If we here were successfully to name the "animal" (Genesis 2:19) now parading before us as "civil society," the place of this study in intellectual history would be secure. While civil society as the designation for the "animal" in question has been around for at least two centuries, and while its proper home is the sociological menagerie, one searches the manuals and dictionaries almost in vain for either that designation or its intended object. Of course, conceptual quandaries of this sort plague the social sciences generally, but in this instance the problem seems unusually acute.

The two members of this compound term, civil and society, emerged early in what we call Western history. That history, like a local railroad train, stopped at many stations enroute, taking additional freight aboard. Accordingly, each term took on layered meanings, further complicated by the conjoining of the two terms at later stations. Meanwhile the species to which our term refers itself was evolving and multiplying. Rather abruptly, over the past decade, there has been an upsurge of sightings of this "animal," but we have yet to agree on its features and its name. Different studies treat different important traits of the animal before us, offering definitions or paradigms reminiscent of the blind men’s encounter with the elephant. Allegories aside, David Little cited the liberal notion which, as a first approximation, views the vast region between the "individual" and the "state" as civil society. John Kromkowski drew a more precise boundary in delineating the neighborhood community. In citing these paradigms, neither speaker claimed to offer a full delineation or definition of civil society. In any event, the latter, the neighborhood community, presupposes the former, the region bounded on opposite sides, as it were, by the individual (citizen) and the state.

Much of what we call human history consists of the search and struggle for order, waged as a contest for the supremacy of one solidary group over another: we know the phenomenon as tribal or inter-tribal warfare. Later, the massing of men in battle array appears analogous to inter-tribal confrontations, mass against mass. Without multiple individual identities, negotiations, compromises, wider recombinations are scarcely possible. Even at more advanced stages, as the global wars of this century and the current Bosnian tragedy exemplify, solidary human configurations as such have limited inter-group conflict resolution capability.

In the Hebrew creation myth, to which I return below, the human emerges step by step, with the social endowment appearing as the final stage. However that came about, we know the human only as zoon politikon (Aristotle); more strictly, only in society is the humanity of this animal realized and sustained. But here comes the rub. Liberal society, in its substitution of the individual for the family, nonetheless presupposes and takes for granted the communal constitution of the individuals that comprise it, and hence their capacity for responsible collaborative action. But as I shall emphasize, the paradigm neither assumes responsibility, nor makes provision for creation of the necessary human "material" or agents. Indeed, the very mechanics of liberal society constantly jeopardize the generative processes that sustain the humanity it presupposes.

Sociologically speaking, both states and economies consist of roles which human individuals enter, perform and leave, while corporate entities live on. The particular traits and initiatives of individual role incumbents impinge upon the flow of events, and indeed may result in particular successes or failures in that flow. Only rarely do such particularities effect fundamental modification. Apart from the provision of technical training, however, both economy and state simply take for granted the availability of the human material they require to "man" the roles by which they are constituted.

The separation of home and work, that became modal in the U.S. early in the present century, was perhaps the biggest direct challenge of modernity to traditional familism.

Scarcely was the ink of the Parsonian studies dry before the explosion of the 1960s set in. Within 25 years the divorce rate doubled from one in four marriages to nearly every second. This irruption was paralleled by similar rises in extramarital births, teen pregnancies, single parent households and sexual promiscuity. Contraceptives had become widely available, divorce was legalized, and gays "came out of the closet." Above all it quickly became evident that the nuclear family, Parsonian style, tended to perpetuate the historical subordination of women in society. A White House Conference on the Family, convened in 1980, had to yield ground to conflicting family views, and was down-scaled accordingly. Since then the concept of "the family" as institution has been replaced by "families." A wide range of differing domestic arrangements have come to demand equal respect and standing with the conventional two-parent model.

