It is a great honour to have been invited to give the 1995 John Bonython lecture dedicated to the exploration of the links between individuals and the economic, social and political elements that go to make up a free society. While I shall take this charge very seriously, I shall do so in a manner decidedly different from the one you have become accustomed to. Instead of talking about how the macro institutions of the economy, the state, the media, and so forth, affect individual life – as a distinguished succession of John Bonython lecturers have done before me – I shall talk about the role of the micro-institution of the family in the creation of prosperity and liberty. In particular I shall try to show that inner dynamics peculiar to the much maligned bourgeois or middle-class family – that is to say a family consisting of father, mother, and their children fused into a unit by its distinctive ethos – provided the emerging democratic capitalist societies of the West with their organising principles and moral character. And in looking towards the future, I shall submit that dynamics flowing from this type of family, rather than any industrial policy or governmental strategy, will be decisive in shaping the future of nations.
Looking at the world through the prism of the family implies a “bottom-up” perspective of how the world works in contrast to the “top-down” structural one customarily employed by economists and policy on the life of nations, a “bottom-up” perspective pays attention to the social consequences flowing from the ways ordinary people behave in their everyday life, at their values and the hopes that inspire them. This approach may strike you as unfamiliar, if not odd. From early childhood on we have been conditioned to accept the view that the family is a helpless pawn of powerful forces flowing from technology, the economy, and the law. And here this stranger from America – with a German accent to boot – comes and claims the opposite to be true! Hence it will require a major effort on my part to induce you to think about these matters in different ways. But such an effort, I think, is precisely what is called for today when ever more of those who enjoy a freedom and prosperity unknown to human history have begun to experience the modern world as problematic. Although many of us are vaguely aware of the fact that there exist linkages between our private life and the large institutional order of the society we live in, few of us realise the degree to which the two are intertwined, a degree that allows me to state – unequivocally – that public life lies at the mercy of private life. Yet we know – at least since Aristotle – that human beings are social beings who can develop their humanity only in the company of other human beings, in the families and moral communities in which they are embedded. And this timeless dictum takes me to the theme of my talk today.
The Family and the Social Construction of Civilisations
Let me start my comments with the simple, straightforward proposition that the family is the culture-creating institution par excellence. All over the world, wherever one turns, today as in the past, an incontestable argument can be made that the family, and not the individual of the economist’s paradigm, is the most basic building block on which all other social forms rest. The family itself is the product of the most elementary and most virulent emotions of human nature – love, hate, sex, hunger, sacrifice, punishment, loneliness, religious yearnings, and so on. It is the basic locale in which human production and reproduction takes place, becomes routinised, habituated, and, ultimately, institutionalised. Over time, the patterns or ways in which these properties of human nature and human existence interact and reinforce each other lead to the formation of an almost inexhaustible variety of family systems, more than a thousand by the count of anthropologists, which, in turn, provide the foundations from which vastly different cultures and civilisations arise.
In other words, distinctive family patterns, shaped and activated in a complicated process by powerful forces of religion, not only provide the rock-bottom foundation for the development of corresponding political and economic structures within a given society; they also set up cultural potentials for future economic and political developments to occur. So for instance, as I shall show in some detail presently, we know today beyond the shadow of a doubt that the emergence of the capitalist market in the northwestern part of Europe was made possible by pre-existing family-based cultural tendencies that antedated the industrial revolution by centuries, and it is in this sense that I am permitted to argue that the Western family provided the engine and the anchor for the great transformation in the commerce pattern that has ruled most of human history.
When one turns to the long history of China, on the other hand, we also know that the apparent immutability of its all-encompassing kinship structure prevented Chinese civilisation for long to develop those dynamics that could have led to the spontaneous formation of a modern market economy. Only today, when the stifling controls of the state have been loosened and the fetters of Chinese culture have somewhat fallen in the overseas Chinese communities of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore has the Chinese family been liberated to unfold an awesome entrepreneurial dynamism that is productive of the modern market. In fact, the “sib fetters” once held to be an obstacle to economic modernisation, have in this case turned out to be the strength of what is called “the Chinese road to capitalism” (Wong 1985; Redding 1990).
