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Family, Civil Society and the State in Contemporary European History: Some Methodological Considerations1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

Paul Ginsborg
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Over the past two decades, the rapid development of historical studies on the family has tended to neglect almost completely the relationship between the family and politics. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Journal of Family History in 1987, Louise Tilly analysed the content of articles published on the family in eight historical journals (including the Journal of Family History) between 1976 and 1985. Of 233 articles on the family, just two were listed under the heading ‘Politics–Institutions’.2 Family history has made great strides in a whole number of areas: in the understanding of the origins of the modern family, an enquiry launched by the path-breaking work of Philippe Ariès in i960; in the development of family reconstruction technique, initiated in the post-war period by Louis Henry and Pierre Goubert, and pursued with signal distinction by the Cambridge Group, founded in 1964; in the critiques and further refinement of the findings of the Cambridge Group, with the development, in particular, of studies on the life course; in the area of intra-family relations, especially in the analysis of the historic subordination of women within the family; in the study, finally, of the interaction between the family and major socio-economic transformation, especially industrialisation, emigration and urbanisation.3

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Contemporary European History , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , November 1995 , pp. 249 - 273
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

4 Tilly, , ‘Women's History’, 310.Google Scholar

5 Okin, S. M., Justice, Gender and the Family (thereafter Okin, Justice) (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 9.Google Scholar See also James, S., ‘The Good-Enough Citizen: Female Citizenship and Independence’, in Bock, G. and James, S., eds, Beyond Equality and Difference (London: Routledge, 1992), 62Google Scholar, where she writes of the need to ‘treat the domestic and political spheres not as opposed, the loci of two distinct and incompatible types of relationship, but as complementary and mutually supporting’.

6 Seton, Watson H., The Russian Empire, 1801–1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).Google Scholar For some details on the housing conditions of working-class families, 542–3.

7 Carr, E. H., Socialism in One Country, 1924–1926, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1958), 27–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Lewin, M., The Making of the Soviet System (London: Methuen, 1985), 83–5.Google Scholar Stalinist family policy is mentioned on 275.

9 Smith, S. A., Red Petrograd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Figes, O., Peasant Russia, Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).Google Scholar

10 However, a number of works on the Soviet family have been available for some time. See in particular the very useful collection of readings and documents in Schlesinger, R., ed., Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia: The Family in the U.S.S.R. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949).Google Scholar See also Geiger, H. K., The Family in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Farnsworth, B. B., ‘Bolshevik Alternatives and the Soviet Family: the 1926 Marriage Law Debate’, in Atkinson, D., Dallin, A. and Lapidus, G. W., eds, Women in Russia (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1978), 139–65.Google Scholar More recently, there has been a flurry of interesting sectoral work on the Soviet family, some of it still unpublished. See, for example, Waters, E., ‘From the Old Family to the New: Work, Marriage and Motherhood in Urban Soviet Russia, 1917–31’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, 1985)Google Scholar; Thurston, R. W., ‘The Soviet Family during the Great Terror, 1935–41’, Soviet Studies, Vol. 43, no. 3 (1991), 553–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Charles Tilly has claimed that the work of social historians combines reconstitution and connection: the reconstitution of ‘a round of life as people lived it’, and the connection of ‘life on the small scale with large social structures and processes’. I would very much agree, but would add that the connection must be not only with social structures and processes, but with political ones as well. This is not at all to say that the history of the family must be made subordinate to political history, or that family time should be bent to fit political time. Peter Laslett has warned of these dangers, and of ‘breakneck’ accounts of familial transformation – ‘first in one direction for a reign or two, then in another, now a reversion, then a collapse’, with the result that family history remains ‘at the mercy of almighty politics’. My own attempt to connect the family to politics is, as I hope to show, of a different nature. See Tilly, C., ‘Family History, Social History, and Social Change’, JFH, Vol. 12, no. 1–3 (1987), 320ff.Google Scholar; Laslett, P., ‘The Character of Familial History, its Limitations and the Conditions for its Proper Pursuit’, (thereafter ‘The Character’)Google Scholar, ibid., 274.

