Akademik

Government as by a benign parent. The contentious feature is that the parent has traditionally the right and indeed the duty to overrule the children's preferences in the name of their real or true interests, which they may not be mature enough to perceive. (Paternalism in this sense is not gender-specific: it might equally be called maternalism, since a similar right and duty invests in the mother.) Paternalist forms of patronage (gift giving, charitable involvement, provision of amenities and institutions) have frequently had the function of disguising naked relationships of domination, e.g. between capitalists and their workers, husbands and wives, or colonialists and the colonized. But see also Ulysses (