By the same token, it is also important to keep in mind that deeply ingrained cultural traditions can serve to subvert the family’s dynamising potential. A case in point are the polygamous societies of the Sub-Saharan African continent, whose cultures are profoundly antithetical to the emergence of a genuinely modern market economy. Here, where every aspect of life is determined by factors of kinship, the family has failed to emerge as an economic unit. To be sure, in recent decades the control of traditions which since time immemorial have provided African social life with its form and content, have been considerably weakened by the migration of large numbers of people to the exploding cities of Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, there exists little evidence to date for a large-scale formation towards a modern family system that is strong enough to withstand the dual pressures of dislocation and modernisation. Marriage in the urban centres of Africa is an extremely fragile bond, with men, women, and children forever on the move, making and remaking in a single lifetime domestic forms which logically cannot be called either a household or a family (Bascom 1968; Epstein 1969; Moodie 1994). It is one of Africa’s great tragedies that it has been deprived of the social and economic resources only a dynamic familism can provide.
It goes without saying that when one makes generalisations as broad as these, one has to take great care to assume that some civilisations are predestined to advance while others, like the just cited polygamous societies of Africa, are eternally condemned to lag behind. Under propitious circumstances, cultures do not only have the capacity to change; they actually do change. So for instance, when one looks through the prism of the family at a set of contemporary data that traces the social consequences of the mass migration of often desperately poor people to the teeming cities of Latin America – Brazil, Chile, and Peru, for instance – it does not take long to discover that traditional behaviour patterns that long subverted the emergence of a modern market economy are today fundamentally transformed in the migratory experience. Here, in the favelas and barrios of Latin American cities, at the bottom of society, unencumbered and unaided, a new manner of life is crystallising around family-centred behaviour patterns that – as David Martin in his recent studies of Fire (1990) has shown – are given shape and content by a Pentecostal religious ethos. Most recently Claudio Véliz has speculated that the “dome” of Latin America’s centralist/mercantilist tradition is cracking today to give way to distinctly modern behaviour patterns (Véliz 1994). And again, a growing number of detailed studies convincingly demonstrate that at the heart of these cataclysmic changes stand changes in the structure and ethos of migrant families which provide a deep prior preparation for the great transformation to occur. By the same token, it is not difficult to argue that societies like Japan and England, just to name two, who have been “modern from the beginning”, could easily jeopardise the comparative cultural advantages they currently hold, if changes in the structure and ethos of their family system should occur.
The Bourgeois’ Family and the Creation of Democratic Capitalism
Let me now turn to my second major topic: the unique role of the nascent bourgeois or middle-class family in the creation of liberal democracy and capitalism in the West. The case of the bourgeois family not only illustrates in a singular way the civilisation-building, if not revolutionary, potential of a particular type of family, it also permits us to recognise the degree to which the fate of the middle-class family and the fate of modern democratic capitalism are inextricably intertwined.
For generations, philosophers and economic historians have tried to identify the factors that made possible the rise of capitalist industrialism in the northwestern part of Europe in the early modern era. Some, like Adam Smith, attributed the transformation from feudalism to industrial society to the rationality flowing from the market, while others, following in the footsteps of the philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, attributed it to the triumph of freedom in the West flowing from increasing rationality in human thought and cognition. Although most scholars are in agreement that the two are in some form connected, they disagree which preceded which: and over matter of market or mind.
It was the genius of Adam Smith’s argument – and our misfortune, I may add – that economists to this day have remained committed to Smith’s view that the capitalist market economy is the “natural” way for individuals to organise and that it is the purpose of economists to understand the laws of the “natural” system.
If viewed through the prism of the family, however, the way people behave and continue to behave under capitalism is anything but “natural”. For behaviour to become purposive it must be motivated: motivated to work, to delay gratification, to save, to plan, to build, to take risks, and so forth. To be sure, we may assume that human beings have always meant well by their offspring and wanted to protect them from harm. But this “natural” desire does not necessarily lead to a life of self-denial, nor does it inspire never-ending efforts to care, to build, to accumulate capital or to restlessly search for ever new horizons. A more “natural” attitude, I think, might be to save for a certain measure of material well-being and then say “enough is enough” and begin to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour by feasting and celebrating. It may well warm the cockles of the traditionalist’s heart that, in many parts of the world, poor and rich families alike are willing to incur immense expenses in connection with elaborate wedding celebrations – some are even willing to go into hock of years to come. Such practices are surely not conducive to the amassing of capital for purposes of production. Yet such a saving of capital by large numbers of ordinary people, while perhaps negligible at the outset, is precisely what occurred in certain parts of Europe in the early modern period.