12 Laslett, , ‘The Character’, 272.Google Scholar

13 This article is intended to serve as a methodological introduction to a study that I am preparing on the family, civil society and the state in twentieth-century Europe.

14 Todd, E., La Troisième Planete, (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983)Google Scholar, Eng. edn, The Explanation of Ideology (thereafter Todd, Explanation) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985)Google Scholar; L'Invention de l'Europe (thereafter Todd, LInvention), (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990).

15 Todd, , Explanation, 33.Google Scholar

16 ibid.

17 Ibid, 29.

18 Even in Todd's later and more sophisticated work the same stubborn reductionism is at work. See his Preface to L'Invention, 12: ‘It is the diversity of family systems that permits us to explain different regional reactions to the Reformation and to the French Revolution, to different types of socialism and nationalism in the twentieth century, as well as unequal geographical levels of literacy, of industrialisation, of dechristianisation and of contraception.’ See, among others, the criticism levelled by Marc Ferro against Todd's latest work: ‘He is guilty of the sin of disciplinary imperialism. Family types and demography are for him the definitive explanation.’ Libération, 20 April 1990.

19 Commaille, J., ‘Famille et Politique’, Revue Française de Science Politique, Vol. 42, no. 3 (1992), 485.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 See, for example, Percheron, A., ‘Le Domestique et le Politique’, Revue Française de Science Politique, Vol. 35, no. 5 (1985), 840–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Percheron, A. and Rémond, R., eds, Age et Politique (Paris: Economica, 1991)Google Scholar; Jennings, K. and Niemi, R., Generations and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Pahl, R. E., Divisions of Labour (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984)Google Scholar; Finch, J., Family Obligations and Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Delphy, C. and Leonard, D., Familiar Exploitation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).Google Scholar

22 See, for example, the very useful works by Anderson, M., ed., Sociology of the Family, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980) (1st ed. 1971)Google Scholar, and Allan, G., Family Life (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985).Google Scholar

23 Balbo, , Stato di famiglia (Milano: ETAS, 1976)Google Scholar; Balbo, L., May, M. P., Micheli, G. A., Vincoli e strategie nella vita quotidiana (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990)Google Scholar; Saraceno, C., Sociologia della famiglia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988), esp. 205–29Google Scholar; Idem, ‘Modelli di famiglia’, in Acquaviva, S. et al. , Ritratto di famiglia degli anni '80 (Bari: Laterza, 1980), 45–111.Google Scholar See also Barrett, M. and McIntosh, M., The Anti-Social Family, 2nd ed. enlarged (London: NLB, 1991)Google Scholar, (1st ed. 1982) whose work, however, is distinguished by its strongly anti-family orientation: ‘The family embodies the principle of selfishness, exclusion and pursuit of private interest … [it] sucks the juice out of everything around it, leaving other institutions stunted and distorted’ (47 and 78).

24 Gribaudi, G., ‘La metafora della rete. Individuo e contesto sociale’ (thereafter Gribaudi, ‘La metafora’), Meridiana, no. 15 (1992), 108.Google Scholar

25 For full bibliographical details, see ibid, 99, n. 15.

26 For ‘stars’, ‘zones’ and ‘clusters’, see the important article by Barnes, J. A., ‘Networks and Political Process’, in Mitchell, J. C., ed., Social Networks in Urban Situations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969), 51–76Google Scholar; for ‘webs’, the useful introduction by Lande, C. H., ‘The Dyadic Basis of Clientelism’, in Schmidt, S., Guasti, L., Lande, C., Scott, J., eds, Friends, Followers and Factions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), xxxiii–xxxv.Google Scholar

27 This is very much the case with the pioneering work of Bott, E., Family and Social Network (London: Tavistock, 1957)Google Scholar, which launched a rich debate on the connections between different types of network and conjugal roles, but which delved hardly at all into the relationship between families and the state. Indeed, the only reference to the welfare state was the use of the term ‘service institutions’, which families did or did not use, much as if they were service stations (65 and 74–5).

