In this intervention into long-standing theoretical debates within liberalism, Marxism, and feminism over the justice of the family, Hannes Charen fleshes out a variety of critiques of the “traditional,” or state-sanctioned, nuclear family from several disciplines—anthropology, history, philosophy, and political theory. Though he accepts these critiques, Charen nonetheless resists the conclusion that the family must be altogether abolished, attempting instead to distinguish and rescue some of the traditional family’s relations and purposes by reconceptualizing them under the more flexible and emancipatory rubric of “kinship.”
Charen describes his method as a “series of theoretical vignettes or frames, which, taken together, form a kind of conceptual collage” (p. 12). The result is a wide-ranging consideration of a number of thinkers and works. It meanders as a single, cohesive argument but it could be grouped under some broad themes. The first is a critique of historical, theological, and anthropological accounts of kinship arrangements that have the effect of naturalizing and sanctifying the traditional, patriarchal family even when they set out to document or even promote alternatives. Here, Charen addresses the anthropological tradition of Morgan, Levi-Strauss, Mead, and more recent scholars like David Schneider. He also examines moments of anti-traditionalism within the Western tradition, like Thomas Müntzer’s peasant rebellion and the French Revolution. The second is a critique of the legal foundations of the family rooted in Roman law, the modern distinction between public and private, and the modern conception of sovereignty. In these sections, Charen’s targets are Cicero, Kant, and Luther. The third broad theme is the relationship between kinship and practices of caring for and memorializing the dead, bringing in Heidegger and Laqueur.
Family abolition is an old—if not altogether ancient—theme in political theory. It was perhaps most famously and at least most concretely proposed by Friedrich Engels in the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), and that proposal launched efforts to work out its meaning and details, along with critiques of the critique from feminists, queer theorists, and other schools of critical theory. But centuries before Marx, Plato and Aristophanes had already imagined it as a conceptual possibility, and almost the entire history of political thought has at least flirted with it, from early modern state-of-nature theorists to modern nationalists. It is not easy to break new ground in this argument, and many of Charen’s concerns are now canonical ones—the family as a site of primordial discipline and seedbed of governmentality, as upholder of the neoliberal economic order and of a sexualized division of labor, as boundary between the recognizably human and the animal or monstrous. These critiques have been extensively elaborated by others—Foucault, the Frankfurt School, Heidegger, Agamben, Butler—and Charen ably summarizes their arguments.
Much of the book is a weaving together of these threads of previous critiques, though Charen also digresses into targets that seem arbitrary or at least underdeveloped—a passage from Hobbes here, a jab at the US Department of Health and Human Services there. Numerous points are raised and abandoned to create a canvas of only partially articulated impressions. One difficulty with this method is that Charen relies heavily on historical sources to develop his case for the deep and pervasive roots of the “family myth” in Western thought, but his engagement with the historical sources themselves is somewhat shallow. He devotes, for example, a substantial part of the second chapter to Luther’s and Calvin’s theologies of inner grace, but cites only Herbert Marcuse’s critique of them, never actually referring to their own writings. Later, he associates Kant with the basis of the public/private distinction in Western statecraft, but there is no historical evidence for such an origin, and much evidence to suggest its origin is much older and even ancient (e.g., Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, 1979; Jean Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman, 1981). He draws on a line from Hobbes to show that modern suburban “family is the state writ small” in its patriarchal absolutism, but the line is a decontextualized misreading; Hobbes emphatically denies private fathers absolute power within the commonwealth (p. 125).
Another difficulty arising from Charen’s vignette-based approach is an underdefended evidentiary standard. Social scientific studies demonstrating the evolutionary superiority of monogamous, or nuclear, or in any way traditional families are cast aside as “racist and misogynistic” or “dogmatic,” and social science itself is condemned as “at once ‘reaffirming the cultural foundations of the state’ and justifying the—inevitably racialized, sexualized, and nationalized—production of poverty and lack, and the attendant brutalizing tactics of correction” (p. 126). Nonetheless, Charen effusively praises Sarah Hrdy’s studies of alloparenting in early humans, suggesting that they definitively demonstrate that “there is no biological-evolutionary, natural, or pragmatic basis for the nuclear family” (p. 77). It may well be that Hrdy’s social science is more rigorous in some way than that of the other anthropologists or social scientists he condemns, but Charen does not explain how, and the reader is unfortunately left to question whether the significant difference is that Hrdy’s research supports his political conclusions while other social science does not.
The primary new contribution of the book to this old debate over the justice of the family is in Charen’s positing of kinship as a substitute for the conventional conception of the family. Charen argues that the family as we understand it—traditional, nuclear, monogamous, state-sanctioned—insupportably narrows the possible human forms of mutuality and collective life, but that a breaking down of the family’s traditional boundaries can restore these collective possibilities. Indeed, such restoration is our only choice, since the “political ontologies” which are both supported by and support the traditional family are collapsing from their own contradictions. Kinship, as Hegel recognized, arises from impulses not naturally hospitable to the logic of the state and so contains the potential for “resisting the coercive structure of the modern state and the atomistic economic rationale it relies on” (p. 154). This potential can be recovered by detaching the practices of kinship from the enclosing force of the family. Such detachment ought to be guided by an understanding of our relation to death, since it is our bodily fragility and ultimately our mortality that impels us to interdependence and into kinship relations in the first place. Charen proposes that we turn to “indigenous ontologies,” according to which “kinship is not limited to human relations,” for our model (p. 164).
One might wish for a clearer picture of what such a kinship-based society might look like, and how these practices would be more than reflexive negations of every existing Western family practice. But Charen’s book opens a door to the imagination of such alternatives.