Similar arguments can be made with regard to one of Western civilisation’s most glorious achievements: the emergence of liberal democracy. An old Arab proverb, “Me and my brother against my cousins, me and my cousins against the world”, may well be reflective of the “common human pattern” that has ruled human history for millennia. The political scientist Edward Banfield coined the term “amoral familism” for this purpose. The continued consequences of this type of “amoral familism”, let me remind you, still are felt in many parts of the world today. A revealing case in point can be found in the intricate politics of Iraq where Saddam Hussein’s Tikriti gang of family and cousins has managed to dominate the politics of that country to a degree unimaginable in the West.
To think in ways that transcend the interests of the immediate family, to act in ways that allow for the emergence of a “civil society” capable of incorporating non-family members, regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion and social origin, into new political and economic networks, may well be an “unnatural” from an Iraqi point-of-view. Yet the acceptance of this “unnatural” way as the only way of conducting politics is precisely what happened in the rising capitalist societies of the West in the early modern period. If one wants to uncover the reasons that motivated people to behave in such “unnatural” ways, I would propose, one is compelled to look at the inner dynamics typical of the rising middle class family and their revolutionary consequences.
Before putting my arguments before you, a few words about the use of the term “bourgeois” are in order. In the literature, the term “bourgeois” and “bourgeoisie” has frequently been used interchangeably with the terms “Victorian family” and “Victorian virtues”, as Gertrude Himmelfarb for instance has done in her important book The De-moralization of Society (1994). In popular literature both terms “bourgeois” and “Victorian” have been replaced by the term “middle class”. For analytical purposes I find the term “bourgeois” preferable for a variety of reasons. It is confined neither by geography nor historical time, but is reflective of particular mind sets and practices; nor does it emphasise the economic dimension the term “class” invariably carries. Yet to tell the story that has to be told, it is perfectly all right to use all three terms interchangeably as long as we know what we are talking about.
I would, however, insist that it is of considerable importance to liberate the term “bourgeois” from its clichéd Marxist connotation. If one
broadens the economic aspect of the term to include its civic dimensions – as the Dutch with the term burgerlijk or the Germans with bürgerlich do – moral is altered than just its linguistic form. It is precisely the novel combination of distinct features typical of the inner dynamics of the nascent middle-class family that provided the emergent institutions of democratic capitalist society with their revolutionary momentum and power.
This may also be the appropriate moment to disabuse you of any impression that my comments today will turn out to be nothing but a moral sermon. In point of fact, nothing is further from my mind. To hold the middle-class family and its concomitant cherished virtues and ethos in high respect does not imply that we should today return to every idea about sexuality, gender roles or general propriety held dear by bourgeois moralists in the 19th century. In his brilliant book The Subversive Family (1982), Ferdinand Mount of the London Times fame made a compelling case for the advantages of the 20th century liberation of the Victorian family from narrow prejudices and zealotry. While I have a number of reservations about some of Mount’s bold arguments, I am in full agreement with him that a wholesale return to the Victorian age – as some of my friends on the political Right advocate – is neither possible, nor is it desirable.
To return to my argument: as pointed out earlier, a formidable body of research available today definitively documents that what has been called the ‘proto-industrial’ family served as the link between the feudal and the modern industrial worlds (Medick 1975). Its existence long antedated the rise of the industrial order and, if the Cambridge social demographers around Peter Laslett and Alan Macfarlane are right, it was the proto-industrial family that set the stage for industrialisation as far back as the 13th century (Laslett 1965, MacFarlane 1987). By the middle of the 19th century the structural features of the proto-industrial family household – reinforced and given meaning by what MacFarlane calls the ‘enabling’ force of the Protestant Ethic – had solidified into a ‘new manner of life’ that to this day remains constitutive of industrial capitalism writ large.
