The political project at its core involves creating communities out of a multitude of individuals.[1] This project is ever evolving and never complete, largely because individual desires are rooted in the particulars of time and place. Values and desires shift in their importance over a single human lifetime, as well as over generations. What is consistent, however, is that due to the particular desires of individuals, the political project will always be characterized by conflict. Individuals must bend themselves to rules they do not agree to and that they do not understand, and communities must sacrifice communal goals and ideas to incompatible individual desires.

Another consistent feature of this project is that there exist institutions, often ignored by political thinkers, that make this balance between individual and community possible. Such institutions add to the complexity of the study of human social structures by blurring or even eradicating the traditional individual/community dichotomy. The family is merely one of many, but I believe it to be the most important of these “intermediate institutions” that form a kind of buffer between individuals and the communities to which they belong.

What makes families special is that they are natural and constantly re-forming. Everyone is born into one, whether they like it or not. Moreover, families are characterized by both biological and cultural bonds that provide them with an internal pull that political associations, fraternal orders, bowling leagues, and other associations lack. While it may be true that you can never go home again, it’s also true that it’s extremely difficult to leave. Our family relationships follow us out into the broader community, and our familial experiences impact how we move and operate in our broader social worlds.

It is strange, then, that the family has been largely ignored, or at least very easily dismissed, by political thinkers of all stripes. Perhaps part of the reason for the relative silence of political theorists on the family is that the family is taken as a given, a pre-rational and pre-political landscape, while the stuff of political theory is often seen as influenced or even controlled by human rationality. As Hayek would argue, such rationalistic hubris probably prevents us from seeing the interconnectedness between families and broader social and political structures. Empirically, of course, political systems may crumble for lack of attention to the myriad ways in which families influence politics: supply of people through reproduction, marriage as a link between powerful families, familial education in passing down norms and values, nepotism and patronage linked to powerful family lines, inheritance and the movement of property down generations, and the cost of unstable family forms in terms of welfare, criminal justice, and so on. For political theorists, the non-political family quickly rears its head, but in doing so, it muddies the theoretical waters.

This muddying occurs because despite efforts to wrangle it into position, the family challenges our most fundamental values and makes the creation of a consistent political theory essentially impossible. Those who emphasize the unlimited freedom of the individual come quickly up against the iron wall of genetics, early childhood development, and family experiences. We are not free to choose our families and our early familial experiences play a foundational role in the kind of person we eventually become. Individualists like Ayn Rand emphasize rationality and free choice only to be stymied by emotional and accidental bonds. The family is also one of the only places in the world where the creed “to each according to his need” not only works, but is indispensable. The family also challenges individualist arguments for personal responsibility and self-sufficiency since it relies in large part on the reality of human need and dependence. It is no accident that John Galt’s family was only barely mentioned in Atlas Shrugged.

On the other side of the spectrum, families are the root of inequality. This comes about both through the family’s role in education, habituation, and socialization, and through its intimate connection with property rights. The family’s multigenerational bonds challenge the demands of immediate collective decision-making and bind us to rules, habits, and ways of life that reject rationalist and egalitarian reforms. The family is the originator of unequal opportunity. The family also challenges egalitarianism due to its generally hierarchical form, which relies on the natural authority of parents over children for familial action. The reality of pregnancy, birth, and nursing places further stress on a strict egalitarian division of labor. Finally, families represent a divisive internal pull against collective identities. Families represent the private sphere in all its complexity of private and intimate bonds. The collective egalitarian cry that the private is really political is inevitably complicated by intimate groups that profoundly affect social structures but that also stubbornly refuse collectivization. The recognition that the family prevents radical egalitarian goals has led to (so far unsuccessful) calls to collectivize and control the family, from Marx and Engels to contemporary liberal feminists like Judith Moller Okin.

While the family may be irritating to those who prefer a consistency and uniformity to their political thought, the reality is that there is no single political value that trumps all others because there is no single human desire that trumps all others. We are a mixed bag of selfish and social, similar and different, and any decent and humane political system will be forced to recognize and respect such complexity. There are, thankfully, a few moderate thinkers who have appreciated the ways in which the family bridges the gap between individuals and their communities, and it seems to me no accident that such thinkers support a moderate balance of diverse theoretical commitments and a rejection of ideological state-building.

The Scottish Enlightenment thinkers in general were interested in discovering what made for stable successful societies comprised of free individuals. Adam Smith in particular, perhaps surprisingly to some, provides a moderate and balanced approach to social structures through his theory of society as a kind of spontaneous order based on individual self-interest and individual liberty. While this view is often described as less social than selfish, in reality the Smithian understanding of self-interest is expansive, including not only the interests of the individual, but also the interests of family, friends, and close community ties.[2] Smith’s theory, instead of pushing the individual and the community further apart, was instead meant to bridge the gap between individual and community, using expansive self-interest and the natural moral sentiments as building tools.[3]

Unsurprisingly, the foundation for both expansive self-interest and the moral sentiments can be found in the family and the affections we have for those closest to us.[4] Smith argues in both the Wealth of Nations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments that our care is not universal, that human nature does not support a universal benevolence or even a collective concern capable of moving much beyond the people and places that we know well.[5] This limited sphere of interest is a fundamental limit on human sympathy, but it is also the building block upon which the delicate balance between individual and community is constructed. Our concern for our families and friends produces affections that spill into the broader community, however imperfectly. This affection produces a kind of moderation and a restraint that limits revolutionary spirit and keeps individual rights and the stability of the community in harmony.[6]

Edmund Burke picks up on Smith’s anti-revolutionary concerns but makes the importance of the family a more explicit and central part of his anti-revolutionary argument. Concerned about Lockean individualism run amok during the French Revolution, Burke tried to forge a balance between individual rights and freedoms on the one hand, and the health and stability of communities on the other. He was particularly concerned, as was Smith, that the call for universal benevolence or the myth of all men as “brothers” would lead to a breakdown in the true familial affections that both bind individuals to their communities and moderate abstract rights claims.

Burke constructed this moderate bridge between individual rights and community harmony on the back of the family in the broadest possible sense. Using the analogy of inheritance, he wrote of an “intergenerational compact” whereby individuals, despite their abstract natural rights, are bound by inherited duties to the community.[7] These duties, rooted in our affections for and our inheritance from our families, and extended to community, social order, and eventually state, serve to expand individual self-interest into a recognition that the individual’s fate is always bound to that of a wider community. Burke rejected the idea that the collective can and should replace the family itself, an idea laid out most clearly later by Marx and Engels. Burke argued instead that our affections for our families are the foundation for our affection for our communities, not an enemy of them. In fact, the intergenerational compact protected and transmitted by families preserves the stability of the state just as it preserves the happiness and freedom of the individual.

Both these authors (and some other classical liberal thinkers like Montesquieu and Hayek) balance individuals and the communities to which they belong through a spontaneous ordering of society, fueled by individual desires, but rooted in the sociality born and bred in family life. They reject revolutionary destruction of the social order because social orders emerge from the spontaneous action of individuals interacting with other individuals both in the anonymous market and within intimate associations like the family, not from rational planning. A complex and balanced political theory, like the ones above, emphasizes the importance of communities while also recognizing the importance of individual rights. The family is situated at the intersection of socialization and individuality, and our affections help meld the two together.

The moderate thinkers mentioned above are only a few of the thinkers who recognize the crucial role the family plays in moderating both individualistic and collectivist desires, and thus in ensuring both individual freedom and social stability. There may, of course, be other authors with a more communitarian bent who emphasize the family in the way I’m describing. But the overall point, which needs to be taken more seriously by political theorists broadly, is that the family challenges ideological purity in almost every way. Humans are not monolithic animals, if such a thing even exists. The complexity of human desires and the social structures that emerge from those desires mean that any simplistic political theory will fail to meet a minimum standard of acceptance and that unitary political values will be worn down against the rock of human nature. The family, at least for the foreseeable future, will remain a source of connection and strife, sociality and selfishness. It is part of, and perhaps the most important reflection of, our social and self-interested humanity. It is also, therefore, the key to the development of a truly social individualism. 

Correction: This post originally described the character John Galt as an orphan. He is described, briefly, as having run away from home at age twelve.

I very much like Lauren Hall’s argument in her lead essay, and I am also a big fan of her book on these topics. What I would like to do in my reply is to extend the broad perspective she lays out by connecting it up with F. A. Hayek and seeing what his work might tell us about the idea of “social individualism” and its relationship to the family. A more thorough treatment of the argument to follow can be found in my forthcoming book Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions.

