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The Invasion of the Family by the Market
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18170 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1990 |
5,160 Words |
| Author
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Christopher Lasch
Christopher Lasch is Alonzo Watson Professor of History at the
University of Rochester. |
Before the Industrial Revolution, no one would have thought to describe the family as a privileged refuge from the marketplace, an island of emotional security, a haven in a heartless world. That role was reserved for the monastery. The family, on the other hand, was deeply implicated in the world of affairs. Marriage served to consolidate political and dynastic alliances, to produce legitimate heirs, to transmit property holdings from one house to another and from one generation to the next. The family also served as the basic unit of production. Manufactures and agriculture were carried on largely by households. Even commerce, which required larger amounts of capital, was dominated by family firms.
Under these conditions, it was impossible to think of the family as a purely private institution. The regulation of domestic life was a public concern. Relations between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children were subject to public regulation and to the more informal sanctions enforced by neighbors. If a husband mistreated his wife, he invited ridicule, ostracism, or physical punishment by the whole community. The idea that a man's home is his castle made its appearance only in the nineteenth century, long after people had ceased to live in castles.
The Industrial Revolution took production out of the household, and the separation of home and work contributed to the new conception of the family as an oasis, a protected shelter from the outside world. But it was the growing importance of the market that most directly shaped this new conception of domestic life. As liberal states removed tariff barriers and other obstacles to the circulation of commodities, the market came to govern social relations in the public world. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the market was widely recognized as the dominant institution of the modern world. The market replaced the old network of personal obligations and services with an impersonal "cash nexus," in Thomas Carlyle's famous phrase. It made buying and selling the overriding preoccupation of public life. It legitimized the desire for money, formerly stigmatized as the root of evil. It gave a certain respectability to sharp practices once condemned as evidence of a want of breeding. It glorified the hustler, the opportunist, the man on the make. Traits like generosity and compassion came to be regarded as marks of weakness and effeminacy. The man who allowed personal considerations to intrude on his business dealings appeared to have taken leave of his senses. Misguided scruples could only weigh him down in the pursuit of the Main
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