In recent decades the notion of a national family policy has become a controversial political issue in the United States. Our society is undergoing some wrenching changes that deeply impact upon our family systems and mores. Moreover, most social problems affect families indirectly when not directly. Governments have responded variously to specific problems--child neglect, poverty, teen-age pregnancies, and the like--but the feeling has grown that these responses should be coordinated in a national family policy. However, family, marital, and sexual values and practices in the United States, given our heterogeneous population, vary greatly, and policy issues quickly turn emotional and ideological.

It is my task here to describe and to assess the American experience with family policy initiatives. I will comment first on the career of family problems and responses in the United States, then briefly retrace the efforts toward a family policy, notably by the Carter Administration during the second half of the 1970s. Finally, I will discuss a few of the emerging issues.

THE FAMILY VS. THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

Conventionally we view the family as prior to the society, both genetically and historically; genetically, because the family provides the human material from which the state and other social formations are constructed; historically, because as we well know the family precedes the state. As far as we can tell, "the family" emerged with the birth of our species; whereas, "the state" as we know it today is a recent fabrication. In a measure the state rises in opposition and as a challenge to the family. That challenge has evolved historically. In its early stages, political authority often presented itself as a simple extension of patriarchal rule. Nor have solidary values embodied in family and kinship totally disappeared from the modern state. The nationalism linked to the modern state appeals to familial sentiment, as illustrated, for example, by such terms as "fatherland" or "motherland." Nonetheless, in certain specific respects, the logic and interests of families and states are contradictory.

For example, despite the familial overtones of nation-state ideology, the elementary unit in the modern state is the "citizen," not the family or the lineage. Nowhere is this more evident than in the limits placed by the state on the claims of parental jurisdiction over children. The state reserves for itself the right to intervene on behalf of the child, as well as the right to decide when such intervention is appropriate. This abstraction of the individual from his/her social matrix, as we shall see, places the state inevitably on a collision course with "the family."

In practice, difficulties arise also from the regulatory functions of the state. The family, as indicated, is a pre-political given in human existence. It is there, with its self-perpetuating dynamic, that the state arrives much later on the scene. Nevertheless, by way of its regulatory mandate, the state insinuates itself into a position of authorizing, and hence even seeming to institute, the family (e.g., the marriage license). States, however, rise and fall. When they fall, "the family" picks up the pieces, and thus is the social "protoplasm" from which all other formations grow. Thus, the critical argument that family policy means state encroachment on family turf, though by no means a full account of the matter, is not without substance.

The differentiation of a "public" sphere from the domestic group preceded the rise of the state. Public and private domains are reciprocally determined¹. Further institutional differentiations followed, among which the "economy" and the "state" are the most important. We need, but do not possess, a concept for the social totality from which the "state" (sphere of government) has been abstracted. The Hegelian triad--family, civil society and state--is the most likely conceptual solution². However, the middle term, "civil society," is ambiguous and ideologically freighted; it has not gained general acceptance or clear definition.

In American usage, we frequently distinguish the "private" (nongovernmental) from the "public" (governmental) sectors, in part paralleling the Hegelian distinction between civil society and the state. But much of our associational and economic life, though nongovernmental, nonetheless possesses a "public" character. Moreover the external encroachments that appear to threaten the family derive not only from the state, but from society as well. Indeed, governmental interventions are justified in part by the need to protect the family from the civil society, especially from the ravages of the economy.

Whatever our language, the dynamics and interests of state and society are complementary as well as conflictual. Unfortunately, our polemical experience in state-family relations sometimes hinders the development of the deeper, more nuanced grasp of the family in the modernization process. Admittedly, as we have just seen, there is a sense in which the state grows at the expense of the family, the former forcing the latter into a defensive--and losing--position. Losing function after function to the state and civil society, the family shrinks and declines. Mere quantitative measurement, however, is misleading. Family systems not only surrender functions, but in the process, undergo positive transformation. In the language of game theory, family-state relations may parallel a positive-sum rather than a zero-sum game. There are gains for the family as well as for the state.

The modern state is distinguished from its predecessors by the fact that individual citizens rather than families constitute its building blocks. As I shall note presently, at least in the American context the state intervenes in families on behalf of individuals in the family and not on behalf of the family per se. While this tends to reduce families to mere aggregations of individuals, it also enhances personal autonomy, a value long prized in Western society. Correspondingly, the axis of the family unit shifts increasingly from the blood tie (mother-child) to the conjugal tie. Marriage partners become personal rather than familial choices. Personal fulfillment, hence the nurture of persons, assumes increasing importance in family life. It may thus be argued that "loss of functions" frees the family unit to concentrate directly on its primary task.

