only possible in an illiberal family. The logic of congruence is wrong because liberalism owes its survival to incongruence.

Embracing the Incongruence of the Illiberal Family

Admitting all this, would our social science and public policy be improved if it started from the family – in its full, illiberal reality – rather than the atomized, utility-maximizing individual? McCloskey is certainly correct to note that the reduction of society to atomized individuals is the road to despotism. But we embarked on this road long before Paul Samuelson theorized individuals as the basic unit of economic consideration. Thomas Hobbes had already imagined men in the state of nature “as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other,” an origin which inexorably leads them to submit themselves to an absolute sovereign as the only reliable protection against the existential threats they pose to one another. Hobbes likened the mediating institutions like towns, associations, and colleges that buttress men against the absolute state to “worms in the entrails of a natural man,” exhorting the sovereign to suppress them. But this grim Hobbesian “covenant” was the origin of the softer Lockean social contract and the sociable Scottish vision of bourgeois virtue. The isolated individual helpless before an all-powerful centralized state will not grow out of some foreign graft like communism; it is already in the DNA of liberalism.

The necessity then is not to circumvent the individual in our social-scientific considerations, but to support the formation and vitality of the mediating institutions – including, centrally, the family – in our politics and practice, to protect liberalism against an unbalanced, dependent individualism. But we can only do this if we permit these institutions to remain internally illiberal if their functions necessitate it. Egalitarianism may prevail in the book club and the club soccer team, but it would destroy other institutions, like the family and the church. McCloskey complacently suggests that “we do not need to go back to the authoritarian, hierarchical family,” but as long as there are children to be educated, there is no going back or forward; there is only coming to terms with authority and hierarchy. Wishing it away through misguided progressive dreams like democratic education or gentle parenting does little more than perpetuate illusions. To protect liberalism, we have to accept and even embrace incongruence.

Rita Koganzon is an associate professor in the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina, where I teach political theory and American politics. She is the author, most recently