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The subtitle of MacCannell's book, After the Patriarchy, may be understood in either of two ways: what has happened after the Enlightenment's overthrow of monarchical government and of the father's domination, or what is to happen, given that patriarchy has not released its hold. Juliet Flower MacCannell is pointing to the irony of modernity, in claiming to have removed hierarchical oppression and replaced it with democratic sovereignty, when the result has been the exposure of the continuing oppression of those for whom patriarchy has no definition, the literally and metaphorically colonized: the native, and the woman.
MacCannell's view is expressed in the form of a cogent dictum, that the role of the Father has been subtly reoccupied by the Brother. The primal father has been killed, but his power has been transferred to his sons. Patriarchy is as powerful as ever, and part of its power lies in the nature of its disguise, that of democratic equality and individual liberty, purveyed and maintained by the third of the Enlightenment triad, fraternity. Despite its positive connotations, the fraternal is a patriarchal term: “liberty, equality, and sorority” sounds distinctly odd to our sexist ears. It is the continuing gloss of these ideals that hides their inadequacies from oppressor and oppressed. MacCannell argues that modernity's emphasis on individual equality becomes an effacement of otherness, and that its emphasis on the sovereign subject becomes an empowerment of the male fraternal individual. After MacCannell, one could coin a new word, “fraternalism.” The Brother is now characterized by what Lacan called repression of the recognition of the other.
The material MacCannell enlists to uphold her thesis is both literary and psychoanalytic, the literature interlocked with history. She detects in Rousseau the hidden flaw of the ideal of a democratic collective “self,” expressed in a faultless “general will,” repressing recognition of the other (sex). Rousseau admire