Human sexual dimorphism — anatomical, hormonal and temperamental alike — is seen to be fundamental in the very formative "hominization" of the species. . . .

Weston LaBarre (in Spiro)

The issue of models of identity in postcommunist societies is at once intriguing and revealing. It is intriguing because of the similarity of the human predicament in post-communism to what is often described as postmodernism in other advanced societies. It is revealing with reference to the shared assumptions behind these two ostensibly opposing systems. If the communist and noncommunist systems differed as radically as the past Cold War conflicts implied, how does it happen that in the post-communist era, the several populations confront the same sort of identity questions?

I recall a familiar pair of antithetical statements — John Stuart Mill’s axiom: Human beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the laws of individual man; and Karl Marx’s declaration: The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. "Capitalism," of course, resonated to the former proposition, and "communism" to the latter. This polarization between individualism and collectivism, as we know, emerged in the wake of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Yet may it be that the consequences of the reductionism implicit in both of these claims outweighs the half-truth, and hence the apparent polar opposition, that each represents? And if so, does that account for the above-noted similarity between the challenges confronting post-communist societies today and modem societies generally?

Here, I would focus this issue on the problem of the family in these times. In the title of this paper I place the term "high modernity" (Anthony Giddens) alongside "postcommunism," in preference to the more common notion of "postmodernity." After all, the present era represents the culmination of industrial modernity, not its abandonment, as the term "postmodern" signifies. The extent to which the important differences between early and later stages of industrial development lead to qualitative thresholds, requiring the language of contrast, may be left to historical assessment. The point to which I call attention here is the fact that the question of identity tends to be addressed in nonfamilial terms, certainly in the discourse of high modernity and now also in "postcommunist" language. In both instances, the critical importance of the family in the formation and anchoring of human identity is somehow missing from the calculus.

The reason for this omission is not hard to find. Modernization — the interdependent scientific, technological and sociopolitical revolutions that since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been transforming human existence — means the liquidation of kinship or the "blood tie" in favor what some have called "the rational reconstruction of society" (Coleman). Though such "reconstruction" was incipient in earlier times, for example, in the Greek polis, until the modem era, kinship and local interdependencies served as the social primordium, the glue that held human aggregates in place. Only after "the individual (becomes) steadily substituted for the family" (Maine, 1861), can such reconstruction proceed. To put the matter metaphorically, only when the family molecule begins to dissolve into individual atoms can the rational reconstruction or resynthesis that we call modernization be undertaken.

Modem polities and economies presuppose the existence of human material deplorable as individuals rather than as families or clans. Indeed they further foster the very individuation that they meanwhile presuppose. The polity, above all in its jurisprudence, strives to secure citizenship and the equal rights of citizens before the law. To be sure, in both polity and economy, individuals act in combination or concert, but such combination is always reducible to individual agency. As organizational charts connote, tasks are rationally and instrumentally devised, and individuals are recruited to invest only that aspect of their persons or identity that the task or role requires. The individual as such, or the "core person," remains outside the role designated by the organizational chart.

The family or other kinship organization, quite to the contrary, unites members in their core identity, along with role differentiations such as husband and wife, parent and child. Family or kinship aggregation is essentially covenantal, that of modem organization, merely contractual. Familial, and by extension tribal, organization has long since proven its incapacity for social complexity and large scale organization. Hence larger scale organization, and above all modernization has increasingly supplanted kinship and tribalism as modes of social organization. Moreover, the esteem for individual dignity and worth, the acknowledged endowment of every individual with inalienable rights, rests on the rescue of the individual from the totalizing claims of familial identity.

To make such individuation possible, as Abbott Philip has written, "(a)ttack on the family in modem political thought has been sweeping and unremitting. Although the critiques vary in their intensity, dissatisfaction with the family is nearly universal in modem political thought." Similarly, the late Robert Nisbet observed that from "Plato’s obliteration of the family in his Republic, through Hobbes, Rousseau, Benthan, and Marx, hostility to family has been an abiding element of the West’s political clerisy." Nonetheless, familism persists well into the modem era, if only vestigially — on the micro-scale in its nuclear form; on the macro-scale, as ethnicity. In the latter instance, while to be sure, far more than literal familism is at work, in ethnicity familistic roots and inspiration are unmistakable. But except for a further comment later in this paper, macro-scale issues lie outside the scope of the present paper.