Conjugally-based families, however, tend to be more fragile than consanguineously-based families, for being rooted primarily in personal choice the former lacks structural support: such are the risks of freedom. Meanwhile, however, the vulnerabilities of the conjugal family are heightened by our lack of preparation for the relative shift from consanguinity to conjugality as the family axis. Though that shift is implicit in Biblical faith, until very recently, human sexuality and marriage have been viewed in official church teachings largely in instrumental terms. Reproduction of the race was seen onesidedly as the raison d être of both. The intrinsic personal significance of the union of the spouses has been slighted in ethics and culture, a lack tied, in turn, to inadequate views of the human person. Readiness to dissolve marriages--in the United States we are approaching a 50 percent divorce rate--is a symptom of these deficiencies. I will return to this problem in the final section of this paper.

SOME UNIQUELY AMERICAN PROBLEMS

This paper addresses questions of family policy in the United States. To some degree the problems adumbrated are common to modernizing societies generally. Yet country by country responses to modernization vary greatly according to their varied resources, histories and cultures. Though often hailed as the land of freedom and opportunity, the U.S. is plagued by high rates of social pathologies--crime and violence, divorce, illegitimacy, teen-age pregnancies, drug addiction, and the like. Sometimes these dislocations are thought to foreshadow outcomes in other lands as well. Perhaps, however, these pathologies arise from developments that are uniquely American.

What are these idiosyncrasies? I cite two examples where the accidents of American history have blown out of proportion some elements of the modern experience. The first is individualism. Its values, while cherished in the United States, are essentially European or Western in origin. The historical circumstances of the "New World," however, permitted and fostered a more sweeping expression of these yearnings and impulses than was possible in the "Old World." Abundant land, prolonged frontier conditions, and sparse population all permitted, indeed often required, a "rugged individualism." At best, generosity and mutuality flourished among the pioneers. Yet in the resulting ethos, accountability to the common good lags behind the celebration of individual freedom. All too often today, people walk away from marital, familial or other solemn obligations, because, to cite a popular phrase, "I am entitled to my own happiness."

The second example is the pluralism of American culture and American society. Recognition that human social existence is intrinsically pluralistic is rapidly spreading worldwide. A condition at first tolerated uneasily, is increasingly embraced as normal. In the United States pluralism is first of all a demographic fact. Though there are forces that unify, as new waves of immigrants pour into the country, the population, and hence the culture, becomes ever more heterogeneous. Pluralism is also a constitutional principle: as such it is defined as federalism. States forming the union reserved important powers to themselves; powers within the federal and other governments are divided; political power is dispersed locally. Public and private power are often shared and mixed. Finally, the continuing development and differentiation of the society recurrently reshuffles the patterns of stratification, of interests, and of power groupings within the society.

One might say that this is pluralism with a vengeance. But meanwhile unease mounts. Earlier such diversity was undergirded by values widely shared. Now the question looms: can a society cohere without a moral and/or spiritual consensus? Are the formal rules that frame democratic discourse enough to hold a pluralistic society together without an underlying or unifying faith? Questions such as these, I shall note below, feed the controversy surrounding family policy options. In broader terms these questions are now widely discussed, sometimes in polarizing terms, but at times in ways that cut across conventional left/right distinctions³.

A NATIONAL FAMILY POLICY?

Social legislation and public welfare institutions emerged belatedly with the rise of the modern state. Such developments in the United States tended to follow, with some delay, developments in England. Older legal traditions, inherited in part from Roman law, upheld the rights of authority, and thus of existing orders. Beginning in the nineteenth century, increasing attention was devoted to the needs and rights of the wards of authority--children, orphans, women. Meanwhile, private charities preceded these developments by many centuries, along with the English "poor laws" dating from the early 17th century.

For the United States a series of decennial While House Conferences on Children and Youth, beginning in 1909, represented a new departure. Initially in the U.S., relief for the poor and welfare responsibilities were left to the states, and within states, to localities. Previously states had enacted protective laws for children, with parents and then next of kin held responsible for child care. Setting standards for, and licensing of, private agencies also fell within state purview. The 1909 White House Conference stimulated further state action, notably the establishment of state commissions. The Conferences led also to the development of a federal Children's Bureau (1912). Beyond this, the Conference drew national attention to the needs of children, addressing primarily those needs beyond the immediate concern of the states.

The next major milestone was the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, part of President Roosevelt's "New Deal" response to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Initially embracing less than half of the working public, within 30 years that program embraced, at least potentially, the entire population. This program includes aid to dependent children, administered through the states. The program is conceived as a form of social insurance, financed by deductions from workers' earnings. It is designed to provide protection against three basic risks--oldage, long-term disability, and the death of the breadwinner. Originally attacked as "socialistic," Social Security has now become virtually politically untouchable due to public opinion.