The basic case against the family has been brought, as noted above, by exponents of societal modernization. Familial institutions, they maintain, are pre-modern vestiges. As irrational or pre-rational familial formations have yielded to rationally-constructed associa-tions and agencies, they observe, the larger human potential has been vastly enhanced. Additionally, now that families have continued to shrink both numerically and functionally, new problems have emerged. These shrunken families are no longer able to carry the emotional freight once borne by larger family groups. Among the many sources of marital failure, critics argue, is the excessive emotional expectation of the spouses in families which now lack a wider matrix of communal support.

We need only recall that the "bottom-line" rationale for "the family" has always been its procreative role in order to realize that what is being said here means the end of the family as we know it. Extrapolating from Coleman’s data-based, statistical summary graphs one would be hard-pressed to challenge his conclusion: The trends appear irreversible indeed. Conceivably, of course, Coleman’s "bounty" might "save" the family—couples, otherwise childless, might assume the burden of parenthood if thus subsidized—but once the ethos had assimilated Coleman’s projection—today it has not, or not yet—it is unlikely that a bounty would stay the tide.

Significantly enough, many, if not most, family sociologists and practitioners are far less pessimistic about the family as institution than Coleman’s graphs allow. Basically they are impressed by the historical resiliency of the family. Often they do not share the rosy illusions about the past family happiness and stability that informs many jeremiads concerning family decline today. And while the secular professions make only subdued reference to moral norms, to underscore family resilience is to steer inevitably toward ontological waters. We cannot in the end, then, escape the question of whether the family is rooted ontologically beyond the reach of the "rational reconstruction" paradigm.

Finally, before addressing directly the place of the family in civil society, let us turn briefly to the handicap of the arrested conjugal ethos that we inherit from antiquity. Family arrangements and forms, as we know, varied endlessly over the centuries, and do so to this day. While anthropologists report that pair-bonding appears in some form among all peoples, it is characteristically embedded, often indeed submerged, in larger familial configuration. The primitive struggle to survive—low life expectancy, high fertility and mortality rates, and the like—reinforced this tendency.

Social historians discern some parallels between families among nomadic hunting/gathering peoples and our mobile industrial societies, family groupings in both instances being smaller than the more extended forms that arise in sedentary agricultural societies. Institutions of property and exchange, of collaboration and power begin to emerge, primarily, at least initially, utilizing kinship ties. These early developments apparently reinforced the subordination of pair-bonding (marriage) to larger family or clan interests. Perpetuation and reinforcement of lineage interest became the guiding principle in all things, and especially in mate selection.

Despite the autonomous impulse implicit in the conjugal union, the rationale for marriage in the Western ethos historically has been primarily procreational. Marriage has been seen as the best means of human reproduction, to which it was thus treated as mere adjunct. By so much, its own innate telos is eclipsed, and with it the significance of the sexual dimorphism in human being. Despite inklings here and there to the contrary, Greek thinkers, given primitive constraints, defined women as spiritually inferior to and incapable of friendship with men, friendship being definitionally a relationship between equals.

The growth of society and the corresponding shrinking of the family that emerged in the modernization of the past two centuries meanwhile reversed the relation between the procreative and the conjugal axes within the family system. The family unit now begins and ends with the conjugal union, while the earlier support of extended kinship has receded. Marriages are made and unmade by the partners directly, on the basis of personal interest and inter-personal affinity.

Along the way the symbolic legacy of Demosthenes had resurfaced in the cult of romantic but illicit and unfulfilled love, celebrated by wandering medieval minstrels. Once the differenti-ation of society reached the point at which the conjugal unit became both structurally autonomous and the axis of the family unit, the romantic ideal migrated to the conjugal unit. The conjugal ethos, still anemic from its tradition-based reproductive definition, was newly distorted by bloated romantic expectation. That expectation, though in part correcting for the older procreative skew of marital definition, introduced further instability into a unity already fragile. Family restabilization thus must begin with a fundamental reconstruction of the conjugal ethos. And while this essay moves on the plane suggested by Wilson, which I described above as "pragmatic induction" or the givenness of the moral experience, I draw on logic conveyed in Hebrew religious myth without the theological reasoning that a full treatment would require.