Here the focus is on the former topic, the micro-scale persistence of family. For hitherto, despite the "the attack on the family in modem political thought," modernization has led, not to the disappearance of "the family," but to reduction to its "nuclear" core. Only in recent decades, notably in the United States, has the very survival of family, even in its minimal nuclear form, become uncertain. Today nearly half of the marriages consummated end in divorce. Comparable numbers of children grow up in single parent households, either born out of wedlock or because of divorce. And the reasons for this trend are profoundly structural, not merely moral or ideological.

Meanwhile, however, the persistence of the nuclear impulse in the human process deserves far more serious attention than it has yet received. In this brief paper that need and task can be only faintly outlined. By the "nuclear impulse" I mean the propensity for male and female in the human species to bond permanently and exclusively, and to form independent households with or without immediate offspring. Not pair-bonding as such is new, but rather the emancipation of the pair-bonding act from familial, not to say tribal, control. William Goode, though noting the linkage between modernization and the emergence of the nuclear family pattern, nonetheless describes the fit between modernization and the nuclear family as one-sided. While family reduced to the nuclear scale may serve the needs of modem society, that development in turn may not, indeed does not, serve the needs of the nuclear family. I will return briefly to this ambiguity below.

Basically, then, while Maine’s dictum that in "progressive" (modem) societies the individual is steadily substituted for the family as the elementary unit is being historically confirmed, in two respects it has not, or not yet, succeeded. Not only is family still with us, but modernization has not devised an alternative matrice for the creation and the sustenance of the autonomous human agents or persons which it presupposes. Modernization can endlessly reshape humans once created, and vastly enrich their identities, but those reshaping processes cannot create the initial material with which they work. But meanwhile, though unable to eliminate the family, modernizing has seriously crippled the ability of families to fulfill their person-creating and -nurturing function. Only when and as these realities are addressed can we come to terms with the problems of identity in our era. Nonetheless, in the jargon of our disciplines, it must be stressed: addressing the family stalemate is a necessary though not sufficient condition for the solution of those problems.

I shall argue that, while the replacement of kinship by association as the organizing principle in human aggregation is writ into the human destiny, the replacement of the core family is not. To the contrary, the substitution of familial kinship for society in presocietal (pre-"modem") times twisted and obscured the core familial process. This left the family core, both concretely and institutionally, emaciated and unequipped to come into its own, and thus to realize the very possibility that modernization for the first time permits. Given the obvious inadequacy of kinship and tribalism as the organizing principle in social aggregation, on the one hand, and the inadequacies of the newly isolated nuclear family, on the other, the "hostility to the family . . . of the West’s political clerisy" (Nisbet) is understandable, though hardly defensible. Indeed that hostility may well be an instance of what Julien Benda describes as La trahison des clercs, an intellectual failure of treasonous proportion.

While the dissonance between the family and the modernization project is multidimensional, the key difficulty may well lie in the eclipse of the unitive aspect of the family process by its procreative mandate, and hence the dominance of consanguinity over alliance in any treatment of family systems. Familism and kinship, though always bilineal, are descent-oriented, drawing their inspiration from the "blood tie," from consanguinity, in the end, from the mother-child, rather than from the husband-wife, tie. Incest taboos and rules of exogamy, whatever their genesis, prevented the implosion of family systems in the past. Nonetheless, in pre-societal times, historical conditions effectively secured the eclipse of the unitive by the procreative energies or "needs" in family systems and in our inherited ethos.

Astonishingly enough, given it’s primitive, still largely tribal, setting — scholars date the origin of this story at about 1,000 BCE — doubtlessly the most important social story or myth in the formation of the European tradition, the "rib story" in Genesis, chapter two, clearly challenges that eclipse. Here we find a conjugal "paradigm" that has yet to be fully exhumed. In that evolutionary story, Adam (the "earth creature") appears as a solitary being. The Creator acknowledges, however, that "it is not good" for this being, this creature, "to be alone." So now other creatures are paraded before Adam to permit a search for partnership. When that search fails, a surgical procedure effectively divides this solitary creature into two equal but complementary beings, each now incomplete in itself When thereupon Adam, now a "he," for the first time confronts Eve, now a "she," Adam is quoted assaying, "Ah, this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" and the narrator adds, "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh." Significantly, nothing is said about a procreative expectation or outcome.