Hayek falls squarely within the moderate tradition of social individualism that Hall identifies. I want to support that claim by looking at two aspects of Hayek’s work. First, Hayek, like the other thinkers Hall mentions, had a much more complex understanding of individualism than the caricature version of economic man often associated with classical liberals. Second, Hayek had a very sophisticated understanding of the difference between the intimate world of the family (and other small-scale social institutions) and the more anonymous world of the market, politics, and what he called “the Great Society” more generally. Although Hayek did not say much at all about the family, I will argue that the family plays a central role as a bridge between those two worlds and thereby becomes a force for the sort of moderation that defines Hall’s social individualist perspective on the family.

In his essay “Individualism: True and False,” Hayek argues that the “self-interest” or “self-love” that the classical liberals saw as motivating human behavior were not “egotism in the narrow sense of concern with only the immediate needs of one’s proper person.” Instead, the “self” clearly included one’s family and friends.[1] Hayek further argues that whatever might be true of people’s moral attitude about themselves or others around them, we cannot avoid the epistemological fact that we can only know “no more than a tiny part of the whole of society,” and that we can only act in light of our knowledge of the immediate effects of an action on those around us.[2] For Hayek, human actors do not consider only their literal selves, but also can not consider society as a whole, when they act, all protests to the contrary notwithstanding. Hayek occupies the space of social individualism here.

That is even clearer later in the essay when he notes that society is more than just the individual or the state. The “intermediate formations and associations” are a crucial part of “preserving the orderly working of human society.” Hayek then explicitly lists the family as an example of these intermediate institutions and notes how such institutions often can accomplish goals better than the coercive action of the state.[3] Following in the tradition of the earlier classical liberals that Hall mentions, Hayek sees the family as sitting between the individual and the state and encouraging the moderate social individualism that is Hall’s focus.

One key piece of Hayek’s later thought, made most clear in The Fatal Conceit, was what he called the problem of learning to live in “two sorts of worlds at once.”[4] Those two worlds referred to the difference between the intimate, small organizations of the family or the firm or the various intermediate institutions discussed earlier, and the anonymous, larger, and more complex world of the market, state, and the whole Great Society. In the intimate orders, we know the people with whom we are interacting and we can include them in our estimation of the effects of our actions in exactly the way Hayek described in his discussion of “self-interest.” The intimate orders allow for a broad scope of altruism as well as top-down direction because they have a unified end and a relatively simple structure.

By contrast, the market and the Great Society as a whole are of a degree of size and complexity that most of the people we interact with are not known personally to us. The market, for example, is particularly good at enabling us to achieve cooperation in anonymity. In that world, we cannot act based on our detailed knowledge of others. More important, markets and societies do not have unified ends and singular goals. Instead, they serve as processes for enabling different people with different goals to make use of markets and societies as means toward those ends. Intimate orders are ends-connected, while anonymous orders are means-connected. In reality, many social institutions have elements of both intimacy and anonymity in them, but this analytic distinction is an important one.

So why is this a problem? Hayek argues that our moral instincts were honed in millennia of living in small kin-based intimate orders, and thus notions of collective purpose, shared ends, altruism, and zero-sum thinking, as well as the importance of good intentions, are deeply encoded in our minds. Unfortunately, these moral instincts are not appropriate for life in the anonymous world of the Great Society. In fact, the theme of The Fatal Conceit concerns the ways in which those moral instincts lead us astray when we try to apply them to the Great Society. So, he argues, the challenge of modernity is that we have to learn to live in “two sorts of worlds at once.”

What Hayek does not discuss, but I have explored elsewhere, is the role the family might play as a bridge between those two sorts of worlds, and the primary institution through which we learn to live in them. At the core of Hayek’s view of human action and social order is the idea that humans are primarily rule-following animals. One central function of the family from a Hayekian perspective is the way that it enables people, and especially children, to learn the rules of both the intimate and anonymous orders. The family enables children to learn these rules and their applicability in an environment with people who care about them and know them well, which creates a more collaborative learning process. Such an environment also enables adults to design such learning processes, and any reward and punishment systems associated with them, in ways that are customized to individual children to the greatest degree possible.

Not all social rules are explicit. Parents frequently model the more tacit rules of the social order through their behavior in a variety of social contexts. An obvious example here is how children learn to behave appropriately in restaurants. There are some rules that parents can explicitly convey to children, but there are others that parents may not even be aware of themselves that their actual behavior communicates to children. Interacting with wait staff might be full of all kinds of subtle and tacit norms that parents cannot articulate but children can learn through repeated observation supplemented by parental praise and criticism. This sort of imitation is an important form of learning for humans, and the social institution of the family provides numerous and repeated opportunities for parents to consciously or unconsciously model for children the rules of the social order.

Of course, many of these rules can be learned in non-family social institutions. Schools, religious organizations, other intermediate institutions, and even just playing without adults present are all ways in which children can and do learn through imitation. However, it is parents who have the strongest incentives and relevant knowledge to both make the effort to undertake this task and figure out how to do it best for their children. Given that parents both care about their children and know them well, the family is an irreplaceable social institution for the effective transmission of the discipline of rule-following.

The discipline of rule-following is also very much a form of social individualism. Children who understand the social role of rules, and why the social cooperation of the Great Society depends on people following the emergent rules that define that order, will find their worst sort of self-interested behavior modified by a recognition of their role in the broader community. The family’s role in inculcating respect for rules, and for understanding the different rules and norms in play in the intimate and anonymous orders, is a way in which a Hayekian perspective on the family can be seen as contributing to Hall’s project of social individualism.

Notes

Lauren Hall’s respect for the family as a “mediating institution” between the modern state and the individual sits nicely within her overall goal of understanding the problems of ideological purity common to some contemporary liberal and libertarian thinkers. Surely only contemporary thinkers have been tempted to forget about the family or, perhaps to “take it for granted” as Hall contends. Nearly all modern thinkers before the 20^th century were not so shallow or ideological as to forget the family—ancient philosophers and poets were concerned about the move from the family to the city, while most modern thinkers sought to reconceive of the family and marriage in light of contractual thinking and efforts to conquer nature.

Contemporary blind spots about family life seem to spring from the modern effort to conquer nature, for the family and all of its relationships are, if anything is, grounded in nature and matters of universal concern. Every society must have some way of dealing with the natural, inescapable facts that men and women must have sex in order to bring children into the world and children need much attention to be reared to self-governing or even virtuous adulthood. The contemporary world however treats these facts as problems that can be overcome, perhaps, by transcending the family. A recent study showed that children whose parents read to them at night do better in school and have greater career advancement. This led some to consider a ban on reading bedtime stories! There is a strange logic to such a crazy proposal, based on the assumption that, as Hall argues, the family is an “originator of unequal opportunity.” Efforts to collectivize the family can proceed from following the liberal logic of equal opportunity to its conclusion; perfect individualism seems to require perfect collectivism.

As Plato himself seems to have understood, the abolition of the family proceeds from the desire to build a political community that embodies justice at the expense of all other human goods. Hall and I understand the problem of singling out one good at the expense of all others in much the same way.

Hall and I part company in how we account for how the modern world has gotten to where it is and what advocates of the family should do about it. As I have argued elsewhere, the roots of today’s blind spots on the natural facts of procreation and education lay in the origins of modern political philosophy. This is not to say that all modern thinkers shared the blind spots, but the desire to conquer nature (and hence to erase the inescapable natural facts on which the family rests) is one of the uniting principles in modern thinking. This means that, in my judgment, efforts to defend family life must confront modern thinking even as they accommodate the fact that we live in very modern times.  This is what I would mean by moderation.

What does this mean? While Hall would have us embrace marriage and family life as “mediating institutions” necessary to cultivate a “social individualism,” I say that the family is a community based on love. Where Hall shies away from defending the connections at the heart of family life (the connection between procreation and parenthood or between the bearing of children and the raising of children), I say that all societies rely on these connections, whether they admit it or not, and that those connections make up part of what constitutes a good life for many people.

Hall calls for moderation. By this she means a recognition that there are a complex set of competing goods at stake in family life and marriage. She worries that our society emphasizes one set of goods (independence or autonomy and equality) at the expense of others (dependence and inequalities or excellences, among others). The problem with moderation, as Hall conceives it, is that it floats with the direction that public opinion is drifting; it does not challenge the assumptions of public opinion and in fact going mostly with the grain of public opinion. It seems to me that Hall absorbs Burke and Smith into such a project as well by focusing on their shared opposition to revolution instead of focusing on the job each sets for himself in cultivating a healthy, not entirely spontaneous culture of liberty.

