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Family Crisis and Social Stability
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10392 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
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12 / 1986 |
2,354 Words |
| Author
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Paul Piccone
Paul Piccone is the editor of Telos, a scholarly journal. |
Presumably, the patriarchal family has long since gone. "So much the better" is the immediate feminist or "radical chic" response, since that model of the family has historically been associated with authoritarianism and the subjugation of women and children. Yet, the disappearance of the patriarchal family has not meant the end of the family as such but only of that particular model, to be replaced by other allegedly more adequate models. But adequate to what? Given the present state of growing social disintegration, as documented by divorce rates, abortion, alcoholism and drug use, illiteracy, crime, and so forth, this adequacy has little to do with any kind of better society or more humane forms of social relations. The new models, however, are more adequate to the new logic of advanced industrial societies where they function more or less effectively as mechanisms of social integration, guaranteeing an otherwise difficult to attain high level of social stability in the midst of growing inequality, nihilism, and corruption.
The reasons for the decline of the patriarchal family--industrial dislocations, productions imperatives, and demographic shifts--are well-known. Yet, to fully understand the emergence of new models of the family, it is not sufficient simply to identify the social forces precipitating the transformations. Rather, the present predicament in the coexistence of a plurality of family models generate a variety of contradictory social dynamics that may be better comprehended by examining how classical socialist criticism of the traditional family brought about unintended consequences.
Radical approaches to the traditional family as a multi-functional social institution have always focused on relations of domination hidden under the cloak of privacy. The diagnoses have tended to be negative and highly critical since they have proceeded from the standpoint of the autonomous individual. Looking at the more vulnerable members of the family unit--women and children--natural relations are often considered euphemisms for subtle forms of exploitation, inequality, and authoritarianism. The recent response to the perceived inequities of the family has usually been an attempt to judge the family by formal democratic criteria. But attempts to open the family to state intervention in the name of democracy and individual autonomy destroy its intimacy and special character. If the family is reduced to simply another public institution subject to close state regulation, its democratization will result in its systematic disintegration as a fundamental social institution.
To be sure, the original position of The
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