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Ian KALMAN

Abstract

The notion that the organization of large-scale social structures are rooted in domestic ones has a longstanding history in both Chinese and Greek classical political philosophy. Aristotle and Confucius independently reasoned that a good family, one with a strong father, mapped onto a good state, one with a strong king - though they differed on the details. While there is a strong literature juxtaposing these two titans, less attention has been paid to how their ideas compare with other philosophical traditions. This article provides an anthropological intervention to the comparative study of Confucius and Aristotle – while both autonomously argued that good politics are like good family, the notion of what constitutes a good family varies tremendously across cultures. Is it always father knows best? What about in a society where mothers are in charge? To answer these questions, I draw upon a study of the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, an Indigenous North American nation. Notably, the Haudenosaunee are matrilineal and matrilocal. This article juxtaposes Confucian, Aristotelian, and Haudenosaunee political philosophies, looking at the commonalities of modeling political structures on domestic ones, and how cultural differences across domestic spaces have resulted in subtle and profound distinctions across political practices. Taking “nation is family” as a conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), I suggest a dynamic nominalist (Hacking 2007) paradigm by which to consider how political and social ideas of the nation as family become mutually constitutive once entrenched within a philosophical tradition.

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