For Hall, we defend the family for the good it does the individual and for the good it does the broader community, but rarely as an end in itself or as an embodiment of some important human goods. Social science, for instance, shows that the breakdown of the family has caused increases in criminality, poorer educational outcomes, and a whole host of other sociological ills. Yet, for all the consistency and durability of these findings, they have done little to affect opponents of the family or to affect the public behavior.  Feminist opponents await a new institution to arise to replace the family, perhaps national day cares or genuinely shared parenting, and, while I do not doubt that Hall would be skeptical of such moves, I also do not think that her vision of moderation would allow for much resistance to such a move; we would merely await a spontaneous arrival of an alternative to the family in Hall’s view, instead of trying to construct one rationally.

“The whole art of the legislator” lies, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s felicitous formulation, “in discerning well and in advance these natural inclinations of human societies” and educating against them as one is able. In our day, I would submit, statesmen and those who would defend the family must appeal to goods associated with love or personal relations and personal responsibility against the independence and irresponsible autonomy that we see around us. While Hall’s moderation is infinitely better than the ideological purity of feminists or those who embrace a collectivist extremism in the pursuit of equality of opportunity, a better-grounded theoretical approach would consist of identifying the connections at the heart of family life. This means defending the idea that procreation, marriage, and education are connected goods; defending the idea that marriage is the school of parenthood (that the virtues that allow for the solid practice of marriage are closely connected to those that prepare for parenthood); defending the idea that sex and procreation are connected, despite the partly successful modern efforts to de-couple them with reproductive technologies. Defenders of the family must use the language of goods and virtue and love, because these are the best basis on which to defend marriage and family life.

It seems that neither Hall nor I are concerned only about the health of the family. Both of us would like to preserve the modern regime of liberty, prosperity, humanity, commerce, moderation, and decency as the best the modern world has to offer. Both of us, I presume, see the assault on the family as an indication of all that is ugly or immoderate or blind about the modern project. I think I see this assault as more deeply engrained in our political DNA than Hall does, so I think that a more fundamental reappraisal of modern principles is in order. I am aware that my argument runs counter to many of our most deeply cherished values. Whether my proposal is agreed to or not is not the whole issue. In my view, defending marriage and family life as ends in themselves embodying some of the best experiences and virtues available to human nature would be the ground to lose a battle for now but to win the war in due time.

Lauren K. Hall’s lead essay (and book) are both thoughtful, well-considered takes on the good that the family can do in moderating our political practice. Given the state of so much of our political theory, we can certainly use the moderation. Political theory’s grand projects have typically been nightmares in practice, and the family has commonly been a bulwark against them. Good for it.

But as everyone here will no doubt agree, the role of the family in political theory hasn’t all been sweetness and light. The relative individualism of modern political theory may have its dangers, but it has replaced something also quite dangerous – something purportedly based on the family.

Its name, of course, was patriarchy. Patriarchy and liberalism have always been enemies, as indeed they should be. While modern families are generally benign, even wonderful institutions, patriarchal families were not. They did nothing to moderate the scope of political authority. They were political authority.

In the idealized patriarchal family, the father ruled as a king; his word was law. The mother and the children were his subjects, and it was their duty to obey. In English common law, a wife’s very legal identity simply disappeared in marriage. Legally she was incapable of making contracts, incapable of owning property in her own name, incapable of refusing consent to sex, and usually incapable of leaving the marraige. Her husband made all decisions for her, and there was no appeal.

Patriarchy takes this, more or less, as the proper model for government. As a result, traditional patriarchs look to modern eyes less like fathers and more like the rulers of the world’s smallest despotisms. And they offered their moral support to the world’s largest despotisms.

Let’s look at some examples. As the wanna-be absolutist James I wrote:

The king towards his people is rightly compared to a father of children… the style of Pater patriae (father of his country) was ever and is commonly used to kings… As the judgment coming from the head may not only employ the members, every one in their own office, as long as they are able for it; but likewise in case any of them affected with any infirmity must care and provide for their remedy, in case it be curable, and if otherwise… cut them off for fear of infecting the rest: even so is it betwixt the prince and his people.

It is hard to say whom this insults more severely, monarchs or fathers. Fathers of families did not then, or at any time in English history, have the legal right to murder their children with impunity. Even in the seventeenth century, patriarchal as it was, a father who killed his own child would very properly be thought a monster. How fatherly authority is somehow transmuted and, after a waft through the air, becomes settled on the king, is anyone’s guess. But we should say that whenever people make an argument this shoddy, it’s usually because they are deeply committed to an irrational thesis, one for which they can offer no better defense.

Robert Filmer, that great apologist for absolute monarchy, argued similarly in his book Patriarcha that monarchs owed their authority to the very first family, that of Adam and Eve, over which Adam was purportedly the king:

[A]s Adam was lord of his children, so his children under him had a command and power over their own children, but still with subordination to the first parent, who is lord-paramount over his children’s children to all generations, as being the grandfather of his people.

I see not then how the children of Adam, or of any man else, can be free from subjection to their parents. And this subjection of children being the fountain of all regal authority, by the ordination of God himself; it follows that civil power… in general is by divine institution

John Locke skewered this view in the First Treatise, in ways we need not discuss here. But I’ve saved the worst example for last. It’s from the notorious slavery apologist George Fitzhugh:

Nature impels the father and husband to self-abnegation and self-denial to promote the happiness of wife and children… Wife and children, too, see and feel that in denying themselves and promoting the happiness of the head of the family, they pursue true policy… Especially, however, is it true with slaves and masters, that to “do as they would be done by” is mutually beneficial. Good treatment and proper discipline renders the slave happier, healthier, more valuable, grateful, and contented. Obedience, industry and loyalty on the part of the slave, increases the master’s ability and disposition to protect and take care of him. The interests of all the members of a natural family, slaves included, are identical.

Slavery is good, Fitzhugh claimed, because slavery is like a family. He later added that “Christian morality is neither difficult nor unnatural where dependent, family, and slave relations exist, and Christian morality was preached and only intended for such.” This is the awful power of an unexamined moral authority. It can lead you anywhere, if you only allow it.

Now, I am a classical liberal. I am also a feminist, at least to the extent that feminists will accept me. (It’s complicated.) In our various guises, we liberals and feminists have waged a long, long war on the patriarchy. As John Stuart Mill put it:

the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes — the legal subordination of one sex to the other — is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.

Our war on the patriarchy has brought liberty to women, liberty to children, and even liberty to men, who are no longer forced by custom or by the law to wield a power over others that no one should have. We can even ask – sensibly, for the first time in history – whether men are in decline, and whether women may in time become the dominant gender. Whether or not that ever comes to pass, we can say for certain that in our society, women are not perpetual daughters, and children are not thought an appropriate model for grown adults in a polity.

In all likelihood, full-blown patriarchy is never coming back. But even to this day, political theorists and political actors alike would absolutely love to wear the mantle of the family, and to stake a convincing claim to the moral authority that it provides. When we grant that authority uncritically, it remains disturbing how much it can accomplish.

On the left, we all remember how the “Life of Julia” feature from the Obama campaign showed Julia constantly leaning on the state, but creepily isolated from any hint of a family. The state, it seemed, had become her family, or at least so close a substitute as to make no difference. On the right, it remains jarring to hear the phrase “family values” invoked to oppose the very existence of a family that resembles my own – that is, a family headed by a same-sex couple. By the moral authority of the family, certain families are to be discouraged.

So the family in politics still has a bit of a dark side to it. It can still function as a source of unearned moral authority, and it can still do harm. Fortunately, though, real families are nothing like the ugly caricatures that politics has so often made of them. At least in the modern era, real families have a variety of shapes and sizes, and that’s just how things are when people are free.
 
In closing, my questions for Professor Hall are simple: How did we get from there to here? How did family become a mostly moderating social institution, when previously it was the cornerstone of a pervasive despotism? If family moderates our politics, what moderated our families?

Response to Jason Kuznicki

At the end of Jason Kuznicki’s excellent discussion of the link between patriarchy and despotism, he asks a few key questions:

How did we get from there to here? How did family become a mostly moderating social institution, when previously it was the cornerstone of a pervasive despotism? If family moderates our politics, what moderated our families?