A look at a classic myth at this point can be helpful, namely the "rib story", the second of two creation myths in the Hebrew scriptures (Genesis 2:18-25; cf. also Plato’s myth). Like many other ancient peoples, the Hebrews resorted to myth to account for mystery at the boundaries of human existence. The narrator in this instance recounts one such myth to decipher sexual dimorphism in the human enterprise. First a solitary, sexually-undifferentiated individual appears on the scene. Alone, however, that individual is incomplete. So the Creator constructs a second being, not de novo, but rather from the rib of the first being. The result is a sexually-differentiated and paired unity, equally human yet complementarily differentiated. Following this brief sketch, the narrator supplies an interpretation of the myth: "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh." Much later, another phrase is added: "What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder" (Mark 10:9).

Obviously we cannot here deal with the larger religious frame in which the story appears, nor with the diversity of family phenomena reported elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures. As here the scope is far more limited, I suggest instead that we reflect inductively on the intent of the story as outlined by the narrator and on the logic of its setting. The procedure is similar to James Q. Wilson’s treatment, cited above, of the workaday world. So we ask: what is the logic and setting of the myth, according to the narrator?

The context is cosmological. Following a summary reference to the creation of the world, the appearance of the human receives special note. Bare essentials, both cosmological and human, have been sketched, climaxing in the rib story. The "leaving" and "cleaving" formula, whereby the narrator interprets the myth, assumes both primordial and prototypical significance—the tie to father and mother is primordial, given in nature; the tie to the spouse is prototypical, the beginning of responsible freedom, of action beyond natural determinism. The natural unwilled bond of child to parent is transcended by the chosen, willed relationship of spouse to spouse. Since male and female, as monads, standing alone, are incomplete, the resulting union possesses "ontological" quality: each partner is completed in the other. That being the case, the bond is soluble only by death. This fact is recognized by a phrase in traditional marriage vows, now increasingly regarded as quaint, "till death do us part."

Here we reach the critical juncture in our discussion. In this elementary account of the conjugal union, there is no reference to procreation. Given the historical context, that absence is striking, even startling. This fragment of the Genesis text is commonly dated at about 1000 BC, a time when kinship in its various forms was still the dominant social cohesive. Procreative exigencies still dominated the conjugal ethos and marriage was legitimated by its procreative outcome. Remarkably enough, the logic of this text flows in the opposite direction. Pair-bonding is to be cherished and respected for its own sake, prior to, and apart from, the issue of offspring. The focus is on the humanizing import of the conjugal union in its own right. Offspring is an effluent of the conjugal mystery rather than its essential raison d’etre. The consequence of this claim, of this reversal of priority, is colossal. Contrary to the traditional pre-occupation with the "blood tie" and biological descent, the "leaving" and "cleaving" dialectic in human development defines "the family." The spousal covenant, an agreement between strangers, supplants the bonds of nature, of biological descent. The vocation of parenthood is the eventual emancipation of the child from bondage to the necessities of nature-grounded kinship in preparation for personal participation in the world of responsible freedom. That long, often arduous process, is captured succinctly in the "leaving and cleaving" formula.

But there is more. The human species is introduced by this myth in a general cosmology. Inevitably the question arises: Why is there no further elaboration on the sociopolitical fate of the species, no further instruction regarding human aggregation? Here we can only infer and speculate. For example, are we to view the "leaving" and "cleaving" process as society in embryo? Can it be that this process, figuratively speaking, becomes the social protoplasm—the capacity to make and keep covenant—from which other, more complex social forms are subsequently fashioned?