What seems implicit in this story is not that "the family" is a consanguineal holdout against the enlightened alternative of modernity, but rather that the conjugally-based familial primordium is the embryo of the entire social process. For while the procreative dimension of the family does not appear as its defining telos, procreation is profoundly implicit. The unwilled biologically-rooted bond to father and mother is the foundation, just as the shedding of that tie by this step into willed covenanted freedom dissolves the consanguineal claim. Thus in every generation, in every life course, family creates and transcends itself As the womb to the organism, so the family is the matrix of the human being, the moral agent, who emerges at the end of the process.

The literary setting of this story is cosmogonic. It locates the human in the scheme of the cosmos. Why does it include no further elaboration of the human charter? May it be that this story in fact tells the human story in nuce, that it describes the raw material, the primordium, the process, from which humans now construct their collective destiny? Another ancient, though later, dictum affirms forthrightly that pacta servanda sunt — agreements are to be kept. Intersubjective understandings and infinitely varied but contractual interrelations make the human "world go round." But according to the Genesis story, the prototype of society is not the mother-child or consanguineal but the husband-wife or conjugal tie. Ordered freedom is the human unicum.

Myths, of course, are problematic. Since by definition they are metaphoric or figurative, what do they mean? Moreover since there are good and bad, true and false myths, how does one distinguish? Recognizing the nature of mythological discourse, one finds this story remarkably self-authenticating. Here the pair-bond appears as autotelic — it has its own end in the human enterprise. The conjugal covenant appears as the crowning stage in the creation of the human. What is unique about the pair bond in this species is not biological reproduction — all the other species already do that — but covenantal freedom, the quality that Aristotle was later to capture in his description of the human as zoon politikon, the political animal. Only on leavinkibbug the parental roof in favor of covenanting freedom is full humanity realized. Autonomy means not self-containment or self-sufficiency, but the free actualization of human interdependence. Metaphorically, human reality is thus viewed as essentially molecular rather than atomic. Thus "the family " is not the rearguard of an obsolete past; to the contrary, it is the vanguard of a future that has yet to find itself.

Historically Western familism enshrined the subordination of women to men. As we know Western culture is much indebted to ancient Greek thought. Ironically, the sexist paradigm that until recently dominated Western thought is part of that legacy. As the distinction between public (freedom) and private (necessity) space made its appearance in early Greek settlements, the struggle to survive and to procreate still dominated the destiny of women. Early Greek philosophers concluded accordingly, that given that fate, women by nature were intellectually and spiritually less endowed than men. The result was well-captured in the famous saying of Demosthenes, the fourth century (BCE) Greek statesman, "We have mistresses for our enjoyment, concubines to serve our person, and wives forbearing legitimate offspring." Women effectively were objects or tools to serve men who alone were seen as fully human. Christianity inherited the shackling of women from the Hellenistic world in which it emerged, though it also possessed contravening impulses that would eventually break through (Brown, Brundage).

Despite positive achievements in early Greek and later Roman times, patriarchal imagery prevailed in Western political thought until the rise of social contract thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, basically the Enlightenment and the revolutions of modernization. Where populations grew, along with technology and culture, kinship was increasingly supplanted by other forms of interaction and modes of organization. Families shrank as the functions they previously performed were assumed by specialized, extra-familial agencies. Increasingly marriages as well came to be based on the personal interest and choice of the partners and not in the first instance on the interests of the respective families from whom the partners came.

Nonetheless, while marriage constituted the primordial covenant in the human story, as Carole Pateman shows, the pioneer contract theorists were unable to assimilate that reality into their scheme. Whereas contract theory posits the equality of citizens in the public arena, and hence of the partners in the political contract, women were still regarded as unequal and subordinate to men. "The social contract is a story of freedom; the sexual contract is a story of subjection. . . . Men’s freedom and women’s subjection are created through the original contract," Pateman writes. Unable to recognize the human equality of women and men, women were included in the political contract by the Enlightenment thinkers only through their husbands. Both wives and family were excluded from social contract theory.

Meanwhile the structural changes brought about subsequently by modernization, though in some respects beneficial to women, in other respects reinforced their inherited limitations. In pre-industrial times, economic production was largely household-based. Though there was some division of labor between men and women, scholars believe that such differences were less pronounced than in later times. For example, immediately prior to the rise of the factory system, some manufactures were carried out as cottage industries, activities in which women and children often were the principal participants. The introduction of the factory system meant the separation of work from the household. Initially this took women and children into factories, around which their dwellings clustered. The dehumanizing effects were oft noted, and figured heavily in the origins of modem socialism, and especially Marxism.