28 Yeatman, A., ‘Gender and the Differentiation of Social Life into Public and Domestic Domains’, Social Analysis, no. 15 (1984), 44.Google Scholar

29 Gribaudi, M., Mondo operaio e mito operaio (Torino: Einaudi, 1987)Google Scholar, where there is also a clear choice not to consider the macro–political world in any detail; Gribaudi, G., A Eboli (Venezia: Marsilio, 1990).Google Scholar For family ideologies and secrets, see Reiss, D., The Family's Construction of Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Pincus, L. and Dare, C., Secrets in the Family (London: Faber, 1978).Google Scholar Some of what I have in mind is well summarised by P. Bevilacqua, in the context of Calabrian peasant families in the second half of the nineteenth century: ‘It was above all in the evening, around the fire, that the head of the family or its oldest member took it upon himself to sum up the day's activity and hand out tasks for the morrow. Here, too, were transmitted the basic values on which the household rested. Their form and content varied, from sayings and proverbs about agrarian techniques and custom, to fables and legends of the most arcane sort. Every fragment of the discourse contained messages on the need to obey, to respect rules and authorities, on the binding nature of pacts and ties, on honour.’ Bevilacqua, P., ‘Uomini, terre, economie’, in Bevilacqua, P. and Placanica, A., eds, Storia d‘ Italia. Le regioni. La Calabria (Torino: Einaudi, 1985), 298.Google Scholar

30 Gribaudi, G., ‘La metafora’, 108.Google Scholar

31 While there now exists a large number of books which deal with the role of women in classical political theory, there is no such corresponding work for the family. For some indications, see the collection of essays edited by Elshtain, J. B., The Family in Political Thought (thereafter Elshtain, Family in Political Thought) (Brighton: Harvester, 1982).Google Scholar I have found Claudia Mancina's work, Differenze nell'eticità (thereafter Mancina, Differenze) (Napoli: Guida, 1991), to be highly stimulating on this question, and I am dependent upon her work at a number of points, especially with regard to Hegel.

32 Cornford, F. M., ed., The Republic of Plato (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 162.Google Scholar It should be noted that whereas in The Republic Plato abolished the household, in The Laws he retains it, though with considerable modifications. Domestic worship was to be restricted, and communal eating was to be introduced not only for men and boys but also women and girls. Little time, except at night, was to be spent as a family. Newman comments that in The Laws the household ‘would escape abolition only to be condemned to a somewhat shadowy existence’. Newman, W. A., The Politics of Aristotle (thereafter Newman, Politics), vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1887), 180.Google Scholar

33 Aristotle, , The Politics, ed. Everson, S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 21Google Scholar, Book II, 1261a, 18–19.

34 Ibid, Book II, 1261a, 19–23.

35 Ibid, p. 23, Book II, 1261b, 38–40.

36 Ibid, Book II, 1262a, 13–14. In the same passage, Aristotle asks, ‘But which is better — for each to say “mine” in this way, making a man the same relation to two thousand or ten thousand citizens, or to use the word “mine” as it is now used in states?’ (1262a, 7–9). However, it would be a mistake to assume from this that Aristotle simply accepted the status quo of Greek households. On the contrary, in The Politics he advocates a whole series of measures to regulate and transform them: communal eating for men and boys was to be encouraged by the establishment of public meal-tables (syssitia), not just for certain categories of citizens such as magistrates and priests, but for the whole citizenship (p. 170, Book VII, 1330a, 3–6). The polis was to regulate the institution of marriage, bearing in mind considerations such as the ideal age for procreation, and a correct distance of years between father and son (pp. 180–1, Book VII, 1334b, 29–1335a, 35). No citizen was to hold too much or too little property, for ‘a city ought to be composed, as far as posible of equals and similars‘ (p. 97, Book IV, 1295b, 25). Above all, education above the age of seven was to be the task of the state, not the household, and in commenting on this Aristotle moves very much back in Plato's direction, at least that of the Plato of The Laws if not of The Republic. In Book VIII of The Politics Aristotle writes: ‘And since the whole city has one end, it is manifest that education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private – not as at present, when everyone looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole’ (p. 185, Book VIII, 1337a, 21–31). As Barker, E., The Politics of Aristotle (thereafter Barker, Politics of Aristotle) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 333Google Scholar, n. 1, has pointed out, these last lines bear a striking resemblance to Plato's Laws, 923a.

