With conservatives feeling besieged by acceptance of same-sex marriage, gender fluidity, and multiplying pronouns, a key practical question for them is how to restore the patriarchal family to its rightful, protective place between the market and the state. A spate of recent books, including two by US senators, all reach the same frightening answer.
NEW YORK – Long ago, before writing based on alphabets, knowledge was stored and conveyed across generations acoustically, by word of mouth arranged in rhythmic patterns that could be memorized and then recited whenever collective instruction called for it. All knowledge was formulaic and compulsively repetitive, because innovation – originality, or creative departure from received tradition – meant the erasure of previous truth. Novel facts signaled unwelcome danger or deviation, not exciting new possibilities.
To absorb the contemporary deluge of books and essays on the plight of men, manhood, manliness, and masculinity – or to invoke our ancestors’ acoustic precedent by listening to podcasts on the beleaguered male – is to relive this ancient experience of illiteracy. Contemporary authors on the state of manhood, whether of books, transcripts, or reviews, seem determined to say the same thing over and over, as if mere repetition were a convincing rhetorical strategy – and as if the novel fact of greater equity between males and females signaled deviance, devolution, and decay.
For example, Missouri’s Senator Josh Hawley’s new book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, reads like a very long, very boring speech written for a day filibustering against Medicaid expansion on the floor of the US Senate, and its admonitions echo the ersatz philosopher turned male guru Jordan Peterson’s endlessly repeated and truly inane exhortations about caring for the male psyche in his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
And Peterson’s banal instructions, which he reproduces on cue in public appearances and countless TV interviews, sound like the practical conclusions to be drawn from the Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness, a churched-up reading – an audiobook-ready incantation – of ancient texts (Plato, Aristotle, Tarzan, all the usual suspects). Meanwhile, Costin Alamariu, a.k.a. “Bronze Age Pervert,” reaches even further back to retrieve the pre-literate rudiments of real manhood from the fossilized remains of hominoid existence, and his hilarious self-published manifesto becomes a solemn catechism for ultra-conservatives, who promote it by word of mouth.
What is to be done with this master text, which will never lack for scribes willing to copy it for educational purposes – or, rather, bards willing to sing this epic poem, like post-Mycenaean Homeric performers? Many reviewers have noted that complaints about the impending demise of manhood are at least a century old, dating back to William James’ concerns in “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910), and probably older. This suggests that the demise of manhood has evolved alongside the changing theory and practice of true womanhood, if only because gender, regardless of its supposed origin, presupposes perceived symbiotic differences between male and female.
But the curious thing about the authors of all these texts – reviewers and reviewed alike – is their agreement on the timeless attributes of manhood. That consensus has given the master text on manhood the weight of common sense. There seems to be no way beyond the current intellectual impasse because everyone agrees that manhood is a trans-historical dimension of human nature that, having somehow become decrepit, stands in need of restoration, rehabilitation, or retirement.
Manly Freedom
In pre-industrial households throughout the West, women and their children worked in the home, or on the homestead, whether it was the shop of a skilled “mechanic,” shoemaker, cordwainer, or tailor, or a farmer’s small holding. Some feminist historians have suggested that women’s labor made them the equals of the men – the patriarchs – who headed those households, implying a demotion in social status when the production of industrial goods was moved outside the home and routinized in factories. But, according to the common-law doctrine of femme couverture, which regulated legal decisions about matrimony until the mid-nineteenth century, women became, practically speaking, the property of their husbands upon marriage.
In fact, it was only when the production of industrial goods was removed from the home that women could begin to enter civil society as abstract individuals, that is, as personalities who were not solely the bearers of the familial roles of wife, mother, sister, or daughter. It was only then, in the 1840s and 1850s, that adults could begin to imagine full citizenship for people hitherto confined to the private domain of the home, and, by the same token, to think realistically of the home as an emotional haven in a heartless world governed by the amoral whip of the market. “True Womanhood” was never the same.
Secure your copy of PS Quarterly: The Year Ahead 2025
Our annual flagship magazine, PS Quarterly: The Year Ahead 2025, has arrived. To gain digital access to all of the magazine’s content, and receive your print copy, subscribe to PS Digital Plus now.