Why should this be? Particulars, of course, vary from case to case. If humanization of the human animal is the vocation of the family, first in the fulfillment of the spousal pair, and thereby in the socialization of the young, then divorce strikes at the very foundation of human existence. It is in the conjugal dialogue of the parents that the child is inducted into the covenanting processes whereby society continuously creates and recreates itself. When the parental dialogue fails, the child’s induction into the covenantal world aborts. Thus human reality emerges, not originally in the socialization of the young which typically is viewed as the function or vocation of the family, but in the leaving and cleaving of the spouses from whose covenantal union the child, subsequently socialized to repeat the process, emerges.

Historically, when societies and polities collapsed as covenan-tal configurations, kinship, i. e., the blood tie, has taken up the slack or picked up the pieces, as it were. Such, for example, was the rise of feudalism in Europe following the 5th century collapse of the Roman empire. It would be presumptuous to predict the fate of modern and post-modern societies. Nonetheless it is instructive, at least in the American instance, to observe a certain resurgence of kinship-dependency in the face of the sharp increase of births to single mothers (roughly 25 percent of all births) and of broken marriages (nearly one out of two). With grandmothers or other next of kin "filling in," remnants of the "extended family" are being resurrected (or the state as nanny in the Coleman chimera). Correspondingly, as indicated at the outset of this paper, conjugality is rapidly disappearing from discourse about family-related problems.

On the basis of the conception of conjugality outlined here I shall argue that the germ of the polis is to be found in the conjugal union. Human action is intrinsically political. It entails free choice in a moral context and involves relations which means reflection, dialogue, negotiation and accountability rather than mere instinctual reflex. The family constellation and process in the life course evokes and nurtures the human potential of the biological organism.

In the "leaving and cleaving" process the family is at once indispensable and self-limiting. Population growth and social differentiation are reciprocal processes. Individual and group are inseparably dialectic; neither exists without the other. Beyond the conjugal family as given, human configurations are negotiable and emergent from the familial, indeed, in the first instance, from the conjugal, protoplasm.

The sphere we today call political affords the coercive moment that appears implicit in collective existence. In some religious thought, coercive necessity arises from human sinfulness. But the state as instrument of the political also in some measure embodies the common good of the population aggregate that it embraces. The greater and the more differentiated that population the more powerful the state, and hence also its potential oppressiveness. Much political discourse in the modern era turns on the effort to protect the populace and its activities from the power of the state.

In the American experience, the articulation of certain inalienable rights for the individual citizen that precede and transcend the claims of the state has been a major preoccupation. The logic of the conjugal and familial primordiality outlined above places these on the same level as inalienable individual "rights", yet—perhaps for good reason, given the additional difficulty—families are not even mentioned in the Constitution. In any case, as Maine long ago observed and as noted above, in modern societies the individual has been "substituted for the Family as the unit of which the laws take account." Thus, the family may be viewed as the anchor of the "third sector" juxtaposed to economy and state in the American, and presumably other modern societies.

Given the dendrite character of the two formally-structured sectors, economy and state, and the absence of such form in the third structure, boundaries are extremely difficult to articulate. Moreover those boundaries, however drawn, run diversely through the identities of all societal structures. The social reconstruction now challenging virtually all societies around the globe—challenges arising variously from the newly-achieved independence of many states, from the end of the Cold War, and from the rapid growth of global interdependencies—entails the urgency of opportunity and risk.

I end with two qualifications. First, the third sector or civil society, though family anchored, is far more vast than the family or families collectively. Indeed, if economy and state are dendrite, so is civil society. Only where personal autonomy and accountability transcend role definition, whether in economy or state, can a society or people thrive. The simple private-public conceptual category that presumably derives from the Greek differentiation between the idiom and the koinon, though seminally useful, is confusing as commonly employed. To call large corporations, no longer accountable to a single state, "private" and by implication in the same category as "family" is sheer obfuscation. Unless we find more adequate definition of the third sector (civil society) dynamism we will miss this "window of opportunity."