37 The Politics, p. 1, Book I, 1252a, 16–17.

38 Ibid, pp. 4–21, Book I, 1253b–1261a. Aristotle collates royal and patriarchal power: ‘Homer has appropriately called Zeus “father of Gods and men” because he is the king of them all’ (p. 18, 1259b, 14–15). As for husband and wife, in The Politics Aristotle describes the power of the husband as ‘constitutional’, though husband and wife are not equal and do not rule by turns (p. 17, 1259b, 2–7). In the Nicomachean Ethics, however (Thomson, J. A. K., ed., The Ethics of Aristotle (London: Allen and Unwin, 1953)Google Scholar, Book VIII, ch. X, 221–2), the relationship is described by Aristotle as being in the nature of an aristocracy. In either case, there was to be no confusion of roles: ‘justice of a man and of a woman, are not, as Socrates maintained, the same; the courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying’; The Politics, p. 19, Book I, 1260a, 22–24. For a compelling account of women in the Greek household, Newman, The Politics, 1, 17 off.; for the place of women in Aristotle's political theory, Okin, S. M., Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 73–96.Google Scholar

39 The Politics, p. 3, Book I, 1252b, 28–30.

40 Ibid, introduction, xx. See also Booth, W. J., ‘Politics and the Household. A Commentary on Aristotle's Politics Book One’, History of Political Thought, vol. 2, no. 2 (1981), 209Google Scholar: ‘When Aristotle says that the polis is by nature, he is claiming not merely that it is the conclusion of a process of generation but that it shares in that “inherent something” or “primary material” which constitutes the essence of associations of men.’

41 Saxonhouse, A. W., ‘Classical Greek Conceptions of Public and Private’, in Benn, S. I. and Gaus, G. F., eds, Public and Private in Social Life (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 365.Google Scholar Saxonhouse traces specifically the conflict between the Greek city's need for warriors and the family's need for ‘husband, father, male head of household’. According to her, Aristotle tries to overcome this conflict in two ways: by removing from Greek politics its focus on war, and by making the polis the highest and most worthy authority. In this way, she suggests, the tragic conflict between the family and the polis is removed in favour of a more harmonious ‘interdependence’, with the private realm introducing into the public one ‘moderation or a tempering element’ (379). However, this does not seem to me to be a convincing reading. The needs of war are by no means the only area of potential conflict between family and state, nor does Saxonhouse deal with the different types of power at work in the two associations. On this latter point, see Mancina, Differenze, 99ff. Newman's comment, The Politics, 1, 181, that the household is ‘a sort of younger sister of the state’ begs too many questions. For Vesta, the sacred fire and goddess of the household, and the moral order associated with her worship, see Coulanges Fustel de, N. D., The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome (1st ed. 1864; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 37Google Scholar: ‘The sacred fire, which was so intimately associated with the worship of the dead, belonged in its essential character, properly to each family …. Every fire protected its own and repulsed the stranger. The whole of this religion was enclosed within the walls of each house’ (29).

42 The Politics, p. 20, Book I, 1260b, 13–21. Barker, Politics of Aristotle, 38, n. H, argues convincingly that Book I on the household, which is a separate course or methodos was left incomplete. Nowhere, for instance, is the intermediate stage of the village treated, though ‘the local villages, or demes, were an important part of Athenian life’.

