Family

The Oresteia treats the family as the original human association and also as the scene of its most intractable conflicts. The house of Atreus is under a curse that has passed from generation to generation, and the trilogy unfolds a series of events in which each bond within the family is set against another. Agamemnon, as father, sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia for the sake of the expedition against Troy; Clytemnestra, as wife and mother, kills him in return; Orestes, as son, is then called upon to avenge his father by killing his mother. The question the trilogy keeps forcing on its audience is whether the bonds of blood, of marriage, and of parenthood form one fabric at all, or whether they stand in such tension with one another that no act within the family can leave it undivided.

Aeschylus brings this to a head in the trial scene of the Eumenides. The Furies insist on the primacy of the bond between mother and child, and they treat the mother's blood as claiming a retribution nothing else can discharge. Apollo, defending Orestes, argues that the father is the true parent and that the mother is the vessel only. Athena's vote goes to Orestes, and the argument has drawn the disapproval of most subsequent readers, but the scene is less a settled doctrine than a dramatization of the fact that the family's bonds do not form a natural hierarchy. Where they conflict, no private judgment can rank them. The city, through its court, must step in.

This treatment leaves the tradition with several enduring questions. Whether the bond between parent and child is more fundamental than the bond between husband and wife, and whether either can be subordinated to the claims of the political community, are questions taken up in the Antigone of Sophocles, in the Politics of Aristotle, and in the long line of writers on the household and the state. The problem of how the family stands to justice and to religion is considered under those ideas; the question of how it bears on the education of its members, under Education.

Later writers will place the family within a more orderly frame. Aristotle will describe it as the first of the natural associations out of which the village and the city grow, and he will distinguish its three relations of husband and wife, parent and child, and master and slave. Aquinas will take up the natural right and duty of parents toward their offspring. But the tragic insight of Aeschylus persists: where the claims of the household come into collision, and where they collide with the claims of the city, the resolution cannot come from within the family itself.

The Antigone places the obligations of the family in direct opposition to the edicts of the city. Polyneices has fallen in the attack on Thebes and by the order of Creon is to be left unburied. Antigone, his sister, holds that the claims of kindred and the obligations owed to the dead are older than any edict and cannot be set aside by it. The play does not allow this to be stated as the mere preference of private affection over public order. Antigone's argument is that the bond of family carries its own law, not derived from the city and not subject to its revision. What holds her to the act of burial is not an emotional attachment but something she takes to be a duty laid on her by gods and by an older order than Creon's.

Sophocles develops the treatment by setting several forms of the family's claim in relation to one another. Antigone's tie to her dead brother is distinguished from her tie to her betrothed Haemon, and both are distinguished from the claim of her sister Ismene, who loves her and would have lived with her rather than die for a principle. Ismene represents the family as it ordinarily protects the living; Antigone represents the family as it is claimed by the dead. The poet does not allow either form of the tie to displace the other. Haemon's love and his death, following upon Antigone's, complete the picture of a household whose bonds have been broken by an order that was meant only to secure the city.

The questions raised here belong also to the treatments of Justice, Law, and Duty, and are discussed in detail under those heads. What Sophocles places under the idea of Family is the claim that the household stands in a relation to its members, living and dead, which the city did not establish and cannot annul. This is not yet the philosophical doctrine that the family is a natural association prior to the state, but it is the dramatization from which that doctrine draws its force.

Aristotle in the Politics will argue that the family is the first of the associations natural to man, and that the city, though more perfect, arises out of it. Aquinas will reason that the natural bond between parent and child has a claim on the affections and duties prior to any civic obligation. Neither formulation would be possible without what the tragedian had first set in dramatic form: a case in which the claim of the household, pressed to its limit, produces a conflict the city cannot resolve without loss.

Where Aeschylus treats the house of Atreus as the scene of a curse which binds generation to generation, and where Sophocles treats the house of Oedipus as the scene of an inherited pollution, Euripides in the Medea treats the household in a more private key. There is no curse on Medea's house, no inherited guilt, no dark prophecy. There is only a husband who, having been saved by his wife, chooses to put her aside in order to marry a younger woman of higher station, and a wife whose response to this private betrayal is to destroy the family from within. The play presents the family not as the site where great forces from beyond it work themselves out, but as a structure whose internal bonds can be turned against themselves by the wounded love of one of its members.

The device by which Medea takes her revenge is the most intimate that the tradition records. She does not strike at Jason's body; she strikes at his posterity. By killing the children she has borne him, she makes certain that no line will carry on his name, and she makes certain also that the memory of him will be bound forever to the memory of his dead children. What she destroys is not only two particular lives but the whole continuing meaning of the family for the man who had treated her as its dispensable part. The horror of the deed lies not merely in its cruelty but in the fact that it is made possible only by the very bonds it destroys. A stranger could not have hurt Jason in this way. Only the mother could.

The questions raised belong to several neighboring ideas. The conflict of love and its opposite, and the capacity of the passions to carry an agent against what she herself knows to be good, are treated in the chapters on Love and on Emotion. The claim of blood against the claim of marriage, which is at issue in the Oresteia of Aeschylus, is revisited here in a private form, and the question of what justice owes to the wronged wife is taken up in the chapter on Justice. What belongs to the idea of the Family itself is the display of the fact that the household, as a network of mutual duties between husband, wife, and children, is vulnerable in a special way to the turning of one of its members against the others, and that the bonds within it offer no natural defense against being turned into instruments of ruin.

