With crisp prose and intellectual fairness, Family Politics traces the treatment of the family in the philosophies of leading political thinkers of the modern world. What is family? What is marriage? In an effort to address contemporary society's disputes over the meanings of these human social institutions, Scott Yenor carefully examines a roster of major and unexpected modern political philosophers--from Locke and Rousseau to Hegel and Marx to Freud and Beauvoir. He lucidly presents how these individuals developed an understanding of family in order to advance their goals of political and social reform. Through this exploration, Yenor unveils the effect of modern liberty on this foundational institution and argues that the quest to pursue individual autonomy has undermined the nature of marriage and jeopardizes its future.
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Nature, Marital Unity, and Contract in Modern Political Thought
Part I: The Ballast of Nature and the Ends of the Family
2. Locke and the Invention of the Modern Family
3. Rousseau and the Romance of Family Life
Part II: The Moving Ballast of History
4. Hegel's Modern Marital Unity: More Than a Contract, Less Than a Sacrament
5. In Hegel's Shadow: French Sociologists and Positivist Defenses of the Family
Part III: Liberation and the Movement toward the Family's End
6. The City and the Soul Mate: Mill's Late Liberal Vision
7. Marx, Engels, and the Abolition of the Family
8. Freud, Russell, and the Liberated Family
9. Feminism and the Family
Part IV: The Old Family and a New Nature
10. Positivism Supplemented: Anatomy, Evolution, and the Family
11. A Second Sailing?: Recovering Marital Unity and the Purposes of the Family
12. What Is to Be Thought?: Tensions and Lessons
Notes
Bibliography
Index