43 The key influence in the development of the Aristotelian idea that the family is ex hypothesi within the private and not the public sphere was without doubt the structure of Roman law, and its adoption in Western Europe in all states except England from the seventeenth century onwards. For Aristotelian ideas on the family in the Middle Ages, see Blythe, J. M., ‘Family, Government and the Mediaeval Aristotelians’, History of Political Thought, Vol. 10 (1989), 1–16.Google Scholar The vision of the family as the basic cell of the state lies, of course, at the heart of the symmetries propounded by the patriarchal school of thought; see Schochet, G., Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).Google Scholar Space does not permit here to consider the seventeenth-century English debate, on which there is a growing literature concerning the role of the family. See, for example, Pateman, C., ‘The Fraternal Social Contract’, in Keane, J., ed., Civil Society and the State (London: Verso, 1988), 101–27Google Scholar; Gobetti, D., Private and Public: Individuals, Households and Body Politic in Locke and Hutcheson (London: Routledge, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 Hegel, G. W. F., Elements of the Philosophy of Right (thereafter Hegel, Philosophy of Right) ed. Wood, A. W., trans. Nisbet, H. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 272Google Scholar, §255. All quotations are from this edition and all German words in brackets are Hegel's and are included in Nisbet's translation. The ‘Additions’ are those of E. Gans, taken from the lecture notes of 1822–3 of Hegel's student H. G. Holtho (H), and those of 1823–4 of K. G. von Griesheim (G). For the complete notes and transcriptions of Hegel's lectures, see Hegel, G. W. F., Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie, 1818–1831, ed. Ilting, K.-H., 4 vols, (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann, 1973).Google Scholar

45 Hegel, , Philosophy of Right, p. 222Google Scholar, §184, Addition (H). For the complicated usage of key words in Hegel's political philosophy, see Inwood, M., A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the particularity–universality dichotomy, see also the helpful comments of Knox, T. H., Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965) (1st ed. 1952), n. 61 to §141, pp. 345–6.Google Scholar

46 ‘The family, as the immediate substantiality of spirit, has as its determination the spirit's feeling [Empfindung] of its own unity, which is love’; Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 199, §158. Hegel distinguishes conjugal love both from Platonic love, where physical love is absent, and Romantic love, where it is present but in transient and selfish form. In conjugal love, the individual finds the capacity to transcend individuality, and to enter into a bond of unity, generosity and tranquillity. Furthermore ‘from conjugal love there emanates activity towards other, wider ends’; Hegel, G. W. F., Philosophie des Rechts, die Vorlesung von 1819–20 in einer Nachschrift, ed. Henrich, D. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), 135;Google Scholar quoted in Mancina, , Differenze, 191.Google Scholar On the different versions of the Philosophy of Right and a magnificent contextualisation of the work, Ilting, K.-H., Hegel diverso, ed. Tota, E. (Bari: Laterza, 1977).Google Scholar

47 Mancina, , Differenze, 10.Google Scholar Other commentaries include Weber, M., Zur Theorie der Familie in der Rechtsphilosophie Hegels (Berlin: Duncken und Humblot, 1986), esp. 79–99Google Scholar; Westphal, M., ‘Hegel's Radical Idealism: Family and State as Ethical Communities’, in Pelczynski, Z. A., ed., The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel's Political Philosophy (thereafter Pelczynski, State and Civil Society) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 77–92Google Scholar; Landes, J. B., ‘Hegel's Conception of the Family’, in Elshtain, , ed., Family in Political Thought, 125–44.Google Scholar

48 Philosophy of Right, p. 200, §160.

49 Ibid, p. 203, §163, Addition (H, G).

50 Ibid, p. 206, § 166. For Hegel, ‘When women are in charge of government, the state is in danger, for their actions are based not on the demands of universality but on contingent inclination and opinion’. Ibid., p. 207, §166, Addition (H, G)).

51 Ibid, p. 206, §166.

52 Ibid, p. 212, §175.

53 Ibid, p. 199, §158.

54 Ibid, p. 214, §177.

55 Ibid, p. 221, §184, Addition (H). See the comments of Ilting, K.-H., ‘The Dialectic of Civil Society’, in Pelczynski, State and Civil Society, 214Google Scholar: ‘Hegel's account of the development of the “ethical Idea” in the Philosophy of Right obviously corresponds to his account of the Idea as such in the Logic. Just as there the Idea at the stage of the concept is described as the Idea of life, so here it appears as the institution of the family. There the Idea at the stage of differentiation appears as the process of cognition, and here as the process of the formation of civil society; and the fully developed Absolute Idea of the Logic appears in the Philosophy of Right in the shape of the state.’