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By the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, the “Woman Question” was as pressing an issue as the “Labor Question” – what kind of republic could survive a majority of propertyless proletarians? – because women had important new roles to play in the emerging corporate economy and politics of the Progressive Era. “Reform” became a matter of non-governmental organizations, female labor-force participation increased at its fastest pace until the 1970s, and feminism finally challenged the implicit equation of womanly/female and wifely/maternal identity.
But while womanhood has changed dramatically over the past two centuries, manhood somehow has not. Whatever their opinion on its remaining utility, most authorities (many self-proclaimed) holding forth on the subject agree that manhood has always required and/or signified strength, initiative, assertiveness (or combativeness), responsibility, fortitude, and above all, individualism or independence, because without freedom from external constraint, none of the other attributes are actionable.
This durability is perhaps not surprising. As Sarah Grimké and John Stuart Mill observed in the mid-nineteenth century, man-made laws have always subordinated females to males, prolonging and deepening their provisional dependence as mothers on the protection of their menfolk.
So, freedom as such has long carried a strongly masculine connotation, and vice versa: manhood and dependence are irreconcilable. On that everyone agrees, from Hesiod to Abraham, John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant to America’s Founding Fathers via Aristotle and Machiavelli, unto Hawley, Peterson, Mansfield, and Alamariu. All of them, including Kant, invoke the family, the household, as the bulwark of the independence an individual needs to demonstrate manhood. A real man needs to be a husband and a father, a provider who is responsible to and for his wife and children.
Hawley looks to the Old Testament and Abraham for the masculine virtues we need – primarily those associated with being a leader who is first and foremost a husband and a father. Mansfield reaches almost as far back to find true manliness (though one of his favorite exemplars of it is Margaret Thatcher, often called “the best man in England” during her long premiership), and Alamariu reaches even further. Most others head straight for the eighteenth century, the age of bourgeois revolution and Founding Fathers.
In this sense, being a man and performing manhood or masculinity means being a patriarch, the head of a household. Every invocation of “family values” by a conservative think tank or advocacy group, and every definition of individual freedom under capitalism offered by The Club for Growth, the Manhattan Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, or the Heritage Foundation, presupposes this equivalence. The survival of capitalism is thus predicated on the hoary ideal of a bourgeois society in which households are the site of goods production (both material and moral) and the rules of petty commodity production still prevail.
Lost Boys
This is the unspoken tragedy at the heart of the contemporary defense of manhood: the household, and thus the family, no longer form the social groundwork of market transactions and political standing. It is impossible to expect bourgeois virtues of a population that has been expelled from bourgeois society by industrial capitalism, under which, as Frankfurt School philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer put it, “individuality loses its economic basis.” But that is nonetheless the expectation of manhood’s advocates.
In mid-twentieth-century America, David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Richard Hofstadter drew on Frankfurt School insights to address the post-liberal (populist) politics created in the post-industrial, post-familial age of the “other-directed individual.” Joseph Schumpeter explained the tragedy in similar terms: “capitalist evolution not only upsets social structures which protected the capitalist interests ... but also undermines the attitudes, motivations, and beliefs of the capitalist stratum itself, ... [for example] the loosening of the family tie – a typical feature of the culture of capitalism – removes or weakens what, no doubt, was the center of the motivation of the businessman of old.”
The contemporary defense of manhood, then, can be read as an anti-corporate critique of the hedonistic consumer culture produced by post-industrial society. That is why it resonates on the left as well as the right, and why the reviewers of boilerplate, cliché-addled books like Peterson’s or Hawley’s are sympathetic to the plight of the aimless, hapless, feckless young men their authors cultivate as their chosen constituency. The crisis, after all, is real. Overwhelming statistical evidence attests to it: young men aren’t working, matriculating, marrying, procreating, protecting, or even staying alive at their fathers’ or grandfathers’ rates.
But the reviewers at least ask why. They wonder, as Susan Faludi did a generation ago in Stiffed, and as countless other observers have since, if men’s plight reflects the neoliberal downsizing of Dad in today’s hyper-globalized economy. In any event, they understand that discrediting manhood, fatherhood, and the bourgeois virtues was undertaken by Homer Simpson and Family Guy long before what Hawley calls “Epicurean” liberals or “woke” leftists got around to shuffling genders, multiplying pronouns, and insisting that everyone go to college.