The third major benchmark was the enactment in the 1960s of the "Great Society" programs, the "War on Poverty," and Civil Rights legislation of the Kennedy-Johnson years. It will not be possible here to list, let alone discuss, the torrent of federal legislation and social programs of the middle decades of the century. The list of family-impacting initiatives must include also urban renewal, public housing, and other housing policies.

The final milestone in this series of twentieth century social welfare and social insurance initiatives is the reaction of the 1980s. Popularly associated with the Reagan presidency, and with good reason, the retreat from public (i.e., state) initiatives constitutes a broader trend with the Western (OECD) countries. Though the "welfare state" is not rescindable, it appears that at least for some times, social insurance and welfare were consuming a larger share of the GNP than economies were able or willing to bear. The pendulum swings back.

This retreat from federal activism, however, was compounded with reactions to the turmoil of the 60s, a heady mixture of civil rights and

anti-war movements, which served as catalysts for other sorts of grievances. Both constructive and destructive energies were unleashed. We are still trying to figure out what happened to us in the 1960s⁴.

As social problems were addressed singly over the decades, many roads appeared to lead back to "the family." Strengthening and restoring "the family" thus appeared to be a worthy policy objective. Accordingly, the possibility of a national family policy first surfaced in the federal agencies in the mid-1960s⁵. By the mid-1970s there was a flurry of interest in the possible formulation of a "family impact" policy that would require consideration of the possible impact on families of all federal programs. Jimmy Carter displayed some interest in family policy issues early in his 1976 presidential campaign. His running mate, Senator Mondale, had led earlier on family legislation in the United States Senate. By the time of his election Carter had made up a series of campaign promises of family initiatives, including the convening of a White House World Conference on the Family⁶.

Yet implementation was something else. Some issues, such as abortion, were politically problematic, with the Democratic constituency to which he was beholden. Work with the agencies, especially HEW (the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) likewise was difficult. Joseph Califano, Jr., an advisor to Carter during the campaign and subsequently appointed as Secretary of HEW, when asked about family policy in February, 1978, more than a year into the New Administration, replied, "The Administration, to date, has established no overall family policy, but a great deal of attention has been focused on the interaction of programs and proposed legislation with an impact on families."⁷ In fact, the Carter Administration never articulated a "family policy" nor significant new legislation in the field.

The Conference, though announced soon after the inauguration in 1977, did not materialize until 1980, and then in a less auspicious form than originally intended. Though the substantive problems confronting such a conference were formidable enough, the crippling obstacles were ideological, symbolic and political. Family definitions and the appointment of conference leadership cut across the entire range of emotionally-charged issues in social policy--sexism, racism, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, and the like. The conference issued a number of recommendations, such as Social Security reforms to eliminate biases against families, but no family policy as such. One highly visible outcome was replacement of the concept "the family" in public discourse by "families," a bow to the diversity of peoples, cultures, and values that comprise the society.

FAMILY AND STATE IN THE MODERNIZATION

OF SOCIETIES

Senator Daniel Moynihan, a major actor in the shaping of social policy since the 1960s, recently repeated a statement he had made 20 years earlier while serving as a sociologist in the Johnson Administration. Quoting the noted anthropologist, Malinowski, Moynihan continued:

Family life not only educates in general but its quality ultimately determines the individual's capacity to love. The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger sense whether he is capable of loving his fellowmen collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.

But he also maintained that:

In the nature of modern industrial society, no government, however firm might be its wish otherwise, can avoid having policies that profoundly influence family relationships. This is not to be avoided. The only option is whether they will be residual, derivative, in a sense concealed ones.⁸

If these two assumptions are valid--the social indispensability of vital families, and the inescapability of government policies vis-a-vis families--American society confronts a deep crisis. As James Coleman observes (or is it Urie Bronfenbrenner?), "it would appear that the process of making human beings is breaking down in American society"⁹. The difficulty begins with the absence of a consensus regarding both propositions, as Moynihan himself realized. We have a divorce rate approaching 50 percent and there are projections that half or more of today's infants will live in single parent families before they reach the age of eighteen. Out-of-wedlock births account for more than one-fifth of all births. Annually 60 of every 1,000 American women under the age of 18 have abortions. In many problem areas, such as poverty, delinquency and unemployment, youths from incomplete families are overrepresented.

What is the meaning of these rates, the list of which could be greatly extended? Large segments of the population mostly, religiously inspired, have been aroused, even politically mobilized. At the opposite extreme are vocal minorities espousing theories that anticipate and welcome the disappearance of "the family." Most of the social science guild suggests rather coyly that what we witness is family "change," rather than crisis. Each of these responses has a degree of validity; none alone solves the problem; nor do the views readily mix.