What made the proto-bourgeois family so special? Among its outstanding features three in particular deserve to be mentioned: the sanctity of private property, an inheritance system based upon primogeniture, a marriage system dependent upon individual choice, and the requirement to establish and provide for one’s own conjugal household. Taken together, these characteristics made for late marriage and responsible procreation, just as they encouraged individual responsibility, hard work, training, parsimony and the necessity to save. These habits were galvanised by new forms of work that became available in the budding out cottage work system typically connected to the emergent textile industry, and the myriads of household based artisan enterprises that produced a great variety of objects for everyday use. Detailed studies show that the new ways to earn an independent living provided for the first time in history an opportunity to large numbers of individuals to marry and establish their own household. All that was needed was a good measure of self-reliance, persistence, rational planning, frugality, prudence, and the willingness to accumulate risks. Since the creation of one’s own ‘little world’ was the desired way of life for most, and since the new patterns of behaviour and work rendered tangible results relatively quickly, proto-middle class patterns of behaviour were emulated by many. These family-engendered patterns of behaviour were to have far reaching consequences.
On the economic level family sentiments played a pivotal role in the expansion of capitalist production for they not only enlarged new productive work patterns, but they also created demands for consumer goods on a large scale. As Neil McKendrick recently put it (1974: 152f):
Who bought the cottons, woolens, linens and silks of the burgeoning British textile industries? Who consumed the massive increases in beer production? Who bought the crockery which poured from the Staffordshire potteries? Who bought the buckles, the buttons, the pins and all the minor metal products on which Birmingham fortunes were built? Who bought the Sheffield cutlery, the books from the booming publishers, the women’s journals, the children’s toys, the products of the nurserymen?
On the political level, the egalitarian, individualistic and achievement oriented rules that governed the inner life of the proto-bourgeois family were externalised in the course of time to provide 19th century liberalism with its lasting political creed. Affections revolving around trust and confidence developed in the privacy of family life, providing stable foundations for what we today call ‘civil society’ to emerge. The equality of individuals before the law, equal treatment by the state, and individual freedom, all those guiding principles of liberalism, can be shown to have their origin here. Parentage, religion, and, in subsequent times, also factors of gender and race, decreased in importance and made ultimately for the breakdown of the traditional economic and political barriers. Contrary to Karl Marx’s theory of class conflict that holds that capitalism would lead to the economic immiseration and political enslavement of the industrial worker, the ‘proletariat’, the expanding industrial capitalist system and the concomitant rise of political liberalism offered unmatched economic opportunities to the poor and set them free politically.
It cannot be emphasised enough that sentiments revolving around family and home proscribed ever larger numbers of people mired in the subsistence economy to adapt to the rigours of industrial life. A new culture of domesticity spread like wildfire from one end of Victorian England to the other, engulfing even the child of the slums into its folds. As Edward Shorter (1975) put it:
Home, however, poor, was the focus of all his love and interests, a sure fortress against a hostile world. Songs about its beauties were ever on people’s lips, ‘Home Sweet Home’ first heard in the 1870s, had become a national anthem by the turn of the century.
The middle class family’s relationship to formal education is yet one more area of modern life that needs to be pointed to here briefly, for the two institutions – middle class family and the schools – are both very much tied to the same coin. The rising bourgeois family not only inculcated bourgeois education and a better and better educated, indeed demanded, the schools to do the same. Until a few decades ago, these two institutions came hand in glove and for worse – together set the standards for socialisation and education that were binding for the rest of society. The break this symbiotic relationship suffered during the turbulent history of the past 30 years only serves to bring into sharp relief the institutional crisis that engulfs Western civilisation today.
The Western Family Today
When we now turn our attention to the situation of the family today, we are compelled to observe that recent history has not been kind to the family that stood at the cradle of modern civilisation. Every social order, it has frequently been observed, contains within itself the seeds for its destabilisation. The seeds in question in the case of the bourgeois family flow from the radicalisation of the very characteristics that made for its distinctiveness in the first place: its rational individualism and its rational cognitive style. Under the banner of individual self-realisation and a bewildering number of newly discovered rights the rational individualism and the rational cognitive style that had been instrumental in the rise of capitalism and liberal democracy were radicalised and transformed almost beyond recognition. The growing general affluence that rapidly spread to all layers of society and the ever further reaching arm of the state did the rest. While it was the genius of the bourgeois family to provide a balance between individualism and social responsibility, between individual ‘liberation’ and strong communal ties, between acquisitiveness and altruism, this fortuitous balance was born and nurtured in the span of a few years during the 1960s and 70s.