Second, what I have identified here is by no means to be mistaken for current "family values" sloganeering. Today that slogan is joined to a platform calling for the extension of free enterprise, without the slightest awareness that the excessive self-interest propelling the liberal economy is a direct source of family instability.

A grasp of the profound significance of sexual dimorphism in human existence in the Genesis story, contrary to what superficially might seem to follow, can mollify the pall of bitterness that hangs over the discussion of issues of numerous, sex-related issues such as divorce, abortion, single parenthood and homosexuality, even as our moral comprehension is invigorated. To that end, the cold logic of Coleman’s scalpel is a welcome aid.

1. Since this paper was written and presented I was alerted to an important document issued by The Council on Families in America, sponsored by the Institute for American Values (1841 Broadway, #211, New York, NY 10023) on Marriage in America: A Report to the Nation (March, 1995). Though triggered by the plight of children in American society today, in an unprecedented manner that statement identifies the failure of marriage as the critical variable in the family crisis ("America’s divorce revolution has failed."), though without fully identifying the crux of the marriage problem. By contrast, the United Nations document that announced "The UN Year of the Family (1994)" managed to avoid the term "marriage" completely.

2. Emile Durkheim, Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964 [1893]), p. 37.

3. Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (New York: Dorset Press, 1986 [1861]), p. 140.

4. In an important and welcome study, Alan Wolfe elaborates "civil society" (the moral arena) as the poorly articulated third sector presupposed yet threatened by the polity (centralization) and the economy (atomization), though without the necessary attention to marriage and family. Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

5. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: Ideals of Greek Culture Vol. I. Tr. by Gilbert Highet (New York: Galaxy, 1965 [1933]), p. 111.

6. The felicitous phrase with which the Constitution of the United States begins ("WE THE PEOPLE . . .") reflects not merely the wisdom of the "founding fathers," but more particularly the combination of material and historical circumstances permitting a new political beginning. The "PEOPLE," i.e., society, precedes government or the state, both granting and withholding powers. A society that is "civil" is a society that is self-governing, politically mobilized, but which nonetheless retains its priority and supremacy. However, the processes of social life, though prior to, and transcending, the polity or "state," nonetheless depend upon the polity. Governments (polities) meanwhile possess their own life. Society is suspended perpetually between two dangers: no/not enough government, on the one hand, or governmental encroach-ment/too much government, on the other.

7. Philip Abbott, The Family on Trial: Special Relationships Within Modern Political Thought (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981), p. 4. Much 19th century European socio-political thought was cast in dichotomous terms, such as Gemeinschaft (community) vs. Gesellschaft (society), the former representing the inherited solidarities of kinship and place ("bottom up"), the latter the rationally-constructed and superficial contacts in large scale organization ("top down"). Though such dichotomies are too crude for empirical use, they are profoundly sensitizing. The issues thus identified, however, quickly get lost in the civil society shuffle. Without Gemeinschaft elements, buergerlich Gesellschaft cannot survive.

8. Talcott Parsons with Robert F. Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955).

9. Published under that title, American Sociological Review, 58 (February, 1993), 1-15.

10. James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993).

11. Cited by James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 13.

12. Edward W. Beal and Gloria Hochman, Adult Children of Divorce: Breaking the Cycle and Finding Fulfillment in Love, Marriage, and Fulfillment (New York: Delacorte Press, 1991).

The chapter points to the conjugal union as the sacred center not only of the family but of all human compacts, and hence as the center of social life in all of its dimensions. This opens to the mystery on which the chapter of R. Khuri elaborates.

Externally, the family is under considerable pressure. Politi-cally the family has been attacked as a competitor to materialist ideologies. In some after the Platonic mode this has led to efforts to raise the children largely away from the family in order to instill non-personal attitudes and values. In other cases the economic sector has encroached and largely devoured the family. From the need for the one salary of the father in the 30s, there developed the need for a second salary, that of the mother, after World War II. Now we begin to need a third salary, thereby rendering impossible the needed time together and unsupportable the costs of raising children. Hence, there now is need for a clearer conception of the distinct political, economic and civil sectors in order that no one (in particular, the family) be absorbed or suppressed, but rather promoted, by the others.

