The Family on Trial

...Abbott notes: ". . . the child of this new world takes on all the characteristics of a displaced person...

...Abbott means none of this in a dour, "you-are-not-doing-your-duty" fashion...

...In this manner, Marx and Engels are among the precursors of modern moves to abolish childhood, Abbott argues, for beneath much of the current language of "liberation" and "the self lies an attempt to "free individuals from the burden of parenting...

...He takes up the problem beginning with the "extreme rational individualism of Thomas Hobbes" and pursues it through the somewhat 'softer' rational individualism of John Locke, the romantic individualism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the romantic collectivism of Charles Fourier, the rational collectivism of Karl Marx, and that complex blending of demystification and traditionalism he calls the "psychological conservatism" of Sigmund Freud...

...They go on to reduce the family to the male-female dyad...

...generation is defined in political, or more properly, in bureaucratic terms...

...others would pack children off to foreign countries or establish a "world system of child exchange...

...the parental bond disappears...

...Unfortunately, the version of pluralism that came to prevail on the American scene got tied so thoroughly to a politics of group self-interest that radical thinkers dismissed pluralism entirely...

...He offers up, first, the characteristics of special relationships (intimacy, emotional basis, indeterminate time, object diffusion, and dyadic structure - none self-explanatory, and he discusses each in depth...

...To 'give up' the family to the army of experts Abbott has unmasked, with their bizarre, abstracted models that have to do with everything but real human beings, or to 'give over' the family as a symbol, an issue, and a dream of possibility to the political right-wing would be a historic tragedy of major proportions.y of major proportions...

...The work of each of these vital thinkers is assayed for its understanding of the nature of the family and the relationship of the family to the political order...

...A good portion of humanity at any given moment does not fit that criterion and children and those who are about to become children make up the bulk of the segment of that population...

...Indeed, one of the philosophers whose work Abbott discusses justifies infanticide on precisely the grounds that newborn children are not sentient beings...

...indeed, such collectivization is a precondition for the true emancipation of the male-female pair...

...Abbott brings coherence to a debate - the family as a 'political problem' - more often characterized by mean-spirited parti-pris or abstracted model-building than by philosophically sophisticated decency and concern for the future of those feal human beings who inhabit families...

...Paradoxically, where both the rationalists and romantics wind up is with some form or other of a collectivist order, a polity in which all the barriers to abuse of public power have been destroyed, in which all 'lesser institutions,' including the family, have been eradicated - whether in the name of liberation or justice...

...Child-rearing is collectivized...

...Today the family - its fate, its future, its demise, or its possible rebirth - is a ubiquitous topic which leaps at us from the pages of newspapers and popular magazines, forms the subject of endless workshops, symposia, clinics, retreats, and conferences, and has become a veritable, research industry...

...Since a rights model is designed to make us aware of our self-sufficiency as moral agents, it says little about solidarity among human beings...

...Abbott's larger point is this: the rights model, under which most childhood-abolitionists and "down-with-the-irrational-family" advocates, together with strong pro-abortionists, labor "takes as its basis self-sufficient rational human beings...

...Just as the wider polity requires an all-powerful pater familias to keep order ("an insurance agent with a gun," in Abbott's wonderful phrase), the family, too rests solely upon brute power and strategic considerations...

...One of Abbott's key questions, then, is how the modern family is treated in political theory...

...Or, Marx and Engels portray the family as a "dependent institution," one which transmutes in precise lock-step to transformations in the mode of production...

...He has many homes but as a consequence is homeless-r He has in his possession a whole panoply of human rights but has no power to enforce any of them...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain THIS is a splendid book, lucidly written and boldly argued...

...Abbott concludes this sobering and enlightening volume with a defense of "Special Relationships," an embrace of the family rather than its trimming down or mercy-killing to fit the requirements of a 'rational' political order...

...The family is an anomaly if one is enthralled by the image of a society of rationalistic, self-interested agents going about their business, or if one is in the throes of a heady fantasy of 'authenticity' that requires that all persons be untrammeled in their comings and goings, particularly of the sexual sort...

...Part II of The Family on Trial focuses, first, on the children's-rights theorists who believe childhood is best done away with altogether, in part because children are construed as an oppressed 'class' in need of 'liberation.' Even our affection for our children is cynically dismissed as so much glee in possessing our very own slaves or love objects...