A variety of demographic sources that revealed worrisome shifts in the structure of the family – such as the skyrocketing divorce rates, the unprecedented number of mothers joining the work force, increasing longevity, to name just a few – served a loosely joined coalition of Leftists and radical feminists to declare war on the family in its middle class form and ethos. Both family and those were declared to be no longer viable, nor were they held to be desirable. The governments of virtually every Western nation came under siege to establish, maintain, and, of course, finance supplementary and alternative structures to the family and to provide for a great variety of intervention mechanisms.
This is not the place to trace the sorry history of this cultural upheaval in its consequences (see Berger and Berger 1983; Ch. 5). For our purposes suffice it to observe that today the majority of the traditional efforts to supplement a circumstance, the functions of the middle class family, with a few notable exceptions, have not achieved a whole lot. A mass of frightening statistics attests to their failure to stem the rising tide of delinquency, crime, drug use, teenage pregnancy and welfare dependency rampant in virtually every society of the West today. With the exception of Japan and, to a lesser degree, Korea and the overseas Chinese communities of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, the rise in social ills has been fairly consistent in all industrial societies, with the United States and the countries of Northern Europe outdistancing, by a wide margin, countries such as France, Italy, Germany and the Czech Republic (Population Council 1995).
Upon closer inspection the research reveals that many public efforts have turned out to be not only wasteful of large sums of public monies, but destructive of human lives as well. Instead of assisting individuals in their efforts to become integral parts of the modern economy, they have been instrumental in the creation of a growing dependency or ‘underclass’ that is today in danger of becoming a permanent fixture in the democratic capitalist societies of the West. All too often they have encouraged individuals to turn their backs on the traditional path to self-sufficiency and upward mobility that relied on the dynamic potential of families and the moral communities in which they are embedded – the churches, neighbourhood groups, self-help groups, and the many voluntary organisations typical of countries like the United States and Australia. If one views the politics of the past decades through the prism of the family, one cannot help but conclude that in turning away from the strong formative order of the middle class family all these costly public efforts combined to undermine the social fabric of Western civilisation.
Most recently, we have begun to witness the rediscovery of the salutary role of the family in the countries of the West. A sizeable portion of feminists, moved by the strength of their love for their children and, one would hope, their husbands as well, have been lured back from the wilder shores of madness where many had been moored for long. With the socialist vision discredited, perhaps beyond repair, policy makers already disheartened by the remarkable powerlessness of their programs, have also shown a surprising willingness to give credit to the importance of the family in the organisation of individual and social life. Yet despite pronounced shifts in the public mood, and a huge body of research available to support it, policy elites, by and large, appear neither inclined to put their trust in the nuclear middle class family, nor seem they have fully apprehended the degree to which it’s virtues and ethos continues to be indispensable for the maintenance of both the capitalist market and liberal democracy. And this observation takes me to the final point I wish to make today.
The Family and the Future of the Democratic Capitalist World
As argued earlier, a large body of social science research documents that public life lies at the mercy of private life. The linkage manifests itself most conspicuously in the area of socialisation and education. A wealth of data shows that a nuclear family of father, mother, and their children living together, mindful and actively involved with each other, are still a child’s best guarantee for success in school as well as in life beyond. The same data also show that more than any other factor imaginable, an individual’s progress continues to depend upon the life the traditional nuclear family created and practices. Yet the policies have taken great joy in bashing. The old adage that it does not matter what cards life has dealt you, but how you play them, is still as true today as it was a hundred years ago. Contrary to fashionable arguments, the evidence is in that prudent use of traditional socialisation practices may still be the best service parents can render their children (Hirschi 1986), and the often branded and commented of the middle class family to mould character traits of resilience, perseverance, to motivate their children to be responsible, trustworthy and self-reliant, remain traits uniquely suited to fortify them against the odds of life ahead.