Hawley and the other conservative authors can’t ask why, because to wonder if capitalism has become the most significant impediment to the achievement of manhood would compromise their fidelity to free enterprise and free markets. So, Hawley and his comrades are reduced to worshipping at the shrine of a long-lost bourgeois civilization, where patriarchy still thrives, in that “very Eden of the innate rights of man” where “alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham,” as Marx famously put it. Of course, when not worshipping, they try to reinstate patriarchy by political means. While that sounds like a fool’s errand, it already has powerful sponsors, an itemized agenda and, in the US, a Supreme Court seemingly willing to back it with the force of law.
After Bourgeois Virtue
The social basis of patriarchy is a household economy – the oikos of antiquity, wherein the basic unit of goods production is an extended family that included slaves and servants, and then the small farm or central shop of early modern Europe, where family members and apprentices comprised the work force. This “petty mode of production,” as the economist Maurice Dobb called it, was exported to North America in the seventeenth century, and, in what became the US, it was understood as the necessary foundation of popular, republican government. As such, its establishment or restoration was the goal of social movements from the 1740s (the Great Awakening) to the 1840s and 1850s (anti-slavery), and on into the 1890s (the Knights of Labor, the People’s Party).
For adherents of these movements, self-determination meant self-employment, whereas wage labor signified servility. The idealized self-mastering individual was the male head of household, who almost literally owned his wife and had virtually unlimited control over his children’s fortunes. He was a responsible, protective father because he had to be: the conveyance of his property to the next generation depended on it. And fatherly vigilance meant, above all, that men had to police the sexuality of their wives and children, particularly the females, so that no bastards would appear in court claiming to be rightful heirs. Misogyny, fueled by fear of unbound female sexuality, was baked into the culture of the petty mode of production.
The household economy and its patriarchal implications shaped ancient, Hellenistic, feudal, and modern bourgeois societies. It took a trans-Atlantic industrial revolution, roughly from 1780 to 1890, to empty most households of their economic functions by exporting goods production to factories, and to create a propertyless, proletarian majority that worked for wages.
In the nineteenth century, bourgeois society based on the petty mode of production gave way to capitalism, or what sociologists from Émile Durkheim to Daniel Bell called “industrial society.” At that point, the simple market society described by the political scientist C.B. Macpherson, geared to the inter-generational preservation of familial property and integrity, gave way to a mode of production geared to the unlimited accumulation of wealth. (It’s the difference, in terms of popular television series, between Succession and Billions.)
But bourgeois society, so conceived, was never obliterated by industrial society. It survives, though barely, in the social groundwork of small business and, much more significantly, as an ideological imperative, in the image of the rugged, rights-bearing individual who works for himself and thus answers only to himself.
Because this rights-bearing man is his own boss, his will is free of any encumbrance except adherence to the bourgeois virtues, particularly the compulsion to work and the willingness to defer gratification in order to serve the needs of his wife and children. He is aware of manhood’s price, unafraid of masculinity, and, above all, accepts responsibility for his household’s welfare. He is no Epicurean. He is not stylish or hip. He plays by the rules, lives within his means, and expects you to do the same.
This man, this pale image, this miniature patriarch, permeates conservative speech, whether in sound bites that ridicule “woke” corporations or in legislation that bans books and abortions. When conservatives extol “family” or “family values,” they have in mind male-headed households that are still regulated by the old bourgeois virtues. Only such families can resist the temptations of consumer capitalism, the seductions of the city, and the commands of the state.
Patriarchy from Above
The practical question for conservatives is how to restore the patriarchal family to its rightful, protective place between the market and the state. They can’t very well take us back to a household economy, no matter how anti-corporate they sound. They can’t undo the economic events of the last century, or even the last 20 years, without renouncing the modern, corporate capitalism that they constantly celebrate. But while they have no way of reinstating the social basis of bourgeois society, they can impose its virtues, including male supremacy in the threadbare costume of patriarchy, by political means, as authoritarian regimes elsewhere have done, and as Republican state legislatures are doing in the US.
The first step is to reassert paternal control of female sexuality, by restricting or abolishing access to abortion. In an uncanny twist on Robert Filmer’s argument with John Locke, and Carl Schmitt’s argument against modern liberalism, the state will now stand in for the paterfamilias.
The second step is to reestablish heterosexuality as the binary norm that must govern everyday social life as well as marriage contracts. The gender troubles created by industrial society and then consumer capitalism, which is to say the choices enabled by the passage from bourgeois society to corporate capitalism, are to be adjourned by legislation. Marriage is to be a bond that unites only males and females, for whom sexual pleasure is a means to social ends – reproduction and familial continuity – not an end in itself, and for whom birth control by any method is, therefore, inconceivable.
