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Punctuated Equilibrium: The Modernization of the Proletarian Family in the Age of Ascendant Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

David Levine
David Levine
Affiliation:
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
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Abstract

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Type
Scholarly Controversy
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 39 , Spring 1991 , pp. 3 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1991

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References

NOTES

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2. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979), 25–26Google Scholar.

3. Ibid., 29–30.

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5. Ibid., 88–89.

6. Ibid., 97, 88–89.

7. Foucault, , Discipline and Punish, 221, 225Google Scholar. I shall return below to Foucault's “men.”

8. Ibid., 193.

9. Ibid., 190.

10. Foucault, . History of Sexuality, 1:25Google Scholar.

11. Ibid., 25, 24, 103, 108, 104–5.

12. Ibid., 120–21. For a similar condescension from posterity on the unfeeling nature of the plebeian family, see Flandrin, Jean-Louis, Families in Former Times (Cambridge, 1979; French, ed., 1976)Google Scholar.

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14. Donzelot, Jacques, The Policing of Families (New York, 1979), 69, 92, 94 (emphasis added)Google Scholar.

15. The metaphor (and the title of this essay) is taken from a theory of evolution propounded by Eldredge, Niles and Gould, Stephen Jay (“Punctuated Equilibria: an Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism,” in Models in Paleobiology, ed. Schopf, T. J. M. [San Francisco, 1972], 82–115).Google Scholar Eldredge and Gould argue in favor of a jerky and episodic model of change, not a smoothly gradual pace. Pervasive trends in the fossil record reveal a trend that is more like climbing a flight of stairs (punctuations and stasis) rather than rolling up an inclined plane.

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18. The point is put baldly; it should perhaps be qualified by referring to competition both within industries and between countries. Nevertheless, the basic issue is that the supply of labor outstripped its demand and proletarians labored at a severe disadvantage until there could be a semblance of order in this marketplace.

19. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Macpherson, C. B. (Harmondsworth, 1968), pt. 1, chap. 13, 186.Google Scholar I shall return below to Hobbes's “man.”

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32. For an initial attempt to do so, see Levine, David, “Recombinant Family Formation Strategies,” Journal of Historical Sociology 2 (1989): 100–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a cross-sectional analysis of fertility by occupation, see Haines, Michael, “Social Class Differentials during Fertility Decline: England and Wales Revisited,” Population Studies 43 (1989): 305–23CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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37. The best discussion of these workers if found in Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), Section 2, “ExperiencesGoogle Scholar.”

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50. For a revealing acknowledgment of this malign neglect, see Holmes, Edmond, In Quest of an Ideal (London, 1920).Google Scholar Holmes was a school inspector in the 1870s and 1880s; his memoirs reveal him to have been narrowly concerned with “social control” (as directed by his superiors) during his tenure in office but sentimentally upset in retrospect by the suffering that this policy inflicted upon its young victims.

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