It is remarkable that all through the war against the family level-headed middle class parents always have known the importance of middle class child rearing patterns. Despite an almost pathetic gullibility when it comes to the prospects of their children, their common sense has fortified these parents to resist the siren songs of elites who promised that paradise would be gained once the last remnants of the bourgeois world order was done away with. Unfortunately the poor and uninformed have neither had the knowledge nor the strength to do the same. While there can be little doubt that parents all over the world, regardless of nationality and social origin, have remained loyal to the time-tested values of the middle class ethos, the same cannot be said of the media and a generation of policy-makers created in the adversary culture of the past decades. One can only hope that enough pressures will be marshalled to reverse this trend. Efforts like the CIS’s program Taking Children Seriously are therefore of great importance to introduce a sense of reality into the public debate.
When one turns to the life of adults, large sets of data again document that the institution of marriage, despite all its problems and tedium, is still the best thing around. Both men and women are healthier, happier, more productive, and live longer when married. The bad news is that many are not aware of this linkage and there exists a
widespread suspicion among many today that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Yet despite considerable apprehensions, marriage appears to be as popular as ever, and although middle class couples have fewer children than before, they do have children, nonetheless. The desire for an exclusive sexual relationship is as strong, if not stronger, today as it was a hundred years ago, and if we are to trust the researchers of the recent The Social Construction of Sexuality (Laumann, Gagnon and Kolata 1994), there is much less philandering going on than anticipated – it mediates more lives to believe. If couples divorce, it appears that both men and women spend an awful lot of time and effort in getting married again, thereby giving credence to Dr. Johnson’s lapidary finding that remarriage constitutes the triumph of hope over experience.
And finally, in adding yet one more dimension to an already complicated future scenario, it should be self-evident for anyone who has eyes to see that the modern world with its sophisticated organisational structures and awesome technological capacities depends upon a large reservoir of people psychologically well-adjusted, educationally prepared, and socially competent to execute the kind of performances necessary to acquire and operate the instruments of the post-industrial systems. Whatever the future will bring, one thing is for sure, it will be a system of life in which the principal unit of action is based on individual performance. Despite the perennial search for community and the resting places for the soul, the mechanism of individualism remains the mechanism of a questing individual seeking more and better frontiers. Where such self-reliant, motivated, and yet ethically responsible individuals are to come from is then a question that poses itself with great urgency. There can be but one answer to this query. As I have tried to argue throughout my talk there exists a peculiar ‘cognitive fit’ between the requirements of a highly organised technological society and the individualistic families of the middle classes, a cognitive fit that fosters habits and sentiments conducive to economic progress, to the formation of a sense of civic responsibility, and that has the capacity to instil a rational cognitive restlessness in its individual members.
During the past century the industrial system has undergone numerous permutations that exacted social adjustments in the ways we work, where we live, how we live, what and how we consume and so forth. Regardless of such permutations, however, the social habits, the norms and the cognitive style peculiar to the middle class family remain to this day the core features of any social order based on the principles of democratic capitalism. To put it differently, our type of civilisation, and by extension any democratic capitalist society – today as in the past, regardless of its provenance, permutations, or geographical location – continues to be dependent upon the culture and ethos that defines the middle class family. Regardless of origin and history, any family system – be it new Chinese, Japanese, German, Indian, Islamic, African, and so forth – can meet the challenges of the future, as long as it contains the core features of the family system that was instrumental in the creation of the modern world.
A year or so ago, Samuel Huntington, the eminent political scientist at Harvard, caused a considerable stir with his proposition that world politics is moving into a period of ‘civilizational clash’ in which the primary identification of people around the world will not be ideological, as during the Cold War, but rather cultural (Huntington 1994). Now that Western style capitalism and democracy have remained triumphant, Huntington argued that conflict will arise not between fascism, socialism, and democracy, but between the world’s major cultural groups, Western, Islamic, Confucian, Hindu, and so on. Judging by the attention it caused, Huntington’s provocative essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ clearly is at central nerve in the minds of academics and politicians alike. While only time will tell whether or to what degree Huntington’s predictions are accurate, his essay performs the crucial service of bringing into focus the role factors of culture play in the affairs of nations. In contrast to Huntington, however, I would emphasise the singular importance of the family in the formation of civilisations. And this observation takes me back to the beginning of this talk. If such a ‘clash of civilisations’ should occur some time in the future, then this clash, at its roots, will be one between different family systems and the ways in which they are able to integrate the properties of human nature and human existence with the requirements of the post-modern world rushing towards us today. Any society that disregards this fundamental reality does so at its own peril.