I would say there are (at least) two things going on here. First, the patriarchal family cited by Filmer and others is a perfect example of the use and abuse of the family to justify a particular political ideology. Filmer, like Locke after him, tries to claim the family as the foundation of his own political theory. In Filmer’s case, his argument is (roughly) that God gave man dominion over women and children and that we can trace the absolute monarch’s right to rule all the way back to that original grant of power to Adam. Of course, this characterization assumes a great many things about the family that Kuznicki admits no one actually supported, such as fathers having an absolute right over their children’s lives, and so forth. Real families don’t actually operate that way. The families that existed, while certainly patriarchal in nature, were much less patriarchal than Filmer’s depiction, and it was, in part, the intimate nature of familial relations in the form of the aristocracy (among many other things) that eventually helped moderate the claims of absolute monarchy. Locke’s response to Filmer is intriguing here, since he uses the family to annihilate Filmer’s claims by recasting familial relations as based entirely on consent. This characterization fails almost as badly as Filmer’s, since the idea that the family is purely consensual strikes even the most libertarian among us as problematic. Locke and Filmer both recast the family to justify a particular kind of political theory, but in each case, the family they describe does not and cannot exist in real life. Thus, the link drawn by authors like Filmer between the family and patriarchal despotism is almost entirely fabricated.  

At the same time, the link that’s often made between absolute monarchy, patriarchy, and the traditional family needs to be taken seriously. Many liberals (of all varieties) shy away from discussions of the family because they associate it with patriarchal traditional family forms. This hesitation makes moderate discussions of the current state of families almost impossible. And, of course, most families throughout human history have been patriarchal in some way. Patriarchy is partly the result of the reality that the demands of pregnancy and childbirth create periods of dependence where women need external resources and assistance to survive. In pre-industrial societies, this burden was particularly great. The political, economic, and cultural climates changed over time, however, to limit such dependence. As women gained access to resources and as pregnancy and childbirth became less dangerous and more compatible with working outside the home, women’s dependence on men decreased. As cultural and economic realities shifted, laws changed to allow women the right to own property, the right to custody of children after a divorce, easier divorces, better education, and access to better paying jobs. These shifts allowed for the rise of what has been called the “companionate marriage,” marriages based not on need and dependence, but on affection and love. These marriages, because they represent a more moderate balance between male and female desires, may also help moderate politics over time.

But politics impacts families as well, and immoderate politics leads to immoderate families. Women’s subordination to men only became complete thanks to state interventions such as denying the property, contract, and other rights Kuznicki mentions. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a feminist primatologist, argued that, in general, women are the least free of the female great apes since cultural practices can enforce male dominance and patriarchal institutions in a way that males in ape groups cannot.[i] Of course, the same intelligence and language abilities that created laws to prevent women from owning property and made divorce from abusive husbands difficult also allowed women to resist patriarchy through a variety of means, with the results we’ve seen today. It’s obviously crucial for anyone who does work on the family to distinguish between moderate family forms and immoderate family forms. I’ve argued elsewhere against polygamy in large part because of its link to patriarchal control, and there are other kinds of family forms, including extreme patriarchal monogamy, that do not support the kind of political moderation that leads to freedom. Just like any foundational human institution, families are only as good as the people in them. And of course, the goodness or badness of the people in families is often a result of the structures of families themselves. But in general, immoderate family forms can do much less harm today than in the past since women and children are protected to some degree from the worst of abusive patriarchy. Moderate government moderates the family as well.

Response to Scott Yenor

Scott Yenor’s response points to some important aspects of the discussion I left out, though I think we’ll still disagree on some foundational issues. I believe very strongly in family for its own sake. Family is the source of, for many people at least, our deepest attachments, our fondest memories, and our greatest losses. Like Yenor, I believe the family to be rooted in our natures as human beings.

Yenor is concerned, however, that my understanding of moderation is not adequately rooted in nature to allow me to judge from a stable eternal standard. He suggests that while I might be concerned about suggestions to replace the family with daycare or enforced egalitarian parenting, my moderation does not offer a stable enough standard to resist such changes. Here I think Yenor misunderstands the roots of my moderate understanding of the family. What I try to tease out in the book, and did not have room for in the essay, is that my understanding of the family is based, at least in large part, on an understanding of natural human desires. I would agree with Yenor that men and women, on average, have different desires for child rearing. And children have fairly well understood needs for attached caregivers, consistent discipline, and free play.

At the same time, there is wide variation in what constitutes “good” parenting, with egalitarian sharing of childcare having similar kinds of outcomes to more traditional gender-based division of labor because both are capable of satisfying the emotional, developmental, and psychological needs of children. In the same way, there are particular family forms that we know are problematic, on average, because they fail to either fulfill our natural needs and desires or moderate between different goods and interests. Polygamy, for example, will tend to produce individual- and societal-level results like patriarchal sex-roles and skewed sex-ratios that create imbalances in the family that spill over into the wider community. Single parenthood too is problematic because it tends to be difficult for a single parent to provide the kind of emotional, financial, and psychological stability children need as they grow. But within the confines of what I call “moderate monogamy” there is a wide (though by no means infinite) range of family types that are capable of producing moderate social individuals who are also loved and capable of loving. This would include, for example, stable same-sex marriages. I suspect Yenor would see same-sex marriage as a rejection of the natural coupling between sex and reproduction. I instead see such marriage as the culmination of the natural desire for conjugal bonding and reproduction. I see a wider range of both parenting practices and a wider range of family forms as being capable of producing social individuals than Yenor does. 

This tolerance for variation does not, however, make my position one of mere anchorless moderation that shifts every time the public opinion blows. Instead, it is rooted in an understanding of what humans need to survive and thrive. My argument is not for a moderate family however the current majority defines moderation. Instead, I argue for a family that fulfills our desires as social individuals, and that understanding requires an understanding of human flourishing and the goods that allow for such flourishing. While the particulars of that social individualism may change over time and from society to society, the broad parameters of what it means to flourish remain the same everywhere and always. 

While I don’t think Yenor will find the above particularly persuasive, largely because I approach the definition of “natural” from a different perspective than he does, what is important, and where I agree with Yenor absolutely, is that we defend the family from the extremely pernicious argument that the family’s activities are replaceable by government activity. The family is ultimately too precious, not just for politics, but for individual flourishing, to not fight for. But that fight requires that we be willing both to judge immoderate families and to accept a variety of families that support flourishing. This approach is not relativism, but prudence.

At the risk of turning this conversation into a love fest, let me begin by agreeing broadly with how Hall states the differences between us. These differences ultimately concern two things. First, how stable are the stable things underlying marriage and the family? (And how unstable or extraneous are the unstable things?) Second, how can those who would protect or defend those stable things in the modern world do so moderately and prudently? Neither of us are anti-moderation or anti-prudence (I have written a review of her book elsewhere entitled “What does prudence demand?”), yet how we might apply those virtues differs. My conservatism may seem to be more of the “go back” variety on several questions, while hers, if that is what it is, is more of a “go slow” variety.

Hall’s “go slow” nature, I take it, is part of why Steven Horwitz, an advocate of spontaneous order and social evolution fulfilling the demands of “social individualism,” finds himself in so much agreement with her. What is stable in family life? What is unstable? For Hall, the stable things include “natural needs and desires,” including the need children have for individualized attention and “emotional, financial, and psychological stability” as they mature; and “the natural desire for conjugal bonding and reproduction” on which marriage is based. Hall also finds the marital form to have constants when it comes to the latter, which explains her advocacy of a “moderate monogamy,” as against those advocating for polygamy and the equivalence between single-parenting and other forms.

This is true so far as it goes, in my judgment (though I confess to thinking that a defense of same-sex marriage on the basis of the “conjugal bonding and reproduction” it affords is among the oddest of all defenses I have heard and it is not the one favored by same-sex marriage advocates). The idea of “moderate monogamy” as the centerpiece of a family culture does not rely on the connection between “sex and reproduction” that Hall imputes to me. It relies instead on the connection between having children and caring for them, between procreation and education. By my calculations, even in 2012, after decades of family decline, around 96% of American children under 18 live with at least one of their biological parents (though, admittedly, the numbers living with only one biological parent have increased dramatically over the past 50 years, and the number living with married biological parents has declined as well). Nevertheless, the connection between biology and parenting is so consistent across time and cultures as to make me think that they are not due to mere chance.  We do not randomly assign children, or raise them communally, or produce them through genetic cloning and then assign them to licensed users.  There seems to be a connection between giving birth to children and taking responsibility for them. Very, very few children in America are adopted or in foster homes (about 2% of all children).

We might be able to peel this back further and argue for a connection between sex and having children. Less than 5% of children are products of artificial birth technologies in America. This would suggest that sex, procreation, and education are all related somehow. The old view would be that sex and procreation are united under a larger institution called marriage or monogamy. Marriage—the learning to live together with another in hard and good times, the sacrificing of one’s own identity to a larger whole, the rolling with changes in character that result from a long time living with another—is then the school for parenthood. Precisely how parents arrange the job of parenting is, as Hall notes, subject to more than a little individual variation.

