Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove A Preliminary Report, 1865 Book

Holly Brewer gives an incredibly well-researched and richly detailed historical account of the early modern "revolution in authority" in a welcome update to Carole Pateman's story of the rise of "fraternal patriarchy" as it replaced monarchy and primogeniture. According to Brewer, the Republican tradition was marked by a paradox, most clearly exemplified by John Locke, that simultaneously upheld patriarchal power and challenged it: no longer would children inherit power. Instead, adults with the developed capacity to reason would be in charge. According to these early political theorists, many of whom were religious dissenters as well as political (the two being virtually inextricable in late 17th c. England), responsibility requires reason. Refreshingly, Brewer ignores traditional disciplinary boundaries to bring together religious, legal and philosophical archival material from both sides of the Atlantic, carefully plotting the remarkable story of the arrival on the scene of age-requirements and minority, in the process telling a much larger one about consent, dissent and liberal subjectivity that are so part of post-Enlightenment life we hardly examine them. Brewer hints at the possibility that a large portion of society is left in the category of unreason, childhood and dependency who would, even on the terms put forward by Locke and Sidney, have every right to self-rule, and this is part of the task of resisting patriarchy in the present. I would add that even more interrogation of the roots of the meritocracy we see failing in so many ways today is in order: in what way has the fight against the nobility or "no-ability" as Paine called them resulted in a system that leaves behind millions?