Similar disagreements prevail regarding the responses of government. Some look, perhaps all too readily, to government. Others argue that government intervention in family affairs merely exacerbates existing problems or introduces new ones. Such views, as already indicated, were encouraged during the Reagan presidency. President Reagan in his first inaugural (1981) asserted that government is not the solution to our problems--it is the problem. In a 1983 radio broadcast he elaborated: "There is no question that many well-intentioned Great Society-type programs contributed to family breakups, welfare dependency, and large increase in births out of wedlock."¹⁰ Though the evidence was hardly that clear or sweeping--the President was voicing personal conviction--still the charge was not groundless: not all the federal social programs had been roaring successes.

Do we face a crisis or don't we? Is the family breaking down, with the dire consequences we observe, or is an outdated institution yielding to something new and better? Is the state, specifically its government(s), the problem or a source of amelioration? We don't agree, and events will not wait for us to reach agreement. We have been set down in an uncharted sea. "The family" has been taken out of our general consensus; there are only "families"--as many as our cultural diversity casts up. President Carter observed that "government steps in by necessity when families have failed," and when the chips are down, few Americans would seriously disagree.

The very notion of crisis, as we always note, entails both danger and promise. We need not panic--families and agencies, both private and public--still have great resilience. What is happening is that our intersubjectively shared perceptions are finally catching up with reality, and that is a liberating experience. Our human existence is always and intrinsically pluralistic and open-ended. Crisis clears the deck for us to reach more deeply into reality and to build and rebuild on deeper foundations.

To illustrate I shall comment on two themes anticipated in the foregoing discussion. Both have to do with the transformation of family existence in the modernization process. When we address the confrontation of family and state (and to a considerable extent the "civil society" as well), we are thrust back to the Fragestellung of sociology's founding fathers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fate of Gemeinschaft in a world increasingly constructed as Gesellschaft. These, and similar ideal typical concept pairs, have long since been assimilated and exploited in the discipline. As they stand, such polar typologies are too general and indefinite for empirical use. Yet they identified problems, still baffling, that perhaps only further history can resolve: Can the human person be formed and then sustained without a solidary, in effect, a familial, anchor? If the answer is no, is it realistic to look anywhere but to "the family"? Heretofore we have not confronted these questions radically.

Secondly, not having done so, we have tended to look at families primarily as Gemeinschaft survivals, as the one haven in which to take refuge from Gesellschaft (circling the wagons, as in the American West). To be sure the literature on the transformation and reduction of families into aggregates of individuals and corresponding individualistic therapies is extensive. Such treatments for the most part, however, fall short of a personalistically-informed analysis of the shift from consanguinity to conjugality as the (intended?) foundation of family living. Much of the problem stems from a historically-shaped misreading of Biblical materials. Much of the religiously inspired family renewal effort in the United States mistakenly appeals to the patriarchal traditions of Biblical times, missing the thrust that climaxes in highly personal community.

Systematically the transition from consanguinity to conjugality as the axis of the family system is well-advanced. In important areas, however, development lags. Full admission of women to participation in "civil society" and state alike is only now well under way. Among blacks, tangled configurations of class and structural racism force single-parent female-headed "families" back into pseudo-extended (consanguineal) patterns. But time does not permit a discussion of these problems.

Finally, with regard to family policy, I have dwelt on problems and frustrations. Meanwhile, much has nonetheless been accomplished and learned, chiefly in the piecemeal fashion in which genuine advances must come. Social Security--Old Age and Survivors Benefits--is a success story. Over a few decades poverty as a systemic problem among the elderly has been eliminated. In effect, it is an income policy that has worked. This will be far more difficult to achieve at other levels, but it tells us something important, namely, that our task is not to wring our hands, or to panic, but carpe diem.

The Catholic University of America

Washington, D.C.

1. Werner Jaeger, Paideia. The Ideals of Greek Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 111.

2. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942) (1841); Civil Society and the State:New European Perspective, John Keane, ed. (New York: Verso, 1988).

3. See, e.g., Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's, 1986); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981); and Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

4. For example, Daniel Bell, "Sensibility in the 60s," in Man and Society: Focus on Reality, Robert V. Guthrie & Edward J. Barne, eds. (Palo Alto: J. Freel, 1972), pp. 13-38; Todd Bitlin, The Sixties: Days of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987).

5. Daniel P. Moynihan, Family and Nation (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1985).

6. Gilbert Y. Steiner, The Futility of Family Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1981).

7. Ibid., p. 27.

8. Moynihan, op. cit., p. 38.

9. Ibid., p. 192.

10. Quoted by Moynihan, op. cit., p. 57.