These are the inevitable results of manhood conceived and executed as the restoration of patriarchy, as Hawley, his conservative contemporaries, and his many predecessors understand it. The fear of Woman, a deep anxiety about the erasure of sexual difference and the eclipse of male supremacy, animates every item on their agenda, from the books they write and the speeches they give to the legislation they sponsor. There is nothing embarrassing about this agenda, as they see it, which is why they are untroubled by their association with Donald Trump’s egregious misogyny, and why they are happy to be reprinted, cited, quoted, and otherwise publicized for displays of childish fright at the spectacle of female sexuality and power.
In this sense, today’s crop of patriarchist authors recalls the well-educated, even erudite individuals who conjured the personality type and social psychology of fascism avant la lettre, in 1920s Germany. These are the novelists, journalists, artists, and activists – among them Ernst Jünger and Joseph Goebbels – analyzed by Klaus Theweleit in the two massive volumes of his Male Fantasies.
The real man they imagined (in formulaic, hackneyed prose and images) was a warrior who had been subjected to the excruciating, humiliating rigors of military training, a kind of fraternity hazing. He was therefore able to withstand the temptations of material or sexual pleasure on offer from a decadent, cosmopolitan, consumer culture – temptations signified by the figure of the Woman in Red, whose energy was felt as a fluid, formless, watery oblivion, a flood to be staunched as if it were a wound by the upright, armored bodies of uniformed upright men.
Girded for Battle
Tom Cotton, like Hawley a US senator with an Ivy League law degree, is, like Hawley, someone who faithfully recapitulates this itinerary. His recent book Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Poweris the story of a progressive conspiracy, masterminded by Democrats since Woodrow Wilson, to emasculate America (even Harry Truman, the original cold warrior, stands accused of this gender treason). The gravamen of Cotton’s case is captured in the title of Chapter 4: “Neutering the Military.” The culture war in the all-volunteer military is, by this account, politics by other means, and Cotton, who fought in Afghanistan (and falsely claimed to be an Army Ranger), treats it as an essential struggle against the feminization of the manly, martial rigor that the projection of American power requires.
Hawley is not a military veteran, but Chapter 7 of his book, which immediately follows meditations on the servile abjection of being a Bible-reading, church-going, dutiful husband and father, is called “Warrior.” Here the trope of David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club is invoked a second time, only to complicate and countermand the strictures of bourgeois conformity preached in previous chapters. In explaining why physical prowess, anger, and confrontation are essential components of manhood, Hawley writes what could be the film’s epigraph, or Tyler Durden’s preface to a basement brawl:
“Leftists aim to create a generation of androgynous individuals whose signal character trait is their dedication to self-expression. And to consuming stuff. ... This is the Epicurean left’s new ideal, a nation of androgynous consumers who don’t rock the boat and don’t question much (and certainly not those in power) but buy plenty of cheap paraphernalia to keep the corporations profitable.”
Well, okay, Senator, but 46 pages earlier, didn’t you accuse this Epicurean left of promoting the movie as a violation of the bourgeois virtues required of good husbands? There, Hawley cites the film as “a male-specific version of the Epicurean myth that appears to rebel against the left’s denigration of men. This version portrays marriage and children as dead ends, and society more generally as corrupted by female influence.” This, Hawley argues, is why “Fight Club remains tremendously popular. … ‘Bourgeois’ norms are poisonous, it says, emasculating. They serve only to feminize a man and destroy his soul. A man can truly be a man only by escaping society and his duties to other people, the things that tie him down.”
Hawley isn’t contradicting himself. For him, the warrior contains (in both the inclusive and the exclusive sense of that word) the dutiful husband/father who exemplifies the bourgeois virtues that keep his family intact, as well as the violent brute who refuses the suffocating quotidian routines of bourgeois life. The social contact permitted to men is thereby limited to the extremes of intimacy and enmity.
No wonder the status of manliness, masculinity, and men seems so precarious just now. The terrifying, pre-literate world of Achilles, Agamemnon, and Hector never looked so inviting.
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Ricardo Hausmann
urges the US to issue more H1-B visas, argues that Europe must become a military superpower in its own right, applies the “growth diagnostics” framework to Venezuela, and more.
