Ruth Institute Blog

A book review by Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. This article was first published by FamilyInAmerica.org in their Winter 2009 journal.

When first published in 1947, Family and Civilization was a significant book on the sociology of the family. Thanks to the Background imprint of ISI Books, it is back in print. In this classic, Carle Zimmerman brings clarity to the precise area of today’s greatest confusion: the definition and evolution of the family. Instead of the Triumphant March of Liberation presented by the Life Style Left, the late Harvard sociologist sees an ebb and flow of changes in family structure. Instead of a contrast between the nuclear family and the individualist family, Zimmerman contrasts three different family types. While he agrees with Marx and Engels that family structure is powerfully linked with economics and politics, Zimmerman is more analytical and less ideological. Providing evidence for some of his most fascinating claims sixty years later is The War between the State and the Family, by British scholar Patricia Morgan.

As an older work, Family and Civilization can be a challenging read. But the introduction by Allan Carlson makes the ISI Books edition accessible to the intelligent reader, including many non-academics who have become marriage activists by necessity. The edition would also be good reading for college courses in history or sociology. Carlson helps situate Zimmerman, who opposed the neo-Marxist sociologists of the Chicago School, within the larger stream of twentieth-century family sociology. The Chicago School argued that the American family was losing its functions, with fathers and later mothers leaving the home for outside employment. But while mainstream American sociology applauded this trend, giving it the greatest of modern accolades—“historical inevitability”—Zimmerman denied that there was anything permanent or inevitable about the “shucking off or negation of familistic bonds.” He argued: “The disintegration of the family into contractual and non-institutional forms is so devastating to high cultural society that these atypical forms can last only a short while and will in time have to be corrected. The family reappears by counterrevolution.”

Zimmerman argues that the contractual thinking of the eighteenth-century rationalists channeled the issues in the wrong direction. Political theorists such as Locke and Hume, as well as prominent French and German thinkers, viewed the family as a private agreement between a man and a woman for specific civil functions. This definition constricted the range of issues that these analysts could see clearly enough to take seriously. Once the contractual model is accepted as the basic form of the family, scholars will interpret history as the steady march from non-contractual marriages to contractual marriages, from forced or arranged marriages to love or companionate marriages. Stephanie Coontz is the best-known modern exponent of this view. Things are getting better because they are getting freer, which means more contractual.

Zimmerman escapes this trap by focusing on the sovereignty of the family. He lays out his key analytical questions in the second chapter:

Of the total power in society, how much belongs to the family? Of the total amount of control of action in the society, how much is left for the family? What role does the family play in the total business of society? . . . If we want to marry or break up a family, whom do we consult, the family, the church or the state? If we are in need, to whom do we go, the family or the community? If we violate a rule, who punishes us, the family or the state?

These questions suggest that no necessary reason requires society to “progress” on all fronts from one type of family inexorably to another type of family. He deploys three types of family: the trustee family, the domestic family, and the atomistic family. The domestic family and the atomistic family would correspond roughly to the modern family before and after the sexual revolution. The trustee family is probably the least familiar to modern readers.

The Trustee Family and the Atomistic Family

In the trustee family, “the living individual members are not the family, but mere “trustees” of its blood, rights, property, name and position for their lifetimes.” According to Zimmerman, this family system dominated in Homeric Greece of the ninth century b.c., in Rome from the earliest tribes to the period of the Twelve Tables around 450 b.c., and from the so-called Dark Ages from the sixth to the twelve centuries. The trustee family exercises the most sovereignty of any of the family types. The family is the primary power in society, controlling individual action, punishing transgressions, and providing protection against enemy attack. The concept of the “house” is more powerful than the concept of the “home.” This family type tends be the dominant one in periods when the political authorities are relatively weak. The family keeps order, out of necessity: no one else is doing that job. Individuals in the trustee family do not typically own landed property. Rather, the living members of the family receive the property as a “patrimony” from past generations and hold the property in trust for future generations.

Modern economists might view the trustee family as a family form based on “common property,” but this is an anachronistic interpretation. The “tragedy of the commons,” in which no one takes care of commonly owned resources, does not occur in societies dominated by the trustee family. That tragedy develops only in situations in which a) the state hold the exclusive or dominant power to enforce property rights and b) people view themselves as individual agents rather than as part of an infinitely-lived family, with powers of its own. Neither condition appears in the trustee family, which claims immense non-state power to enforce norms of behavior internally amongst its members and externally against its enemies.

The trustee family is simply the strongest social entity in its time, stronger than both the state and the individual. This is why the trustee family is almost incomprehensible to Americans today, in an era of hugely powerful government and fiercely independent individuals. In contrast, the atomistic family holds that sovereignty lies with the individual, as against the family. But society pays a price for this freedom from family bonds. The very idea of liberty itself changes, according to Zimmerman:

Keep reading….