Few social institutions have undergone as radical change as the family in recent years, and few social changes have been met with as much controversy. Many conservatives claim that there has been an immoral destruction of the “traditional” family in the last few decades. But the reality is that the social institution we call “the family” is not being “destroyed”; to the contrary, the dynamic changes of the market economy have allowed people to experience it in new ways.
To speak of a destruction of “the traditional family” is extremely misleading. The family, throughout its long history, has undergone innumerable changes. In Biblical times, polygamy was far more common than today. King Solomon, for example, had more than 700 wives. Other preindustrial laws treated married women very differently. As the 18th-century legal theorist William Blackstone observed, after marriage the “legal existence of a woman is suspended, or at least incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband.”
Few contemporary conservatives would defend a family in which women were completely subservient to men, nor would they argue for a return to the days of King Solomon. However, they treat recent changes in family structure — such as same-sex couples or divorce — as a repudiation of some ahistorical ideal of “traditional” family. Rather than thinking of the family in anachronistic terms, they should acknowledge that one of the only “traditional” features of the family is its potentiality for continual change.
Social conservatives underappreciate that many of the recent developments in the family are a result of other social changes conservatives tend to embrace: Namely, dynamic economic change brought about by capitalism.
Prior to industrialization, the family primarily served basic economic needs. Under sedentary agriculture, labor was inherently tied to the household. Arranged marriages were common, and consensual marriages were focused on meeting material needs rather than love. Wives were often treated as mere child-producers who contributed economically through cottage industries. With severe infant mortality rates due to poor medicine and bad economics, children were treated with little sentiment as simple helpers on the farm.
However, with the coming of an industrial-capitalist age, labor was divorced from the household and moved into market-driven factory production, allowing for family matters to become less economically-based. Marriage became increasingly about love and romance and a sentimental attitude toward children became commonplace. The change in attitude towards family matters may be observed in the literature of the time, such as the childhood love story of Heathcliff and Catherine in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
As economist Steven Horwitz argues, the history of the family may be seen as changing its social function by moving up Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. Prior to industrialization, the family was simply a means of providing security and physiological needs through household economic production. As markets began to serve those needs more effectively, the family could begin to increasingly serve higher human needs of belonging, love, and self-actualization of family members.
The results have liberated more women from household confinement. Because marriage is now seen as a way of fulfilling love, people increasingly demand divorces and no longer think marriage should be limited to heterosexual couples. Many conservatives are skeptical of these developments. However, since these changes let women leave abusive relationships and gay couples escape a dangerous marginalized state where they are likely to suffer serious psychological damage, perhaps this skepticism is unwarranted.
Two important lessons may be drawn from this discussion. First, as thinkers such as Hayek would argue, there is little one can do to control how the family spontaneously changes. Many conservatives pretend that using legal coercion to regulate divorce or discriminate against homosexuals can somehow revert us to a time when the “traditional family” was the norm. However, changes in law are more often framed by changes in society than vice versa, especially in modern democracies.
Politicians cater to what the median voters, ideologically speaking, are asking for. If socio-economic changes are causing those voters to experience their family relationships as fulfilling new needs, reactionary laws attempting to impose what “officially” constitutes a family will prove ineffective. The family, like so many other social institutions, is continually evolving in complex, unpredictable ways. Its evolution cannot be planned or directed on the whim of research councils and politicians.
Second, social and economic liberty are inseparable. Conservatives want to embrace market capitalism while ignoring and condemning its dynamic effects on society and culture. If one is going to embrace free markets, it is inconsistent to reject how they impact other social institutions.