The great reforms of the industrial era returned women and children to their homes in housing environments separated from the disruption and pollution of industrial operations. The wage economy presupposed the single income household, with the husband-father earning the livelihood and the wife-mother managing the household. The "nuclear family" now appeared to come into its own. In the United States, by 1926 Ernest Burgess described the family as "a unity of interacting personalities." By midcentury, Talcott Parsons, then the leading sociologist, could plausibly argue that the nuclear family and the industrial civilization had reached an accommodation. The family, no longer engaged in economic production, now served the "socialization" of the young and the "stabilization" of the adult. Correspondingly he viewed the husband-father as the instrumental leader of the family unit, and the wife-mother as the expressive leader. This nuclear family unit, now structurally freed from the hegemony of extended kin, possessed the flexibility and mobility that an industrial civilization required, and yet appeared sheltered from the atomizing dynamics of that civilization. The career status of the working "head" of the family determined the social status of the family, which was thus sheltered from the status conflicts that surged through the society outside the family.

What escaped recognition during the early phase of modernization, however, was not only that women remained in bondage but that modernization in some respects reinforced their plight. In the USA this became evident in the new suburbanization following World War II. Large new automobile-based residential suburbs sprang up around major cities, leaving housewife-mothers, along with children and youth, newly isolated and stranded from community and city life. Already the War had brought great numbers of women into the work-place to fill the gaps by the men who were drafted into the armed services, not all of whom willingly left employment when the men returned. Meanwhile with the wage system oriented to household support by one (male) wage-earner, women had been only marginally employed and paid. Even when working equally with men they were paid less.

Subsequent upheavals, stemming from the 1960s, finally triggered the spread of feminism throughout society. Though in recent decades important strides have been made in the USA, the end is not yet in sight. In its extreme forms, feminism has charged that marriage as such is oppressive and enslaving to women. The problem thus is deeper than merely the patriarchal legacy in the culture. Marriage as an exclusive bond, "till death do us part," may well come to inhibit the personal growth of one or both partners.

In any case, there has never been a time or a society in which all marriages were "successful." Without prejudice to the norming significance of the conjugal union, failed marriages must be humanely assimilated in societies, as must human failures otherwise. Where societies find reasonable balance, by the nature of the case, most marriages "succeed." In any case, building human persons and hence building marriages is a lifelong process.

The bonding impulse and its oft-demonstrated fecundity in human affairs places it far beyond the reach of mere cultural manipulation. The universal persistence of the pairbonding proclivity in our species from its the very beginning, despite the great diversity and pathology of mating and family forms, must give us pause. Yet we tend to attach more importance to that diversity — obviously no particular ritual form can be regarded as definitive — than to the persistence and the durability of the pair-bond. Admittedly, given the dual legacy of the derogation of women and the eclipse of the conjugal by the consanguineal axis in the family process over the millennia of our Western tradition we are hardly able at this stage to deal objectively with complementary significance of sex and gender in human affairs. In the end, men and women are different. It is these realities that have yet to be taken seriously in our modem agony over the future of the family.

If indeed marriage and family were to disappear, what would be the consequences? Obviously, if history is moving in that direction, only history can render the verdict. Even so, history is not, or rather not merely, a blind force. Meanwhile the records of the Utopian "experiments" in recent centuries and decades are instructive. These typically sought to reintroduce familial qualities into larger non-familial groupings, while relativizing familial claims at the primary familial levels. In effect, the family "problem" was to be solved by "societizing" families and "familizing" societies. The most instructive example was doubtlessly the modem Israeli Kibbutzim. Originally it was assumed that gender differences could be overcome by removing children from conventional families to be reared in mixed groups, girls and boys, with minimal contact with their biological parents.

But two counter pressures mounted within the kibbutzim themselves. Couples, and especially wives, increasingly objected to the limited space thereby accorded to family living. Secondly, at puberty, girls demanded privacy, despite the conditioning they had received in their non-segregated upbringing. Without retracing the step by step developments here, by the early 1990s, family living and child-rearing has largely reasserted itself in most kibbutzim. Men and women bond, set up households, share personal living, produce and bring up offspring, to state the matter perhaps clumsily, because the are made that way.