But underneath the struggle adequately to conceive the family and its bases their appear to be some deep problems. One is the sense of the family as a situation unwilled and hence of domination, slavery and oppression. This, it would seem, reflects a very superficial sense of freedom, the first in Adler’s topology where freedom is but a choice between two alternatives, generally regarding external objectives or things. In this light there is no real sense of subjects but only of objects. The slave is such an object, but so correlatively is the master. It is a world of things, not of persons. It is unfortunate that modern theory, in order to achieve clarity and control, treated all in these terms, but it is tragic that this meant treating not only persons but the whole human race in such terms.

This flagrant reduction of human dignity led inevitably to a basic misconception of the struggle of humankind to live its true dignity. As a result the family, rather than being seen as the basic human and humanizing social center was misguidedly and tragically looked upon as a degrading situation, escape from which was the proper way to self-realization: one was urged to flee from the center of one’s human dignity; public policies were constructed to favor this flight, and the economic forces which enforced this flight were left unchecked or even favored. Nothing could be more self-destructive, as the increasing fragility and violence of present human life illustrates.

What, after all, is the will but the dynamic character of being and life to hold to itself, to tend toward what is lacking to one’s fulfillment and to enjoy this when it is achieved or possessed. The alternative is the decidedly unnatural and destructive act of suicide or self-destruction. We will life, not death. Hence, a child naturally loves his or her life and those who give it and sustain it. This is not unwilled; rather it is so definitively willed that it is beyond choice. It is the total concentration and free exercise of one’s will, just as the desire of a parent to be with a child in danger is the most intense exercise of the parent’s will. It has been most thoroughly misleading then for modern theory to consider that a child’s life in the family is not free or that freedom is achieved by escaping therefrom, just as it is destructively misleading to suggest that parents are not free in their concern for their children and that they can become free only by abandoning their spouse and children. This is not uncommon, but if one is in search of the root of present social pathologies that is certainly the place to begin.

Second, it seems strange to separate conjugality from pro-creation. In biblical terms the command to cleave to one’s spouse is certainly accompanied by the command to multiply and fill the earth. This is not an unwanted result of the conjugal bond, but the expected, intended and explicitly commanded. There is behind this a basic philosophy and a rich theology. Observation of nature about us manifest this in the rich abandance and communication of life.

Moreover, reflection upon creation reveals that this was due not to any lack on the part of the absolute and all perfect source of all, but rather to the divine will to share life. This, in turn, tells us that being is not inert or self-enclosed, but outgoing and communicative. When the conjugal union is seen in these terms its procreativity is not only a reflection of human biology, but of the basically outgoing character of being itself and of human love in particular. It is not a matter of conjugality without procreativity; one bespeaks the other.

Thus this chapter is correct in focusing on the basic importance of conjugality, social-bonding and faithfulness. This is truly essential for the social character of the couple, as of the children who learn it from their parents. This is not only an interior or spiritual act of the heart, but is borne forth in the bodily procreation of children, whose very life is a continuation of the mutually conjugal entrusting by their parents of their lives one to another—till death do them part.

Finally, while much is being learned now about ways in which women have been left out of the public arena, is it right to take Demosthenes as an adequate statement of the human attitude toward women? Is not Gilgemesh, our oldest epoch, in fact one of our greatest love stories? Is not the Song of Songs an apogee whose languages is possible only through the human experience of love and reverence for women, and has not the devotion to the Blessed Virgin through long centuries of Christianity been the basis for the chivalrous and romantic sense that a man’s task is to protect women even at the cost of his own life: women and children first.

These notions provide deep roots for the thesis of this chapter that all sociality, especially that of the less formal third or civil society sector, emerges from conjugality and its sharing of human love and life.