From cutting taxes to raising tariffs to eroding central-bank independence, US President-elect Donald Trump has made a wide range of economic promises, many of which threaten to blow up the deficit and fuel inflation. But powerful institutional, political, and economic constraints, together with Trump’s capriciousness, have spurred disagreement about how worried we should be.
The Truth About MigrationTimothy Hearsum/Design Pics Editorial/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
NEW YORK – Long ago, before writing based on alphabets, knowledge was stored and conveyed across generations acoustically, by word of mouth arranged in rhythmic patterns that could be memorized and then recited whenever collective instruction called for it. All knowledge was formulaic and compulsively repetitive, because innovation – originality, or creative departure from received tradition – meant the erasure of previous truth. Novel facts signaled unwelcome danger or deviation, not exciting new possibilities.
To absorb the contemporary deluge of books and essays on the plight of men, manhood, manliness, and masculinity – or to invoke our ancestors’ acoustic precedent by listening to podcasts on the beleaguered male – is to relive this ancient experience of illiteracy. Contemporary authors on the state of manhood, whether of books, transcripts, or reviews, seem determined to say the same thing over and over, as if mere repetition were a convincing rhetorical strategy – and as if the novel fact of greater equity between males and females signaled deviance, devolution, and decay.
For example, Missouri’s Senator Josh Hawley’s new book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, reads like a very long, very boring speech written for a day filibustering against Medicaid expansion on the floor of the US Senate, and its admonitions echo the ersatz philosopher turned male guru Jordan Peterson’s endlessly repeated and truly inane exhortations about caring for the male psyche in his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
And Peterson’s banal instructions, which he reproduces on cue in public appearances and countless TV interviews, sound like the practical conclusions to be drawn from the Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness, a churched-up reading – an audiobook-ready incantation – of ancient texts (Plato, Aristotle, Tarzan, all the usual suspects). Meanwhile, Costin Alamariu, a.k.a. “Bronze Age Pervert,” reaches even further back to retrieve the pre-literate rudiments of real manhood from the fossilized remains of hominoid existence, and his hilarious self-published manifesto becomes a solemn catechism for ultra-conservatives, who promote it by word of mouth.
What is to be done with this master text, which will never lack for scribes willing to copy it for educational purposes – or, rather, bards willing to sing this epic poem, like post-Mycenaean Homeric performers? Many reviewers have noted that complaints about the impending demise of manhood are at least a century old, dating back to William James’ concerns in “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910), and probably older. This suggests that the demise of manhood has evolved alongside the changing theory and practice of true womanhood, if only because gender, regardless of its supposed origin, presupposes perceived symbiotic differences between male and female.
But the curious thing about the authors of all these texts – reviewers and reviewed alike – is their agreement on the timeless attributes of manhood. That consensus has given the master text on manhood the weight of common sense. There seems to be no way beyond the current intellectual impasse because everyone agrees that manhood is a trans-historical dimension of human nature that, having somehow become decrepit, stands in need of restoration, rehabilitation, or retirement.
Manly Freedom
In pre-industrial households throughout the West, women and their children worked in the home, or on the homestead, whether it was the shop of a skilled “mechanic,” shoemaker, cordwainer, or tailor, or a farmer’s small holding. Some feminist historians have suggested that women’s labor made them the equals of the men – the patriarchs – who headed those households, implying a demotion in social status when the production of industrial goods was moved outside the home and routinized in factories. But, according to the common-law doctrine of femme couverture, which regulated legal decisions about matrimony until the mid-nineteenth century, women became, practically speaking, the property of their husbands upon marriage.
In fact, it was only when the production of industrial goods was removed from the home that women could begin to enter civil society as abstract individuals, that is, as personalities who were not solely the bearers of the familial roles of wife, mother, sister, or daughter. It was only then, in the 1840s and 1850s, that adults could begin to imagine full citizenship for people hitherto confined to the private domain of the home, and, by the same token, to think realistically of the home as an emotional haven in a heartless world governed by the amoral whip of the market. “True Womanhood” was never the same.
Secure your copy of PS Quarterly: The Year Ahead 2025
Our annual flagship magazine, PS Quarterly: The Year Ahead 2025, has arrived. To gain digital access to all of the magazine’s content, and receive your print copy, subscribe to PS Digital Plus now.