Societies without families? A second, less direct but possibly more profound "experiment" in a possibly familyless future was outlined by social psychologist Kenneth Gergen at the beginning of the 1990’s in book which he entitled The Saturated Self. As the subtitle — Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life — indicates, Gergen attends directly to our theme. He embraces the notion of postmodernity as the reality of our time, radically distinct from the previous modem era. "In the modernist idiom," he writes, "normal persons are predictable, honest, and sincere. Modernists believe in educational systems, a stable family life, moral training, and rational choice of marriage partners" (6). To come to terms with the "social saturation" of postmodernity he proposes "first to bid final adieu to the concrete entity of self, and then to trace the reconstruction of self as a relationship" (140). One reaches the "final stage" in the transition to "the postmodern . . . when the self vanishes fully into a stage of relatedness. One ceases to believe in a self in which he or she is embedded." While he admits that this is not yet "a pervasive condition," he sees indications that that stage "is imminent"(17). Clinging to the notion of stable self that continues overtime in an era in which events and relationships are in continuous flux becomes dysfunctional.

Further: "If it is not the individual `I’s who create relationships, but relationships that create the `sense’ of `I,’ then `I’ cease to be the center of success or failure, the one who is evaluated well or poorly, and so on. Rather, T am just an I by virtue of playing a particular part in a relationship" (157). "In this era the self is redefined as no longer an essence in itself, but relational. In the postmodern world, selves may become the manifestation of relationship, thus placing relationships in the central position occupied by the individual self for the last several hundred years of Western history" (146f). In other words, Gergen regards the notions of personal and self identity as first emerging in the "modem" era, only to become obsolete as the postmodern era emerges.

I noted earlier, that as historical developments, the emancipation of the individual and the conjugal union (from extended family hegemony) emerge correlatively. At least initially, far from disappearing, the family as institution was reconstituted on a conjugal, rather than a consanguineal basis. When the "individual" is substituted for the "family" as the elementary human unit, by the same token that individual rather than the family that reared him or her now chooses his or her spouse or marital partner. The primary family unit thus turns on conjugal rather than on the "blood" tie. The family retains its procreative function, but the balance between the two energies, the unitive and the procreative, is historically redressed.

Gergen focuses his study on the fate of the self in "postmodernity." Meanwhile, however, as already foreshadowed in his above description of the "modem" era ("a stable family life . . . and rational choice of marriage partners"), marriage and family are not exempt from the transiency to which the postmodern "self " is reduced. Though there are occasional references throughout the volume to family, he does not elaborate. The logic, however, is unmistakable — the fate of the self and the family are inseparable. The historical abandonment of the one entails the abandonment of the other.

Anthony Giddens, an English sociologist unwilling to accept the notion of postmodernity, characterizes our era instead as "high modernity." Writing also in 1991, far from abandoning the notion of the self, he proposes instead that in "the post-traditional order of modernity, and against the backdrop of new forms of mediated experience, self-identity becomes a reflexively organized endeavor. The reflexive project of the self, which consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives, takes place in the context of multiple choice as filtered through abstract systems . . . Reflexively organized life-planning, which normally presumes consideration of risks as filtered through contact with expert knowledge, becomes a central feature of the structuring of self-identity"(5)

Self-identity is not a distinctive trait, or even a collection of traits, possessed by the individual. It is the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or his biography. Identity here still presumes continuity across time and space: but self-identity is such continuity as interpreted reflexively by the agent. . . . To be a ‘person’ is not just to be a reflexive actor but to have a concept of a person (as applied both to the self and others) (53).

 

Reflexivity along with trust become pivotal concepts in Giddens’s discourse. His use of the former term is illustrated in the foregoing paragraph. With regard to trust, Giddens refers to the "chaos that threatens on the other side of the ordinariness of everyday conventions." The resulting uncertainty and risk requires "a sense of ontological security," a faith in "the coherence of everyday life."

Trust in the existential anchorings of reality in an emotional, and to some degree in a cognitive, sense rests on confidence in the reliability of persons, acquired in the early experiences of the infant. . . . As developed through the loving attentions of early caretakers, basic trust links self-identity in a fateful way to the appraisals of others. . . . An awareness of the separate identity of the parenting figures originates in the emotional acceptance of absence: the ‘faith’ that the caretaker will return, even though she or he is no longer in the presence of the infant.

 

These few intimations must here suffice. Far from the chimera sketched by Gergen, Giddens underscores the centrality of self and identity in human affairs, and its rootedness in familial soil. Of course, adoptive parents or other caregivers can replace birth parents, but only if they provide the attention and devotion that we associate with the latter. In that case, why assume that we can replace, much less improve on, the devoted ambiance the traditional family provides? Indeed, much of the predictability of human responses once provided in next of kin settings, now devolves on the individual self Paradoxically, while high modernity demands ever greater personal autonomy, its ever increasing complexity tends to dissolve the communal matrices of the necessary personal identity. Only where both marriage and family are radically reconstituted in the process of modernization can they flourish, while modernization mi turn can survive and flourish only on the basis of that reconstitution.

