Rita Koganzon. Liberal States, Authoritarian Families: Childhood and Education in Early Modern Thought Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, 224 pp.

In the United States today, liberals embrace the logic of “congruence” as the basis for their educational systems. They seek, insofar as possible, to ensure that their children’s educations—both at home and at school—reflect the political, social, and cultural tenets they, as adults, prize most. Children, the theory of congruence posits, most reliably develop liberal-democratic qualities such as self-sufficiency, tolerance, and independent thinking in educational environments that treat them as autonomous individuals and allow them to learn relatively unconstrained by (adult) authority. In Liberal States, Authoritarian Families, Rita Koganzon argues that such faith in congruence is both misguided and injurious for the construction and maintenance of a liberal-democratic society. “In a liberal democracy,” she asserts, “the practices of childrearing and education must run counter to those of civic life” (p. 12). To achieve the educational outcomes they seek, contemporary liberals must reject congruence. They must abandon their modern efforts to align family, school, and society and instead return to the family-centered structures of adult authority advocated by the seventeenthand eighteenth-century educational theorists John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Koganzon arrives at her recommendations for the twenty-first century by turning to the past. She begins with two chapters on Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes that trace the development of sovereignty theory in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and show that this influential school of thought gave rise to the earliest arguments in favor of congruence. In chapters 3 through 6, she turns her attention to Locke, Rousseau, and their efforts to address one of the central problems produced by the rise of liberal-democratic societies: namely, the tyranny of majority or public opinion. To advance their anti-authoritarian agendas, Koganzon persuasively argues, Locke and Rousseau rejected congruence and instead “viewed the ‘authoritarian’ family as a necessary educational buttress for children against the new forms of social tyranny that liberal, commercial states would develop” (pp. 11-12). Rather than embrace a system of childrearing and education that mirrored their political-social programs, Locke and Rousseau believed that the emergence of the liberal state and its new threats—the specter of public opinion, fashion, and the attitudes of the majority— required strengthening, rather than diminishing, the private or personal authority