What this all suggests to me is that a moderate, prudent approach to marriage and family life in the modern world must not proceed simply from natural desires and needs. It must also respect that human beings and modern peoples specifically depend, for the most part, on connections between procreation and education and between marriage and parenthood for bringing about the best being of the child.

The task of parenthood requires a stable character, patience, the ability to ride out highs and lows, partisanship on behalf of one’s children, a sense of objectivity about one’s children, an investment of time, a covering love, a willingness to be hard, a willingness to be soft, a willingness to enforce rules, a willingness sometimes to ignore actions that break rules, providing a home, allowing children to spread their wings and no doubt countless other characteristics that I do not have. “Social individualism” as a concept is too abstract, in my view, to capture the complexity of what parenthood, at its best, is.

What does Hall miss by pitching her goal at too abstract a level and her defense of the family on the basis of natural needs and desires? Here I would pose a series of questions meant to tease out the problem. Would Hall be willing to limit, in law or in opinion, adoptions and artificial reproductive technologies to married couples? Does Hall favor Title IX, an effort to re-engineer women to make them less suited or interested in marriage and family life? Does Hall favor the next wave of feminist reform (a reconstituted, flexible workplace and subsidized high quality day care) to save women from the second shift at home while allowing them to pursue a meaningful career?

Any understanding of prudence must begin with a question of what the political good on these matters looks like and then make prudent accommodations to approximate that good. In my view, the political good connects various experiences such as procreation and education and marriage and parenting. Efforts to erode these connections are bound, in the long run, to harm children and undermine society. Such an erosion has been afoot in some measure for fifty years or so. Sometimes preventing erosion requires a strategic retreat to a more important line. Sometimes it involves making public arguments about the importance of a particular line.

The problem of single-parenthood is central to the contemporary problems in our inner cities and in income and economic mobility stagnation. Government has very few levers to deal with this issue. It is a matter of culture and mores. No one knows exactly what prudence demands, except to make public arguments or display public works of art about the importance of parenthood to a good life. Until this matter of culture changes, the drift toward ever greater state responsibility will be well nigh unstoppable. The future of free markets and self-government depends on the future of the family. Hall deeply recognizes this problem. Her framework also provides a way out. Two and a half cheers for Hall!

In this response I want to tackle issues raised by all three of my colleagues. I want to try to answer Jason’s question about what moderated the family in a bit more depth than Lauren did in her reply, and then I want to use that answer to address the overarching theme of Scott’s response essay.

Lauren rightly points to a variety of economic considerations that helped moderate the patriarchy of the pre-modern family. I want to expand on those and connect them to the development of the companionate marriage. The key point of change was the emergence of capitalism in the late 18^th and early 19^th century. For most of prior human history, marriage and family for most people were narrowly economic institutions (except among the very wealthy, for whom they were more political than economic). Marriage was not about finding a soul-mate, but a partner in production. Whether it was agriculture or small crafts, or even early trade, the family was the site of economic production, and family members were much more like employees than they are today in the capitalist world. Marriage was about finding a partner whose human capital in production appropriately complemented your own in order to engage in the family business, most often agriculture.

The family’s status as production unit helps to understand the patriarchy. The father was, roughly, the owner and CEO, and family members were productive assets to be deployed as needed. Women and children worked the land or contributed in other ways, but under the direction of the father. He was not only, as Jason’s essay suggests, the political head of the household, he was effectively the owner and manager of its productive capacity as well.

As the expansion of markets brought more trade and the factory system brought more wage labor, the productive importance of the family declined. People began to work outside of the home, and the house shifted from a site of production to one of consumption. This change brought about a gradual shift in the nature of marriage. No longer was complementary production-oriented human capital key to a good marriage. Instead, people began to look for spouses with whom they had other sorts of complementarities, and many of those were increasingly about consumption and other activities that they both enjoyed. The love-based companionate marriage began to emerge, thanks to the change in economic institutions, and, in the words of Stephanie Coontz, love slowly conquered marriage.

At the same time, the way people talked about other people began to change. Liberalism in its classical form gave us a language of equality and increasing respect for the dignity of all human beings, as well as an aversion to coercion, that contributed to the emergence of what Deirdre McCloskey calls “the bourgeois virtues.” Those virtues were a contributing cause of the flowering of innovation and trade we call the Industrial Revolution, but they were also enhanced by it.

Together, the love-based marriage and the liberal “habits of the lip” associated with the bourgeois virtues moderated the power of the patriarchy. Marriages based on love provided women with the ability to call men on their abuses of power within the family, as did women’s ability to draw on the language of equality, especially by the start of the 20^th century. As women also gained tangible political and economic rights, their ability to escape the patriarchy slowly began to increase, and that new bargaining power was a force of moderation as well. We see this reflected in late 19^th century literature, where domestic violence against women was increasingly portrayed as morally unacceptable behavior.

Once the love-based marriage began to dominate, and the language of liberal equality began to expand, there was no going back. The 20^th century saw market capitalism produce enormous wealth and a dramatic increase in female labor force participation, which accelerated the trends of the century prior and also gave us the advances in contraception that broke the link between marriage and procreation. The result of those changes is seen in the diversity of family forms we observe today. The most obvious example is the advent of legalized same-sex marriage, which is the unsurprising outcome of marriage and family having become almost completely about love and emotional satisfaction rather than production and reproduction.

The combination of structural economic change and a shift toward liberal respect for equality and human dignity makes these changes in marriage and family, in my view, irreversible. What counts as the moderation of families is not, as Scott charges, merely the result of the short-run whims of public opinion. In fact, that moderation has been driven by secular changes in economic and political institutions as well as fundamental belief systems. If one believes those changes have pointed us in the wrong direction, those are not ships that can be turned around easily, if at all.

I think that these changes in the family have been largely positive developments. The moderation of the family is a good thing for all the reasons Lauren discusses, and it has provided greater respect for the diversity of human relationships and more freedom to pursue those deeply meaningful life choices in the ways we see fit. It has also rescued women and children from the not normally benevolent despotism of the patriarchy. Capitalism and liberalism moderated the family and made it more humane. Why anyone would want to undo those changes remains a mystery to me.

I thank Steve for his intervention into this conversation. His final question states the terms of the debate clearly. “Capitalism and liberalism moderated the family and made it more humane,” Horwitz writes, “Why anyone would want to undo those changes remains a mystery to me.” While I am no Sherlock Holmes, perhaps I can shed some light on this mystery.

I do appreciate that Steve believes that marriage and family form follow the “mode of production.” I think it just as likely that the causal arrows point in the other direction, namely that ideas about individual thriving, the conquest of nature, and family life have produced a new economy and the new complex of political ideas that have done so much good in the world. Nor do I think that these changes are the product, as Steve seems to think I think, of “short term whims” in public opinion. I trace the changes in marriage and family life to the earliest rumblings of modern political thought and an ever more thorough application of modern principles of contract and the conquest of nature. The changes are deep, long-seated, long-lasting, and very difficult to contain. Some of the movements are going to be impossible to reverse in the short or medium term and quite possibly in the long term. My powers of prophecy are not as sharp perhaps as Steve’s in this respect.

There are also more than a few beneficial consequences of this revolution.

The question is whether the advent of “moderate monogamy” has brought with it any negatives, whether the better comes at all with the bitter, and whether we can understand the costs that come with the revolution in married life. So let me pose the question in the following way: We show, as Steve suggests, “greater respect for the diversity of human relationships and more freedom to pursue those deeply meaningful life choices in the ways we see fit.” By this I take it he means to celebrate the fact that we treat cohabitation and single-parenthood the same as marriage; that we allow homosexual couples to marry, adopt, or have access to artificial reproductive technologies; that we allow for no-fault divorce so people can exit relationships when they do not comport with their conceptions of the good; and that other efforts to de-institutionalize marriage are welcome. Why, Steve asks, could any sane person resist these developments?

For an answer, I suggest Lauren’s book or a study of urban family arrangements and their outcomes. Lauren catalogues the problems of single parenthood, which include greater dependence on social provision, poor educational achievement, increased criminality, higher poverty rates, and a slew of other social ills. When Lauren published Family and the Politics of Moderation, around 73% of all African-American children were born to single mothers. That number has not declined. Has “greater respect for the diversity of human relationships” been a boon to these women and children or to these men? Are urban families better off?