Finally, what does this mean for ethnicity, an issue newly troublesome in the postcommunist and high modem era? Several years ago, Professor M. Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma, then a guest professor at George Mason University outside Washington, DC, delivered an evening lecture to a small gathering of scholars in Washington on his grandfather’s legacy in India today. In the discussion that followed Gandhi was asked what he considered to be the distinguishing achievement of the American experiment. Without a moment’s hesitation, he answered: "Nation without the blood line. "

The term nation, as we know, derives from the Latin natus — born or birth. Strictly speaking, a nation is a gens, and a nation-state is a gens or ethnic community constituted politically as a state. Modem social and political history can be read as a continuing contest between two conceptions, two paradigms, of statehood: in the first, common descent, a preexisting nation, is the foundation of political community. According to the other, descent-based grouping — ethnicity — is precisely the obstacle that the state must surmount. Gandhi’s India embraces more than fifty languages and a great variety of religious beliefs and practices. Two religions, Hinduism and Islam, have been rivals for supremacy, a competition, as we know, which issued in bloodily in two states, India and Pakistan, as the English withdrew earlier in this century.

The implication of Gandhi’s above reply is inescapable: the blood tie, from family to ethnic solidarity, is not the stuff from which a viable polity can be constituted. Gandhi’s was not the reply of an Americaphile. Gandhi thereupon appropriately noted the continued failure of American society to realize this ideal with regard to racism or to the displaced native population that made the American territory an ostensibly empty continent. Even so, those failures honor the ideal in its breach. Perhaps no existing society fully attains the ideal that all humans are created equal, that only where all members stand of equal footing before the law can a society fully prosper.

In any event, that the United States emerged as a "nation without the blood-line" is due in part to the wealth of the European cultural legacy on which the new country drew, in part as well to an "accident of history." The USA has often been described as a nation of immigrants, of people who chose to go there in search of a new existence, hence a new identity. Ideally citizenship is grounded in the common humanity of everyone, not on secondary traits such as family, gender, language, privilege and the like.

In recent decades this "melting pot" paradigm has come under the increasing challenge of "multi-culturalism," in effect, demands from a variety of ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities for greater space, provoking anxieties over the fate of the basic model. This challenge may well be a fitting signal that the basic notion of the nation-state that hitherto has informed the modem era is not a panacea. As already noted, linguistically nation derives from birth, in effect seeks to replace lesser ethnicities by a greater one. Cynically, one might thus argue, a nation simply bribes the lesser ethnicities into submission by offering a greater one. Whatever the case, today’s globalization and the uprooting of peoples profoundly challenges our existing schemes. I here argue that whatever our social contrivances, we ignore or violate the archetypal human significance of the conjugal union at great cost. Admittedly, marriage as well as family can, and often do, stifle the personal development of children and of spouses, despite their archetypal grounding, but particular violations do not constitute general nullification. After all, both institutions, as well as their members, are only human.

Philip Abbott. The Family on Trial. Special Relationships in Modern Political Thought. University Park & London: Penn State University Press, 1981.

Julien Benda, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955 (original French, La Trahison des Clercs, 1927).

Peter Brown. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. NY: Columbia University Press, 1988.

James A. Brundage. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Ernest W. Burgess. "The Family as a Unity of Interacting Personalities," The Family VII, 1926.

James S. Coleman. "The Rational Reconstruction of Society," American Sociological Review, 58.1, 1993: 1-15.

Kenneth J. Gergen. The Saturated Set(- Dilemmas of Identity in Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-Identity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.

William Goode. World Revolution and Family Patterns. New York: Free Press, 1963.

Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Society. Dorset Press, 1986 (1861).

Karl Marx. "Theses on Feuerbach," The Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York. W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. 1972.

John Stewart Mill. A System of Logic. London, Longmans, Green, 1872 (1941 reprint).

Robert Nisbet. Twilight of Authority. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Talcott Parsons and Robert F. Bales. Family Socialization and Interaction Process. Glencoe, 11: Free Press, 1955.

Carole Pateman. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Melford E. Spiro, Gender and Culture: Kibbutz Women Revisited. New Brunswick & London: Transaction Publishers, 1996 (With a new intro. by the author, original 1979).