...Though they are better off without parents it turns out children may need a bevy of professionals (lawyers, judges, psychiatrists, educators, social workers and political reformers "appear to be the approved vanguard for these efforts") to guide them on their way to fully rationalist, freely-choosing, atomistic adulthood...

...He can foresee no future generation, for the capacity to form a generation is not available to him...

...No quick summary can do justice to the lean richness of Part I of Abbott's discussion...

...If all this weren't bad enough we find philosophers who justify abortion not only by denying personhood to the fetus - this is, by now, common and unstar-tling in abortion debates - but by going so far as to deny human status to the new-born infant...

...Tracing the heritage of child rights advocates to the rational and collective individualist traditions, Abbott unpacks the demand that children "ought to take their place immediately in society as independent human beings...

...Parenthood ceases to exist...

...Her books include The Illusion of Eve and Parenting...

...He continues: "Although the critiques vary in their intensity, dissatisfaction with the family is nearly universal in modern political thought - so much so that the family as an institutional form has come to be regarded as one of the central problems of political philosophy...

...He is subject to no authority, except, of course, the authority of those institutions that guarantee him his freedom...

...In order that the family not pose a threat to political order he must first reconceive the family as an anarchic 'society,' having no intrinsic bonds that unite its members to one another in order that he can than put it back together under his terms: a set of rational considerations under which lies fear...

...In his chapter on "Abortion, Infanticide, and Rights," Abbott decries moves whereby the concept of humanity itself is restricted as part of a larger set of arguments that resolve around a "rights model" and person-hood is granted only to those beings who meet certain standards of rational self-consciousness...

...The federal government and various foundations have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into research projects on such matters as child abuse, spouse abuse, effects on the family of dual-career parents, the family and the newborn, the family and the elderly, the family and mental illness, the family and the developmentally disabled, the family and teenage sexuality, the family and divorce, cohabitation, child-'free' marriages, postponed pregnancy, role reversal and the family, effect on the family of changing demographic patterns, inflationary pressures, and chronic illness: there is no end in sight...

...Instead,it is with a keen and skeptical eye fixed to the self-servingness of much of the hoop-la about "abolishing childhood" (for the good of the children, of course) that he moves into considerations of an epoch, our own, powerfully shaped by the voices from the past who have spoken to us of the family and bequeathed to us a heritage profoundly suspicious of the family in the name of ostensibly 'higher' goals (political order, political justice, the new Communist society...

...All vital family responsibilities involving children are turned into public affairs - matters for the public world to handle...

...Abbott finds this dangerously short-sighted and so do I. He begins the process of reconstructing an "image of . . . pluralism based upon special relationships, one that welcomes decentralization," that promotes participatory democracy, and that "holds out the possibility for a revitalized social and political order...

...bounds of ethical consideration...

...Sidney callahan is assistant professor of psychology at Fairfield Univesity Graduate School of Education...

...That, finally, is where the political and moral issues get joined: on the question - what sort of beings are we, or do we wish to be, anyway...

...In these nasty days when any defense of the family sets liberal and radical teeth on edge, and places one, against one's loudet protestations, in tandem with the Moral Majority, or other discoverers of Utopia in the American past, Abbott's courageous volume is welcome...

...Some call for children-swapping (if you don't like the ones you've got, trade...

...hence they lie outside the REVIEWERS JEAN bethke ELSHTAIN is an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of the forthcoming book, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton University Press...

...Unless, Abbott worries, it is the end of the family itself, for the furious flurry of concern scarcely disguises, in his terms, an "attack on the family in modern political thought" which "has been sweeping and unremitting...

...The impact of each thinker's "reconstruction" or "deconstruc-tion" of the family on subsequent thinkers, epochs, and the people whose lives have been structured, in part, along lines they set is then evaluated...

...Two brief examples must suffice: Hobbes reconstructs the family along the lines of a rational individualism fueled by crude exchange and power considerations...

...There is, it turns out, one tradition of political thinking that preserves the family as one feature of a ' 'political order that is capable of offering a safe, decent, and reasonably just life for its citizens," pluralism...

...Second, he defends his conviction that the modern family is where these special relationships are most likely to find genuine expression...