Let us continue in this direction. Marriages designed for adult fulfillment tend to bring about a dearth in births and hence a loss of society’s dynamism, as society ages and as more resources are drained away to service the aging population. This is a trend noted since the late 1990s in book after book. Does the “greater respect for the diversity of human relationships” mean societal collapse? Are childless couples better off? Is society better off? Are such couples ultimately happier?

Charles Murray’s Coming Apart or Andrew Cherlin’s Labor’s Love Lost show that our moderate monogamy has also helped to stall equality of opportunity, or to harm the “right to rise” in the United States, as we are becoming a nation divided along family lines. Children from two-parent homes are generally getting a big leg up on those from broken homes. As the importance of education and work ethic increase, this gap gets larger. Is a “greater respect for the diversity of human relationships” helpful for the children or adults from these broken relationships? 

Let me be clear about this. I do not think that there is much government can do to reverse these trends, and I do not see these trends reversing themselves absent a strong, unexpected religious revival. There are still questions, however, of whether we should welcome further efforts to reconstruct the connections at the center of marriage and family life. Should we embrace genetic cloning to further weaken the link between procreation and education? Should we publicly fund efforts to mass-produce artificial wombs that might do the same? Should we encourage more flexible work environments, publicly subsidize day care, or have a minimal family wage? Should we welcome the production of sex robots as expressions of our “great respect for the diversity” of human choices, if not human relationships? 

Despite the fact that we cannot resist all of these changes, we should nevertheless understand the structure of what is going on. The de-institutionalizing of marriage may be a triumph in some respects for modern freedom, but it has inescapable costs related to children and society. We should look at “advances” in marriage arrangements through the ancient prism of tragedy, in which successes and failures come as a package deal. This is what ultimately separates Steve’s pretty much unqualified praise of modern movements and my skepticism. Could it be that for Steve life is a comedy and for me it has more than a few tragic elements?

Precisely how intelligent human beings evaluate the balance sheets on these goods and evils is a question that is open for debate, but that there is a balance sheet with credits and debits seems to be one of the truest deliverances of ancient and, in fact, classical liberal (as opposed to utopian) wisdom.

Scott argues that the fact that so few children live with non-biological relatives suggests that “sex, procreation, and education are all related somehow. The old view would be that sex and procreation are united under a larger institution called marriage or monogamy.” Of course they’re related, because until very recently, it was very unlikely you would have children if you were not a fertile heterosexual. Now, of course, things have changed. I suppose my argument about reproduction as the foundation for even same-sex marriage is based on anecdotal evidence from the individuals in same-sex marriages I know. Most of my gay friends desire children and have sought out the means to have children, whether through sperm donation, surrogacy, or adoption. Technological limitations therefore explain a big part of the pattern Scott points out. But, as with many new technological changes, people will be very likely to use these new technologies to fulfill their natural desires as human beings. I see little difference between a gay couple fulfilling their desire for reproduction and child-rearing through artificial insemination and a straight couple doing the same thing. Having children, for many if not most married couples, is a fulfillment of the desires of the two partners for a greater union through the creation of a loving family. Scott’s discussion here ignores the universal desires, shared by most individuals, for monogamous coupling and the raising of children. How those children get here seems less important to me than how they are loved once they arrive. 

Steve’s post, on the other hand, slightly misses the mark from the other side. I agree in broad terms with Steve’s characterization of the new moderate family and all the benefits we’ve received from the shift away from patriarchal family as a unit of production. That being said, there are genuine concerns about specific family forms for societies based on free and responsible individuals. Families, as Steve knows, are the foundation for the manners and mores that make the Great Society possible. Certain family forms, single-parenthood and polygamy among them, will struggle to form this kind of character, not because the people in these families are bad, but because the family form itself cannot serve as an adequate transmission device for those manners and mores. The failure of the family as transmitter of manners and mores requires more state intervention in the family and the erosion of the character that prevents the need for government intervention in other areas of life. The crisis is particularly acute among the urban poor. There are important economic and public policy recommendations to reduce the impact of drug laws and mass incarceration on the family, there is also some evidence, as Kay Hymowitz suggested this week, that the problem may be deeper than economic incentives can reach. Moderate supporters of the family need to be clear about the kinds of families the Great Society requires and also how we can encourage their formation.

I am guilty as charged by both Scott and Lauren for often looking at the changes in the family over the last century with excessive optimism. I have been known to over-emphasize the good things that have happened because so much of the literature on the family spends so much time on the (supposed) pathologies that someone has to step up and point out the good stuff. It a classic case of Bastiat’s seen and unseen: the bad stuff is visible and immediate, while the good stuff requires more work to see and has unfolded slowly over a longer period of time. Plus, we just take the good changes for granted and often are surprised when we’re reminded that the sorts of things I raised in my prior response are of relatively recent vintage.

So in the spirit of finding some common ground, let me say that I agree with the broad tenor of both Scott’s and Lauren’s rap on my knuckles. The world would be a better place if every child were raised by two loving, caring, well-resourced parents. (I agree with Lauren that the sex/gender of the parents does not matter for this point.) The social scientific evidence is pretty clear that kids raised in such families do better on average than kids raised by single parents or in foster care or orphanages or other institutional care. Of course saying kids do better on average does not mean that single parents are incapable of raising good kids. And as Scott says, admitting the problems facing families doesn’t necessarily mean state action is the cure.

I would just add that we run a certain risk by focusing so much on the welfare of children. Adults matter too. Sometimes single parenthood happens because a marriage is bad, and high-conflict marriages are not only bad for the adults, they are bad for the kids. A wife and mother who exits a high-conflict marriage to raise her kids on her own might well be doing better by the kids, but her own well-being matters too. Healthy, less stressed adults also make better parents, especially if they are doing it on their own. No-fault divorce also reduced suicide rates among married women, as well as their propensity to murder their spouses. That seems like progress too.

As Lauren notes, there are a good number of reasons for the prevalence of single parenthood and low marriage rates among the poor and among African-Americans. We could do a lot by ending the War on Drugs and stop criminalizing and incarcerating millions of African-American men. We could do a lot by changing the tax code and welfare programs so that marriage among the poor was not the bad deal policy currently makes it.  We could do a lot by eliminating the economic regulations that create barriers to upward mobility among the poor and non-white, especially the minimum wage. All of these things would make marriage and family a better deal for the people who need it most without trying to undo the expansion of the range of choices that we’ve seen in the last century.

And none of this means we can’t use various bully pulpits and the levers of culture to sing the praises of married life and a family to all those who can hear it. In fact, I might argue that the recent Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage gives us just such an opportunity, as millions of our fellow Americans who very much wanted to participate in the institution of marriage, and who recognized its benefits, are now able to do so. That’s a pretty good counter-signal about the health of that venerable institution.

Finally, I’d like to directly answer the series of questions Scott raised in his last reply. I’m guessing he knows what my answers would be, but it’s worth talking about each of these:

There are still questions, however, of whether we should welcome further efforts to reconstruct the connections at the center of marriage and family life. Should we embrace genetic cloning to further weaken the link between procreation and education?

I don’t know about “embrace,” but should it be on the table as one option for those who want it?  Yup.

Should we publicly fund efforts to mass-produce artificial wombs that might do the same?

No, but that’s partially just my libertarianism talking. That said, if someone wanted to develop that technology privately and offer it as another option, again, not a problem.

Should we encourage more flexible work environments, publicly subsidize day care, or have a minimal family wage?

Lots of different options lumped together here. Yes, we should praise employers who are already offering and will continue to offer more flexible work environments, especially the opportunity to work from home. Working from home gives both two-income couples and single parents much more ability to manage child care in ways that I think serves the interest of children. It also allows men to work from home and take more responsibility for child care, which I think it not only salutary on its own, but will help to equalize male and female wages even further.  This is all, I think, part of the process of moderation.

No on publicly subsidizing day care. Instead, let’s deregulate it and encourage competition and reduce costs, as well as reaping the benefits of the expansion of work at home, as above. We can expand choices and reduce costs and give parents more flexibility for managing work and home without public funding.

And absolutely not on the family wage. For all the reasons economists have argued for a long time, minimum wages of any type are destructive, and given the history of the family wage as a tool of the patriarchy, it would be a huge step backward.

Should we welcome the production of sex robots as expressions of our “great respect for the diversity” of human choices, if not human relationships?

We’ve had machines for sexual pleasure for as long as we’ve had machines. The choices to use such machines are indeed human choices, but not “human relationships.” Trying to cram such choices into the category of “human relationships” seems insulting to the actual humans in those relationships.

