Contract, Gender, and the Emergence of the Civil-Military Distinction

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>This paper examines the social contract theories of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke, highlighting the failure of their contractarian defenses of the military and military service. In order to ground the duties of military service, each theorist presumes a chivalric gender order wherein men as men are expected to be willing to sacrifice themselves as violent instruments for the sake of their families and communities. While Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf use the contract method to defend absolute, or near absolute, political authority wherein subject's primary political obligation is to serve the sovereign in war upon command, Locke uses the contract method to create a liberal political order that preserves the natural rights of subjects. Nevertheless, Locke maintains the commitment to self-sacrificial military service. In Locke, then, the military is peeled away from liberal civil society and we see the first statement of the civil-military distinction that persists today.</jats:p>

Talking to Children About War

“…As much as theorists of war may try to use gender-neutral or gender-inclusive pronouns when referring to combatants, the fact remains that, for the most part and for most of history as we have it, it is a he who wields the sword (Goldstein 2001). Our conception of the warrior is intimately bound up with our conceptions of masculinity, and even our rules of war that separate combatants from civilians are bound up with our conceptions of masculinity and femininity (Kinsella 2006;Mann 2014;Parsons 2020). The more we justify war and celebrate the warrior, the more we entrench a gender binary, and celebrate men over women and the "masculine" virtues over the "feminine": thinking over feeling, aggression over gentleness, competition over cooperation.…”