By Birth or Consent

The other day I was talking to a visiting scholar who had given a paper to our seminar; I gave a brief and garbled explanation of my project (in its new form), and she said, 'have you read Holly Brewer's book?' No I hadn't! Turns out, it's extraordinarily relevant and useful! Also, thankfully, it's nothing like the book that I want my thesis to be. It is a story of changing attitudes to childhood, in relation to political theory, in the Anglo-American world from the 16th to late-18th centuries. By Birth or Consent (great, evocative title):

...in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a fundamental shift occurred in the legal assumptions about childhood, adulthood, and responsibility [p.1]... During the late sixteenth century, children became a metaphor for obedience and submission to church and kingdom... [but] political reformers of seventeenth-century England distinguished children's political identities from adults', emphasizing experience and reason as requirements for the exercise of political power. Their distinctions grew out of attempts to justify a form of government based on consent [p.2]... This paradigm shift, from authority based on birthright to authority based on reasoned consent, reconstituted the nature of legitimacy and power [p.5].

One of the particularly interesting things for me is the questions it raises about what defines childhood: as I expected, we see some elitist politicians (e.g. John Adams) equating certain classes of adults (e.g. the propertyless) with children. What I also found interesting, though, is where Brewer's project differs from how I envisage mine. She ignores or tacitly refuses psychological implications, and builds her argument on corrolations and parallels between childhood issues and political issues.

A review on H-Net complains that "the connection between changing theories about civic authority and childhood often seems more theoretical and corollary than experiential and causal." I agree, Brewer shows that the two discourses seem to be connected but fails to find that connection. Surely it is psychological. At the very start, she touches on it: "On some level this image [of "children as metaphors for obedience"] transcended metaphor, became, in its pervasiveness, a structure through which many people understood their world [p.2]." But she doesn't follow this point up. The book would have benefited from a deeper theoretical appreciation of conceptual metaphor.