Humans and our institutions are a lot more resilient than we often given them credit for. I may be overly optimistic, but, historically, betting on humanity’s descent into doom and gloom has always lost in comparison to betting on our resilience and ability to progress and enrich ourselves.

I have two related questions about our discussion: First, how resilient is the Great Society? And second, is that what we’re really arguing about? I will discuss them in turn, but I will say up front that I can’t readily answer either of them.

The Resilience of the Great Society

Let us begin with the first question. I take the Great Society here to mean that condition of society in which the division of labor, specialization, and gains from trade are capable of intensifying themselves in a virtuous circle. This is not to say that the society so described is a libertarian (or any other) utopia. Quite the contrary; Great Societies as I intend the term are both real and full of flaws. Many examples fit the bill, including even nominally communist China. After accounting for business cycles, economic growth in these places tends to be positive, and we will stipulate that nothing about the nature of the Great Society is inherently self-defeating.

If threats to a Great Society come from the outside, that is, from cultural forces that may or may not be coded as foreign, but that have no necessary role in establishing the Great Society itself – then how well do Great Societies resist such threats?

This is an empirical question, and we don’t have very much data to go on. David Hume once lamented that political philosophy had not yet had 3,000 years of experience on which to draw, and he held that this was too short a time to really understand too much. Great Societies, meanwhile, are perhaps only a tenth as old. As a result, we don’t know the full list of things that can make them fail, and perhaps we never will.

There’s a case here for conservatism, to be sure. We have a new thing, one that seems to be beneficial. And we don’t know which things might break it. Some caution is definitely in order.

We do, however, have a partial list of things that we know with some certainty to avoid. That list includes extensive land reform, collectivized industrial planning, significant currency manipulation, race wars, total wars, and forced migrations. All of these utterly wreck the webs of trust and tacit knowledge necessary to conduct a Great Society; in some cases, the damage from these acts can last for many generations.

We can also exclude quite a few things from the list of potential threats. The Great Society would appear to be compatible with many different spiritual and religious orientations, including Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Shinto, and secular humanism. (Each, incidentally, has a significantly different approach to the family and its role in society.) This diversity bodes well both for the Great Society’s future and for its status as an objective truth, consisting of social regularities that operate regardless of the various other contents found in individuals’ minds. We should all be thankful that the trick of having a Great Society doesn’t appear to depend on being a Protestant.

One thing that we do not yet know is whether the wholesale dissolution of the family poses a threat to the Great Society. Although it seems awful to contemplate, the truth is that a dissolution simply hasn’t happened yet. If we are being empirical, we ought to keep this fact in mind.

It could be, for example, that the wholesale dissolution of the family is practically impossible. As Lauren Hall notes in her book, real-world attempts by collectivists to supplant the family or to minimize its influence have overwhelmingly failed. Both the early history of the Soviet Union and the history of Israeli kibbutzim included ideologically committed efforts to re-engineer childrearing. They both met with a seemingly immovable object: People just preferred to have families. (Hall might have gone further and cited the ideological commitment of plantation owners in the Old South to treating human beings as property. Even that couldn’t stop African-Americans from forming families, and from striving to keep their families together.)

Great Societies almost definitionally don’t give social planners this type of power. Yet what if the family spontaneously dissolved, not through a planner’s edict, but through independent social forces and incentives? Some might argue that we are witnessing this very process today, although I am not among them. Still, though, if a spontaneous dissolution were to happen, would the Great Society go with it? 

Is That What We Are Arguing About?

This brings me to my second big question: Is the resilience of the Great Society in the face of a particular set of changes really what we’re arguing about?

Imagine a counterfactual world. In it, the institution of the family has disappeared, but the Great Society remains. (Babies are hatched from genetically engineered pods, perhaps, and educated by robots with friendly AI. It doesn’t really matter.)

Suppose that we find this counterfactual world is not dystopian. Rather, we envy it. Its citizens are politically free; they form deep, authentic friendships with one another; commerce, science, and the arts all flourish; they are ethically and spiritually commendable; and whatever differences may exist between them and us are to their credit, and not to ours. Only we have families, and they do not.

To be sure, there are no real-world societies that fit the bill. (Some may exist in fiction, but perhaps that’s where they will remain.) I bring up my counterfactual not because I think it’s practical (it isn’t), but because it raises a question about the ontology of the family.

That question is simple: If the family’s dissolution did not affect the Great Society, would we still care about it? Would we care as much? Or would we only care a little, the way we do about the loss of commercial whaling traditions, or about the terminal decline of the fedora?

In short, much of the discussion so far seems premised on a functionalist view of the family, one that tasks the family simply with reinstantiating the Great Society: The family makes adults who are able to take part in the Great Society, and that’s why we need it. And if that function were performed better by pods and robots, we might not even need the family anymore.

Still, I rather doubt that that’s an authentic position for any of us. Is the family merely functional?

Jason asks whether the family is merely functional. I think that question is harder to answer than it first appears. I take my cues on the importance of the family largely from my background in evolutionary biology. The family is crucial for individual development. Right now, at least, it cannot be replaced. Asking whether children could be raised in some kind of Skinner crib is perhaps the wrong question to ask. Perhaps the better question is why can’t we replace the family with other things? The ultimate explanation for this is rooted in evolutionary theory, but we don’t really need to go that far back. Developmentally, the family is absolutely necessary for human development of every kind. Children learn not only language and cultural norms from their parents, but also how to manage emotions, communicate, and trust. The incredible intelligence held as potential in our genes is useless until it is released, usually within the first two years of life, by interactions with loving, committed adults. Of course, this is itself a functionalist account to some degree. But more than an argument that a particular kind of society needs the family to be successful, the developmental argument for the family is that individual humans need the family to be successful humans. This of course does not mean that there are not terrible families out there and children who survive such families usually do so because there is someone else, perhaps a sibling, but maybe instead an unrelated caseworker or teacher, who cares enough to fulfill some of these basic attachment functions. But such stories are rare because the kind of commitment required to replace the family is so great that such commitment is rarely extended to non-kin. 

The role of the family in human flourishing brings me to my second point, which is merely to say that families are also the source of some of the deepest human joys and sorrows life can throw at us. Families, for most people, give life meaning. While defending the family because it serves important societal functions is one way to make policy makers pay attention (maybe), it shouldn’t replace, as Jason hints, the deeper defense of the family that most people would instead recognize. The family makes life worth living. And because it’s such an important human good, it can also make life unbearable when it is corrupted. It is the family’s connection to living and living well that should make us care, not only about the functions the family serves in the Great Society, but about the fate of the family itself. Because where the family goes, we go too. 

Our discussion so far has been quite abstract. I’d like to explore how our broad vision of the moderate family cashes out in terms of parental rights and public policy.

My own work approaches the family from a Hayekian perspective. A key part of that framework is the idea that knowledge is dispersed, contextual, and often tacit. This argument is at the core of Hayek’s objections to socialism and his case for the market: by establishing well-defined and well-protected property rights, we allow people to develop and use their local knowledge in ways that make the best use of resources. In the same way, it is parents who have the right incentives and best relevant knowledge to know what is best for their children. Establishing well-defined and well-protected parental rights encourages parents to act on this local knowledge and thereby helps to ensure the best outcomes for children.

The intimacy of the family provides parents with deep, and often tacit, knowledge of their child that can be deployed in finding the most effective ways to transmit social rules and norms. A great deal of the parent-child socialization process works through imitation, as imitation is a way to pass on knowledge that otherwise cannot be articulated. The family provides an ideal setting for this sort of imitative learning.

Parents also have strong incentives to make sure that such behaviors are learned, as the family remains a major site of social interaction where appropriate behavior will make such interactions smoother, and because other family members may suffer negative external reputation effects due to the misbehavior of children. Children who do not learn the rules of social interaction will cause their parents to suffer both directly and indirectly, thus providing parents with an incentive to ensure that such rules are learned.

The family’s role in this Hayekian socialization process is complemented by schools, houses of worship, and the other elements of civil society. However, none of them can completely replace the family. Where responsibility for raising children is diffuse, and where those in charge lack the necessary knowledge and incentives, we would expect the same sorts of commons problems we are familiar with in other realms. Allowing “the village” to raise children is no more likely to succeed than allowing “the village” to run agriculture or industry.

How does this case for parental rights and responsibilities translate into public policy? The newspapers are full of stories of parents who have made choices that clearly do not have the best interests of their children in mind. Do these cases necessarily require some action on the part of the state or others to stop the parental behavior in question? For Hayekians, the question is always a comparative one: even if parents are imperfect, will the state or other institutions that intervene in the family necessarily improve upon the imperfect parenting?