Subscribe Now
By the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, the “Woman Question” was as pressing an issue as the “Labor Question” – what kind of republic could survive a majority of propertyless proletarians? – because women had important new roles to play in the emerging corporate economy and politics of the Progressive Era. “Reform” became a matter of non-governmental organizations, female labor-force participation increased at its fastest pace until the 1970s, and feminism finally challenged the implicit equation of womanly/female and wifely/maternal identity.
But while womanhood has changed dramatically over the past two centuries, manhood somehow has not. Whatever their opinion on its remaining utility, most authorities (many self-proclaimed) holding forth on the subject agree that manhood has always required and/or signified strength, initiative, assertiveness (or combativeness), responsibility, fortitude, and above all, individualism or independence, because without freedom from external constraint, none of the other attributes are actionable.
This durability is perhaps not surprising. As Sarah Grimké and John Stuart Mill observed in the mid-nineteenth century, man-made laws have always subordinated females to males, prolonging and deepening their provisional dependence as mothers on the protection of their menfolk.
So, freedom as such has long carried a strongly masculine connotation, and vice versa: manhood and dependence are irreconcilable. On that everyone agrees, from Hesiod to Abraham, John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant to America’s Founding Fathers via Aristotle and Machiavelli, unto Hawley, Peterson, Mansfield, and Alamariu. All of them, including Kant, invoke the family, the household, as the bulwark of the independence an individual needs to demonstrate manhood. A real man needs to be a husband and a father, a provider who is responsible to and for his wife and children.
Hawley looks to the Old Testament and Abraham for the masculine virtues we need – primarily those associated with being a leader who is first and foremost a husband and a father. Mansfield reaches almost as far back to find true manliness (though one of his favorite exemplars of it is Margaret Thatcher, often called “the best man in England” during her long premiership), and Alamariu reaches even further. Most others head straight for the eighteenth century, the age of bourgeois revolution and Founding Fathers.
In this sense, being a man and performing manhood or masculinity means being a patriarch, the head of a household. Every invocation of “family values” by a conservative think tank or advocacy group, and every definition of individual freedom under capitalism offered by The Club for Growth, the Manhattan Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, or the Heritage Foundation, presupposes this equivalence. The survival of capitalism is thus predicated on the hoary ideal of a bourgeois society in which households are the site of goods production (both material and moral) and the rules of petty commodity production still prevail.
Lost Boys
This is the unspoken tragedy at the heart of the contemporary defense of manhood: the household, and thus the family, no longer form the social groundwork of market transactions and political standing. It is impossible to expect bourgeois virtues of a population that has been expelled from bourgeois society by industrial capitalism, under which, as Frankfurt School philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer put it, “individuality loses its economic basis.” But that is nonetheless the expectation of manhood’s advocates.
In mid-twentieth-century America, David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Richard Hofstadter drew on Frankfurt School insights to address the post-liberal (populist) politics created in the post-industrial, post-familial age of the “other-directed individual.” Joseph Schumpeter explained the tragedy in similar terms: “capitalist evolution not only upsets social structures which protected the capitalist interests ... but also undermines the attitudes, motivations, and beliefs of the capitalist stratum itself, ... [for example] the loosening of the family tie – a typical feature of the culture of capitalism – removes or weakens what, no doubt, was the center of the motivation of the businessman of old.”
The contemporary defense of manhood, then, can be read as an anti-corporate critique of the hedonistic consumer culture produced by post-industrial society. That is why it resonates on the left as well as the right, and why the reviewers of boilerplate, cliché-addled books like Peterson’s or Hawley’s are sympathetic to the plight of the aimless, hapless, feckless young men their authors cultivate as their chosen constituency. The crisis, after all, is real. Overwhelming statistical evidence attests to it: young men aren’t working, matriculating, marrying, procreating, protecting, or even staying alive at their fathers’ or grandfathers’ rates.
But the reviewers at least ask why. They wonder, as Susan Faludi did a generation ago in Stiffed, and as countless other observers have since, if men’s plight reflects the neoliberal downsizing of Dad in today’s hyper-globalized economy. In any event, they understand that discrediting manhood, fatherhood, and the bourgeois virtues was undertaken by Homer Simpson and Family Guy long before what Hawley calls “Epicurean” liberals or “woke” leftists got around to shuffling genders, multiplying pronouns, and insisting that everyone go to college.
