Locke’s pedagogy follows from his political and epistemic theory, counterposing an authoritarian pedagogy against limited formal parental authority. In light of his fears about the power of public opinion, Locke argued that personal authority in childhood was necessary for intellectual independence in adulthood, and the personal authority of parents was required to shield children against competing authorities in society. Locke’s account of human development reveals that the intervention of a unitary, personal authority to direct the will at the beginning is necessary for the will to be self-directing afterward. The inward-directed Lockean family forms a counterforce against the prevailing fashions outside. The private guidance of familial and pedagogical authority in childhood is a fence against the potential dangers of Locke’s political philosophy. His pedagogy argues that a state grounded in equality and individual liberty requires a hierarchical, authoritarian family to sustain itself.

Rousseau’s account of authority over children in Emile brings to light his quarrel but also his agreement with Locke on the question of private authority. The education of Emile is a direct objection to Locke’s characterization of the will and the nature of adolescence. However, while Emile has mainly been read by scholars as a rejoinder to Locke’s Education, this chapter uncovers the extent to which Rousseau’s account of Sophie’s education is actually Lockean, and it demonstrates that even Emile’s education culminates in Lockean conclusions about the use of the private, inward-oriented family as an antidote to the predations of fashion and opinion. It explores why Rousseau presents both anti- and pro-Lockean arguments about the role of authority in education and concludes by emphasizing the previously unnoticed agreement between Rousseau and Locke on these questions in the context of modern, liberal societies.

Although John Locke's educational curriculum has traditionally been seen to aim at creating free citizens capable of independent thought, the centrality of habituation to his pedagogy has recently raised concerns that the Education is no more than “indoctrination” for compliant subjects. I argue here that by re-examining habituation in light of Locke's epistemology, we find that Locke's education does aim at freedom, but that this freedom requires a strong will and a cultivated skepticism. The habits which Locke asks parents to instill are aimed not at programming specific behavior and opinions, but rather at training children to “cross their desires” to strengthen their wills against the impositions of nature, custom, and fashion, which Locke argues pose an far more serious threat to independent thought than parental discipline. Locke's education aims to cultivate a skeptical mental disposition that permits individuals to resist these other sources of habit and to continually question and revise their own convictions.

This chapter locates the origins of the logic of congruence in modern thought. This logic turns out not to be historically liberal in origin but rather arose out of the arguments for absolute sovereignty advanced by Jean Bodin and his followers. Bodin was the first modern thinker to model the power of fathers on that of absolute monarchs and to claim that fathers wield absolute authority over their children. This model goes so far as to demand the reinstatement of the long-discarded Roman right of life and death over children. For Bodin, the family became a vehicle through which his novel conception of absolute power could be demonstrated and legitimated. Total submission under absolutist fathers was necessary to correctly educate and accustom children to their political duties as subjects of absolute sovereigns.

This chapter describes how Locke came to reject sovereignty theory, along with the logic of congruence, in favor of a much more limited account of political authority. It traces his transformation from a young Hobbesian who accepted that an absolute sovereign could manipulate public opinion in its favor, to a skeptic about anyone’s ability to control public opinion. This shift in his view of the possibilities of political authority grew out of his increasing fear of the intellectual tyranny of public opinion. It resulted in his mature turn in the Two Treatises toward an anti-sovereignty politics and to his limited account of parental power designed to maximize the possibility of liberty under modern social conditions.