56 See, for example, Marcuse, H., Reason and Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1941), 204Google Scholar: 1The family has its “external reality” in property, but property also destroys the family. Children grow up and establish property-holding families of their own. The “natural” unit of the family thus breaks up into a multitude of competing groups of proprietors, who essentially aim at their particular egoistic advantage. These groups make for the entry of civil society, which comes on the scene when all ethics has been lost and negated.’

57 Mancina, , Differenze, 14.Google Scholar

58 Philosophy of Right, p. 263, §238 and Addition (H).

59 Ibid, p. 226, §188.

60 Ibid, p. 263, §238, Addition (H).

61 Ryan, A., ‘Hegel on Work, Ownership and Citizenship’, in Pelczynski, State and Civil Society, 192.Google Scholar

62 Philosophy of Right, p. 222, §185.

63 Riedel, M., Hegel fra tradizione e rivoluzione (thereafter Riedel, Hegel) (Bari: Laterza, 1975), 146Google Scholar (1st German ed. Studien zur Hegels Rechtsphilosophie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969)).Google Scholar

64 As Riedel and other commentators have explained, Hegel's use of the term ‘police’ is very different from ours, having more in common with public administration; see ‘Hegel’, 146, and §§231–49 of The Philosophy of Right.

65 Philosophy of Right, pp. 263–4, §§238–9.

66 Ibid, p. 264, §239. In the Addition (H, G), Hegel comments, ‘It is difficult to draw a boundary here between the rights of parents and those of civil society’.

67 Ibid, pp. 270–1, §252. For a useful discussion of Hegel's view of corporations in the wider context of political reflection on the role of guilds in Europe, see Black, A., Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (London: Methuen, 1984), 202–9.Google Scholar

68 Philosophy of Right, pp. 272–3, §255.

69 Philosophy of Right, p. 287, §265, Addition (G).

70 Ibid, p. 286, §263, Addition (H).

71 ibid., pp. 288–9, §268. See also the comments of Mancina, , Differenze, 210–11.Google Scholar

72 Philosophy of Right, p. 275, §258. Mancina claims, Differenze, 16, that for Hegel the family acts in some way as a moderating influence against so powerful a state: ‘The family is not ordered in a pacific and totalitarian way so as to ensure the supremacy of the state over individual interest and reason. On the contrary; the family can even sometimes appear as an element of disturbance to the political community, because in its essence it is autonomous from it. Taking a substantial distance from Plato, Hegel makes of the family a moderator of the absolutising needs of the state.’ However, I can find no direct evidence for this assertion in The Philosophy of Right, nor does Mancina elaborate on this point later in her book.

73 Marx, K., Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843), ed. O'Malley, J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).Google Scholar Marx's critique finishes at §313.

74 Ibid, pp. 7–8.

75 Letter to P. V. Annenkov, 28 Dec. 1846, in Marx, K. and Engels, F., Collected Works, vol. 38 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982), 96.Google Scholar

76 Cohen, J. L. and Arato, A., Civil Society and Political Theory (thereafter Cohen and Arato, Civil Society) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 631, n. 48.Google Scholar

77 Ilting, , ‘The Dialectic of Civil Society’, 217.Google Scholar

78 Cohen and Arato write of the family as ‘the voluntary association par excellence’ (Civil Society, 629, n. 48), but this seems to me to miss the specificity of close kin relationships, which are far from being merely the highest expression of voluntary associationism, and involve at least as much compulsion (you do not choose your parents) as they do voluntarism. For a very balanced discussion of the role of emotions and morality in kinship relations, see Finch, , Family Obligations, 212–36.Google Scholar