Hawley and the other conservative authors can’t ask why, because to wonder if capitalism has become the most significant impediment to the achievement of manhood would compromise their fidelity to free enterprise and free markets. So, Hawley and his comrades are reduced to worshipping at the shrine of a long-lost bourgeois civilization, where patriarchy still thrives, in that “very Eden of the innate rights of man” where “alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham,” as Marx famously put it. Of course, when not worshipping, they try to reinstate patriarchy by political means. While that sounds like a fool’s errand, it already has powerful sponsors, an itemized agenda and, in the US, a Supreme Court seemingly willing to back it with the force of law.
After Bourgeois Virtue
The social basis of patriarchy is a household economy – the oikos of antiquity, wherein the basic unit of goods production is an extended family that included slaves and servants, and then the small farm or central shop of early modern Europe, where family members and apprentices comprised the work force. This “petty mode of production,” as the economist Maurice Dobb called it, was exported to North America in the seventeenth century, and, in what became the US, it was understood as the necessary foundation of popular, republican government. As such, its establishment or restoration was the goal of social movements from the 1740s (the Great Awakening) to the 1840s and 1850s (anti-slavery), and on into the 1890s (the Knights of Labor, the People’s Party).
For adherents of these movements, self-determination meant self-employment, whereas wage labor signified servility. The idealized self-mastering individual was the male head of household, who almost literally owned his wife and had virtually unlimited control over his children’s fortunes. He was a responsible, protective father because he had to be: the conveyance of his property to the next generation depended on it. And fatherly vigilance meant, above all, that men had to police the sexuality of their wives and children, particularly the females, so that no bastards would appear in court claiming to be rightful heirs. Misogyny, fueled by fear of unbound female sexuality, was baked into the culture of the petty mode of production.
The household economy and its patriarchal implications shaped ancient, Hellenistic, feudal, and modern bourgeois societies. It took a trans-Atlantic industrial revolution, roughly from 1780 to 1890, to empty most households of their economic functions by exporting goods production to factories, and to create a propertyless, proletarian majority that worked for wages.
In the nineteenth century, bourgeois society based on the petty mode of production gave way to capitalism, or what sociologists from Émile Durkheim to Daniel Bell called “industrial society.” At that point, the simple market society described by the political scientist C.B. Macpherson, geared to the inter-generational preservation of familial property and integrity, gave way to a mode of production geared to the unlimited accumulation of wealth. (It’s the difference, in terms of popular television series, between Succession and Billions.)
But bourgeois society, so conceived, was never obliterated by industrial society. It survives, though barely, in the social groundwork of small business and, much more significantly, as an ideological imperative, in the image of the rugged, rights-bearing individual who works for himself and thus answers only to himself.
Because this rights-bearing man is his own boss, his will is free of any encumbrance except adherence to the bourgeois virtues, particularly the compulsion to work and the willingness to defer gratification in order to serve the needs of his wife and children. He is aware of manhood’s price, unafraid of masculinity, and, above all, accepts responsibility for his household’s welfare. He is no Epicurean. He is not stylish or hip. He plays by the rules, lives within his means, and expects you to do the same.
This man, this pale image, this miniature patriarch, permeates conservative speech, whether in sound bites that ridicule “woke” corporations or in legislation that bans books and abortions. When conservatives extol “family” or “family values,” they have in mind male-headed households that are still regulated by the old bourgeois virtues. Only such families can resist the temptations of consumer capitalism, the seductions of the city, and the commands of the state.
Patriarchy from Above
The practical question for conservatives is how to restore the patriarchal family to its rightful, protective place between the market and the state. They can’t very well take us back to a household economy, no matter how anti-corporate they sound. They can’t undo the economic events of the last century, or even the last 20 years, without renouncing the modern, corporate capitalism that they constantly celebrate. But while they have no way of reinstating the social basis of bourgeois society, they can impose its virtues, including male supremacy in the threadbare costume of patriarchy, by political means, as authoritarian regimes elsewhere have done, and as Republican state legislatures are doing in the US.
The first step is to reassert paternal control of female sexuality, by restricting or abolishing access to abortion. In an uncanny twist on Robert Filmer’s argument with John Locke, and Carl Schmitt’s argument against modern liberalism, the state will now stand in for the paterfamilias.
