Masonic Contracts, Fraternal Contact, and the Intimate Public Sphere

• In Event: Pluralizing Political Theory: Contemporary Queer Contributions (Pre-Recorded)

Abstract

In Jürgen Habermas’s influential work,“The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere,” he argues that the formation of new egalitarian spaces of sociability in the 18th century bourgeois public undermined hierarchical relations of status characteristic of what he calls the ‘representative’ public at court. Whereas feudal relations of rank depended on the display of the aristocratic body at court, Habermas contends that bourgeois modes of communication rooted in the equal exchange of opinion gave rise to new egalitarian relations between citizens. Yet, since deliberation presupposes an equality between speaking subjects, how exactly did bourgeois speech, previously considered unworthy and unable of articulating political claims, suddenly politically intelligible?

Feminist critics of Habermas’s account have pointed to the primacy of gender in the formation of the public sphere, arguing that women’s exclusion played a constitutive role, regulating not only which bodies could speak in public but how to speak in order to participate in the public voice of reason. Building on this feminist scholarship, this paper argues that women’s exclusion was a necessary but insufficient condition for the constitution of new gendered relations of equality between bourgeois men. Proposing a queer feminist reading of the 18th century public sphere, I show how new corporeal practices of homosociality premised on women’s exclusion enabled bourgeois men to subvert hierarchies of status and form new relations of equality. In constituting new gendered relations of equality, I contend that the historical transformations in men’s bodily relations made possible the kinds of deliberative exchange characteristic of the 18th century bourgeois public.

In order to showcase the constitutive role played by the reorganization of men’s bodily relations in the bourgeois public sphere, this paper investigates the largest and most widespread fraternal organization of 18th century Western Europe, namely, Freemasonry. Unlike other institutional sites such as the coffeeshop or salon, the masonic lodge served a unique infrastructural node in what historians have described as a mass movement among the gentry and professional classes. Undergoing reorganization following the formation of the Masonic Grand Lodge in 1717, freemasons established a new and distinct set of associational practices across a growing landscape of lodges. Training men not simply in new arts of sociability but also in republican practices of self-government, involving elections, laws, and representation, masonic lodges were, in historian Margaret Jacob’s words, “microscopic civil polities, new public spaces, in effect schools of constitutional government.”
Unlike most institutions of the public sphere, entry into the masonic lodge required its members to undergo a ritual of initiation through which men entered into contract with the fraternal society. In providing a political reading of these rituals, I argue that freemasons enacted theories of the social contract in order to oppose the hierarchical politics of monarchy and create new social relations between men. Drawing on Carole Pateman’s “The Sexual Contract,” I show how freemasons deployed a political logic of fraternity in order to reorganize men’s relations according to new gendered principles of equality between brothers. Situating freemasonry within a larger intellectual context of what Pateman calls the fraternal social contract, this paper explores how a republican political movement such as freemasonry instantiated the gendered egalitarian politics of the social contract in and through a transformation of men’s bodily relations.

The ritual of initiation that transforms a man into a mason marks the threshold of entry into a new society of men organized on principles of fraternal equality. In entering the masonic contract, a mason symbolically breaks with the monarchical world and its patriarchal logics of subordination. Far from simply an exchange of words, the masonic contract involves an intricately choreographed traffic in men’s bodies that transgress the structures of conduct regulating the aristocratic world of status. By drawing men into new bodily relations of intimacy, masonic rituals sought to constitute new egalitarian attachments between men. As such, this paper shows how 18th century republican movements mobilized binary gender difference in order to transform individuals mired in the hierarchical politics of kingship and build a new world of masculine association based on principles of equality. The proliferation of novel bodily rituals of fraternity in the masonic lodge institute a new set of political relations based not on hierarchy and patronage but equality and reciprocity, which ultimately come to define not just a new egalitarian mode of publicity but a novel political form of association.

Author

• Aylon Cohen, University of Chicago