79 Delphy, and Leonard, , Familiar Exploitation, 4.Google Scholar

80 For a good summary, see Cohen, and Arato, , Civil Society, ch. 1, ‘The Contemporary Revival of Civil Society’, 29–82.Google Scholar Recent treatments include Gellner, E., Conditions of Liberty. Civil Society and its Rivals (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994)Google Scholar; Walzer, M., ed., Toward a Global Civil Society (Providence/ Oxford: Berghahn, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hall, J. A., ed., Civil Society. Theory, History, Comparison (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).Google Scholar

81 Paine, T., ‘Common Sense’ (1776) in idem, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3Google Scholar; see also Keane, J., ’Despotism and Democracy’ (thereafter Keane, ‘Despotism and Democracy’), in idem, Civil Society and the State, 35–71.Google Scholar

82 Bobbio, N., ‘Società civile’ (thereafter Bobbio, ‘Società civile’), in Bobbio, N., Matteucci, N. and Pasquino, G. F., eds, Dizionario di Politica, (Torino: UTET, 1983), 1084–90Google Scholar; see also his ‘Sulla nozione di “società civile”’ (thereafter Bobbio, ‘Nozione’), De Homine, nos 24–5 (1968), 19–36; Riedel, M., ‘Gesellschaft, bürgerliche’, in Brunner, O., Conze, W. and Koselleck, R., eds, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1975), 719–800.Google Scholar

83 Bobbio, , ‘Nozione’, 21.Google Scholar

84 Bobbio, , ‘Società civile’, 1087.Google Scholar

85 For Gramsci–s use of ‘civil society’, see Anderson, P., ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, no. 100 (1976–7), 5–78Google Scholar; Bobbio, N., Gramsci e la concezione della società civile (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1976).Google Scholar

86 Habermas, J., The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (thereafter Habermas, Structural Transformation) (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), 27 (original German ed. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand, 1962).Google Scholar

87 Cohen, and Arato, , Civil Society, ix.Google Scholar

88 Keane, ‘Despotism and Democracy’, passim; Seligman, A., The Idea of Civil Society (New York: Free Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Meiskins, Wood E., ‘The Uses and Abuses of “Civil Society”’, Socialist Register (1990), 60–84.Google Scholar

89 Habermas, , Structural Transformation, 30.Google Scholar

90 See, for example, N. Tadmor, ‘Privacy, Sentiment and the Family’, paper read to the Anglo–American Conference, July 1993, Institute of Historical Research, London. Tadmor, building on the evidence of family historians, casts serious doubt on both of Habermas's premises vis-à-vis the bourgeois family: the conjugal family did not first emerge among the seventeenth-century English gentry and the eighteenth-century French and German bourgeoisie; nor did the modern conjugal family see the birth of new forms of intimacy and personal subjectivity. If there was a structural transformation of the public sphere in the eighteenth century, concludes Tadmor, it should not be derived from the rather shaky foundations of this family history.

91 In Structural Transformation, Habermas makes no explicit reference to Hegel's discussion of ‘Auflösung’ in The Philosophy of Right, but emphasises how his account differs from ‘the Greek model’ because the intimate sphere of the conjugal family and not the public sphere itself ‘was humanity's genuine site’ (52). In the later part of his work, Habermas traces both the destruction of the bourgeois public sphere and that virtuous family form which, according to him, had played so vital a role in creating it. However, in this disintegrative process, the family (chs 16 and 17) is no longer presented as a subject of history, but only as being on the receiving end of the dual process of the ‘stateification of society and the ‘societalisation’ of the state. Bombarded by these transformations, the family is largely relieved of its functions of upbringing, education, protection, care and guidance, shrinks into a ‘sphere of pseudo-privacy’ and becomes little more than a ‘community of consumers’. It is a shame that Habermas's controversial views of the connection between the family, civil society, the bourgeois public sphere and the state have been hardly touched upon in the recent lengthy discussion of this work; see Calhoun, C., ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).Google Scholar For recent usage of Habermas's scheme and a feminist critique of it, see Landes, J., Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

92 Cohen, and Arato, , Civil Society, 631, n. 48.Google Scholar

93 Ryan, , Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 16.Google Scholar

94 Mount, F., The Subversive Family (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982).Google Scholar