The second step is to reestablish heterosexuality as the binary norm that must govern everyday social life as well as marriage contracts. The gender troubles created by industrial society and then consumer capitalism, which is to say the choices enabled by the passage from bourgeois society to corporate capitalism, are to be adjourned by legislation. Marriage is to be a bond that unites only males and females, for whom sexual pleasure is a means to social ends – reproduction and familial continuity – not an end in itself, and for whom birth control by any method is, therefore, inconceivable.
These are the inevitable results of manhood conceived and executed as the restoration of patriarchy, as Hawley, his conservative contemporaries, and his many predecessors understand it. The fear of Woman, a deep anxiety about the erasure of sexual difference and the eclipse of male supremacy, animates every item on their agenda, from the books they write and the speeches they give to the legislation they sponsor. There is nothing embarrassing about this agenda, as they see it, which is why they are untroubled by their association with Donald Trump’s egregious misogyny, and why they are happy to be reprinted, cited, quoted, and otherwise publicized for displays of childish fright at the spectacle of female sexuality and power.
In this sense, today’s crop of patriarchist authors recalls the well-educated, even erudite individuals who conjured the personality type and social psychology of fascism avant la lettre, in 1920s Germany. These are the novelists, journalists, artists, and activists – among them Ernst Jünger and Joseph Goebbels – analyzed by Klaus Theweleit in the two massive volumes of his Male Fantasies.
The real man they imagined (in formulaic, hackneyed prose and images) was a warrior who had been subjected to the excruciating, humiliating rigors of military training, a kind of fraternity hazing. He was therefore able to withstand the temptations of material or sexual pleasure on offer from a decadent, cosmopolitan, consumer culture – temptations signified by the figure of the Woman in Red, whose energy was felt as a fluid, formless, watery oblivion, a flood to be staunched as if it were a wound by the upright, armored bodies of uniformed upright men.
Girded for Battle
Tom Cotton, like Hawley a US senator with an Ivy League law degree, is, like Hawley, someone who faithfully recapitulates this itinerary. His recent book Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power is the story of a progressive conspiracy, masterminded by Democrats since Woodrow Wilson, to emasculate America (even Harry Truman, the original cold warrior, stands accused of this gender treason). The gravamen of Cotton’s case is captured in the title of Chapter 4: “Neutering the Military.” The culture war in the all-volunteer military is, by this account, politics by other means, and Cotton, who fought in Afghanistan (and falsely claimed to be an Army Ranger), treats it as an essential struggle against the feminization of the manly, martial rigor that the projection of American power requires.
Hawley is not a military veteran, but Chapter 7 of his book, which immediately follows meditations on the servile abjection of being a Bible-reading, church-going, dutiful husband and father, is called “Warrior.” Here the trope of David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club is invoked a second time, only to complicate and countermand the strictures of bourgeois conformity preached in previous chapters. In explaining why physical prowess, anger, and confrontation are essential components of manhood, Hawley writes what could be the film’s epigraph, or Tyler Durden’s preface to a basement brawl:
“Leftists aim to create a generation of androgynous individuals whose signal character trait is their dedication to self-expression. And to consuming stuff. ... This is the Epicurean left’s new ideal, a nation of androgynous consumers who don’t rock the boat and don’t question much (and certainly not those in power) but buy plenty of cheap paraphernalia to keep the corporations profitable.”
Well, okay, Senator, but 46 pages earlier, didn’t you accuse this Epicurean left of promoting the movie as a violation of the bourgeois virtues required of good husbands? There, Hawley cites the film as “a male-specific version of the Epicurean myth that appears to rebel against the left’s denigration of men. This version portrays marriage and children as dead ends, and society more generally as corrupted by female influence.” This, Hawley argues, is why “Fight Club remains tremendously popular. … ‘Bourgeois’ norms are poisonous, it says, emasculating. They serve only to feminize a man and destroy his soul. A man can truly be a man only by escaping society and his duties to other people, the things that tie him down.”
Hawley isn’t contradicting himself. For him, the warrior contains (in both the inclusive and the exclusive sense of that word) the dutiful husband/father who exemplifies the bourgeois virtues that keep his family intact, as well as the violent brute who refuses the suffocating quotidian routines of bourgeois life. The social contact permitted to men is thereby limited to the extremes of intimacy and enmity.
No wonder the status of manliness, masculinity, and men seems so precarious just now. The terrifying, pre-literate world of Achilles, Agamemnon, and Hector never looked so inviting.