No set of social institutions will perform perfectly across the whole range of knowledge and incentives facing human actors. Instead, we must look for those that work better, and Hayek’s standard of judgment was to prefer those institutions that have built-in powerful ways of informing actors of their mistakes and providing them the incentives to correct them. Mere imperfection in one set of institutions is not automatically a reason to adopt an alternative. We must ask whether the alternative can actually improve upon the mistakes of the first. We can apply that framework to the issue of imperfect parenting and the role of the state.

Imagine a case of child neglect, though not physical abuse. The parents are not sufficiently caring for the kids in terms of consistently providing warm clothes or regular, nutritious meals, or medical care. They also leave the children home alone and unsupervised quite a bit and none of them are older than ten. Assume that the children are in no immediate physical danger. It might be tempting to call this a case of “parenting failure” and ask Child Protective Services to intervene, perhaps even removing the children from the home. In the face of such a temptation, the first Hayekian question worth asking is the comparative question “and do what with them?” Is the alternative that the state will offer for the children really better, on net, than their current situation? Suppose that alternative is foster care. There is enough empirical evidence on the problems with foster care, especially short-term placements where the incentive to really behave as a steward for the child is weaker, to be skeptical that it would be an improvement. When we account for the psychological effects on younger children of being taken from their parents and placed with strangers, the comparative analysis suggests the case for intervention is even weaker.

In addition, we can ask in the case of parenting failure whether there are other non-state institutions of civil society that could be brought into play to help these parents perform better (e.g., a religious institution, a neighborhood group, extended family members, etc.). In the specific case of neglect, the problems are often financial, rather than bad parenting per se. In such cases, the sorts of civil society solutions noted above are far more likely to be appropriate than removing the kids from the home of what are otherwise well-intentioned parents. One of the problems facing state intervention from a Hayekian perspective is knowing all of the fine details of each particular case sufficiently to come up with a solution. In general, those closest to the family are in the best position to understand the problems at hand, imagine an effective solution, and have an incentive to act on that knowledge. Bureaucrats with dozens of cases or more are unlikely to come close to the knowledge and incentives possessed by those in the family’s local sphere.

Steven Pinker has said of our own time: “The historical increase in the valuation of children has entered its decadent phase.” In such a world, those of us who understand the importance of the family as a social institution will have to push back against public policies that are increasingly encroaching on parental rights in the belief that any risk to the safety of children is intolerable. Such corner solutions are neither wise public policy nor smart parenting. Hayek can help us understand why parents are in the best position to judge what is best for their kids, and why the way to help parents who are struggling is through the people and institutions closest to them. Restoring those beliefs will be a battle, but there are few fights more important for the future of the family and the liberal order.

Since the discussion has taken a practical turn, I’d like to delve a bit deeper into some of our concerns about how best to encourage a kind of moderate monogamy (as I call it) and take a look at how we can encourage or defend such monogamy without relying on government nudges or prohibitory laws.

We know that incentivizing marriage does not seem to do much. Both conservative and liberal think tanks bemoan the fact that there does not seem to be much government can do in a positive sense to encourage people to marry. But, of course, many people are getting married and staying together. Those people tend to be middle class individuals with college educations. The question is not how we get people to marry but why some groups marry and stay married so much more than others.

There are, of course, many ways in which the political system creates disincentives for marriage among people of the lower class. Some bemoan the welfare state as become a replacement for stable relationships, which may be true, but we are confronted with a chicken-and-egg problem. Do poor women eschew marriage because they can get welfare benefits, or do they end up on welfare because marriage is not possible in their current environment?

One part of the answer might be to take a closer look at sex ratios among lower class individuals. A cluster of facts leads to a somewhat startling conclusion. First, lower class men are failing at life at significantly higher levels than lower class women. They are less likely to get an education, less likely to have stable jobs, and more likely to engage in risky behavior like drug and alcohol addiction and criminal activity. The Economist recently had an entire issue devoted to this topic, and Hanna Rosin famously declared the End of Men five years ago. What this means for the family is that the pool of acceptable marriage partners is skewed. There are far more marriageable women than there are marriageable men in lower income brackets. Lower-income women, being perfectly capable of seeing patterns in their environment, may very well choose to have a child by a man without wanting to bank her financial and emotional future on a very uncertain investment. His genes may be good enough, but everything else will likely lead to a lot of trouble, particularly since marriage involves entangling economic alliances.

It’s not just the effect of the information economy on males that skews sex ratios. There are, by some estimates, as many as 1.5 million missing black males due to a combination of violence and incarceration. In some neighborhoods, this means there may be as many as 140 black women for every 100 black men. Monogamy is simply not possible under these circumstances. While Kay Hymowitz points out that the demise of the black family started well before mass incarceration, skewed sex ratios make any resurgence of the family among low-income communities nearly impossible. There just aren’t enough men to go around.

Imbalanced sex ratios impact the way men operate as well. When there is a glut of women in the mating pool, either because of incarceration or because there are too many unmarriagable men, the marriageable men have no incentive to commit. Men in these circumstances know women don’t have many options, so promiscuity and lack of commitment become the rulebook by which both sexes operate. Such a situation makes both men and women unhappy and less well off in the long run, but both sexes are stuck in prisoner’s dilemma created by sex ratio imbalances they may not even know exist.

If we care about the effect families have on the creation of stable political communities (and, as Jason points out, about families themselves) we need to discuss, as Steve has, the kinds of government policies that affect sex ratios, which in turn affect the decisions men and women make about marriage and reproduction.

A few proposals then. Eliminate drug policies that take men away from their families and that skew sex ratios, making monogamous pairing impossible. Provide more opportunities for working class men to get jobs. This may include eliminating or reducing certification and licensing laws that prevent people from entering various occupations that in themselves may require little formal education. While we’ve made it easier than ever to be incarcerated, we’ve also made it harder and harder to get a job or start a business. Re-emphasize the importance of skilled labor in middle and high schools. The emphasis on college degrees has pushed people away from skilled labor, despite the fact that in many parts of the country there is a serious dearth of skilled laborers to fill stable and well-paying jobs. Finally, reassess welfare benefits that create a marriage tax on the poor.

None of these suggestions will by themselves turn the boat of family dissolution around, but they could at least take the lock off the steering wheel. Without enough men to marry, stable marriage among lower-income people will continue to be mathematically impossible and the marriage gulf will continue to expand inequality between the lower and middle classes.

I love the way that Jason poses the question, because it shows the stakes in the debate. It is not merely that families are about well-being as we understand it now, and all attempts to defend family life purely on those terms have something missing. Lauren’s response—that the family is an end in itself and experienced as such—is good so far as it goes. I think that more needs to be said in this respect, so let me restate Jason’s challenge and talk a bit about how political philosophy deals with it.

Perhaps I have more faith in technology than the others in this regard, but I do think that we may, in the medium term, replace the family and find other things that perform its functions in the future. Perhaps cloning instead of procreation. Perhaps day cares instead of families—it would be a matter for state institutions since families would not be involved in producing children. Perhaps the universal desires that Lauren sees are less universal than she thinks, and people do not have a desire to propagate as opposed to copulate (some evidence tends in this direction, I would suggest, as we see the world wide decline in birth rates well below replacement rates in almost every country in the advanced world). Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

But what sits at the other side of this divide will not be human beings. Perhaps, as Steve may think, they will be “more than human” and the advances in freedom will lead to an open-ended progress—or is his confession that he wears rose-colored glasses a confession that he is fibbing a little, and that he sees a tragic element in all of this? I tend to think that it would be a tragedy if we lived in a post-familial future and that the leaky, weather-beaten vessel of our humanity reflects the truth of our mixed condition. I think that I have Huxley’s Brave New World in my corner. John the Savage—a human being in the old sense of the term in that book—defends the idea that our condition is filled with ups and downs, and costs, and that it has its strange beauty too. The hope for a costless future is the hope for a post-human future.

In the long-term, in other words, I think the future of humanity is at stake in how we think about the family. It is the job of political theory or political philosophy to consider what our condition is and how our regime affects our nature.

Perhaps some think that political philosophy is a venue for coming up with legal rules or distinctions. It certainly involves such things. Yet it must go beyond them to reflect on our nature and how it is shaped by our regime. I think that the ultimate question dividing our conversation concerns the nature of human being. Regimes emphasize some elements of our nature at the expense of others, and it is the job of a statesman, informed by political philosophy, to call attention to the elements of human nature that a regime neglects and to defend those elements in an effort to bring balance to the regime. Regimes are partisan or partial, and political philosophy aims at the whole.