Aristotle, in describing the family as the first of the natural associations out of which the village and the city grow, does not have much to say about how the family can be destroyed from within. That work is left to the tragic poets, and of them Euripides is the one who has gone furthest. The tradition which takes up the family as a subject of political and moral analysis will often speak of it as the school of the virtues and as the root of civic affection. The Medea stands as the reminder that the root can be poisoned, and that when it is, nothing further up the stem can be relied upon.

Aristotle begins the Western philosophical treatment of the family by grounding it in natural necessity. In the Politics, the family (oikos) is the first and most elementary human community, preceding the village and the city. It arises from two primary unions: male and female (for procreation) and master and slave (for daily survival). From the accumulation of families comes the village; from villages, the city. The family is natural in the sense that humans cannot exist or develop their capacities without it. The hermit is either a beast or a god.

The family's governance differs from political governance. Aristotle describes the husband's rule over wife as constitutional (she is a free person with rational capacity, though her deliberative authority is without authority in the household), rule over children as kingly (benevolent and based on superior wisdom), and rule over slaves as despotic (exercised in the master's interest). The household is a small political cosmos, anticipating the forms of rule that appear at larger scales, and its structure reveals much about the structure of political life generally.

Crucially for Aristotle, the family is not merely a biological fact but a moral community. The relationships within it — husband and wife, parent and child — are among the most significant relationships available to human beings, and genuine friendship is possible in each. The person who is cruel to their family or treats marriage as mere convenience has failed to understand what the family is for, which is the mutual flourishing of its members and the production of citizens capable of participating in political life.

Aristotle establishes the family as the foundational social unit from which village and city grow, and his account of the relations proper to it shapes the subsequent debate. Later writers will largely accept his view that the family is prior to the state while contesting whether the hierarchy he describes reflects natural differences or conventional arrangements: Locke grounds conjugal society in voluntary compact, Mill argues that the legal subordination of women is the residue of conquest rather than of nature, and Freud holds that what presents itself as natural domestic order conceals the deepest conflicts of psychic life.

Augustine sees the family as the school of virtue and the smallest unit of the City of God's earthly realization. In The City of God, he argues that the peace of the household — the orderly rule and obedience among those who live together — anticipates the civic peace of the city and the ultimate peace of the heavenly city. The father who governs his household well is practicing a form of political art. The family is not merely the origin of the city but an ongoing image of right order, however imperfect.

But Augustine introduces a tension that Aristotle did not fully face. The family, like every earthly institution, is marked by sin. The love that ought to hold families together is corrupted by self-love; marriages are entered for the wrong reasons; parents love their children in disordered ways. The Confessions show Augustine's own complex relationship to family: his debt to his mother Monica, his illegitimate son Adeodatus, the concubine he dismissed on his way to a socially acceptable marriage, the grief of that dismissal. Family life as actually lived is a moral struggle, not a natural harmony.

The Christian theology of marriage as sacrament, developed more fully by Aquinas, gives Augustine a framework for understanding marriage not merely as a natural institution but as a sign of the covenant between Christ and the Church. On this view, the family is not simply the basic social unit but the place where the drama of grace and sin is most intimately enacted, where the demands of the two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, meet in their most personal form.

Augustine's account of the family is inseparable from his theology of grace and original sin. The ideal family is ordered toward God; actual families are disordered by sin. Aquinas will systematize the Christian account; the Reformers will contest its sacramental dimensions; Locke will reconstruct the family on naturalistic and contractual grounds.

Aquinas provides the most comprehensive medieval synthesis of family theory, integrating Aristotle's natural account with the Christian theology of marriage as sacrament. In the Summa Theologica, he argues that marriage has both a natural dimension (oriented to procreation and mutual support) and a supernatural dimension (signifying the union of Christ and the Church). The two dimensions cannot be fully separated: the natural goods of marriage are ordered by grace toward a supernatural end, and the sacramental sign is realized in the natural institution.

The indissolubility of marriage follows from both levels. Naturally, children require stable parenting over many years; the dissolution of marriage undermines this need in ways that other institutions cannot repair. Supernaturally, the union signifies an eternal covenant that cannot be undone. Divorce is therefore wrong not merely as a violation of social convention but as a metaphysical impossibility: the sacramental union cannot be broken, only recognized or denied.

Aquinas also develops Aristotle's account of parental authority, insisting that children are not possessions but persons entrusted to parents for their formation. The parent's duty is not to possess the child but to guide them toward their own proper end, which includes both natural virtue and supernatural beatitude. The family is therefore a community with an educational mission that exceeds what any political community can accomplish — it is the first and most intimate school of the soul.

Aquinas's account became the standard Catholic theology of marriage and family for centuries. The tension it leaves is the relationship between the two foundations: when the natural argument and the sacramental argument point in different directions, which governs? Protestant Reformers, having set aside the sacramental framework, would find themselves with the natural argument alone and consequently more open to the possibility of divorce in extreme cases than Rome could allow.

The treatment of the family in Shakespeare is most fully given in King Lear, where an old king decides to divide his kingdom among his daughters on the basis of their declarations of love, and where the failure of the youngest to flatter him in the manner the others have adopted sets in motion the disasters of the play. The action that follows is a long unfolding of what the older tradition had discussed under the heading of the household: the reciprocal duties of parent and child, the corruptions these duties are liable to, and the question whether there is anything in the tie of blood which can prevent it from becoming the occasion of the worst cruelty. Lear's error, on one reading, is to have confused the profession of love with its substance; on another, to have demanded from his daughters what the family tie does not permit a father to demand, since love that is offered in exchange for a share of the inheritance is not love in the relevant sense. The play is not doctrinaire on the point, and the question of what Lear ought to have known is left partly open.

Two other plays extend the treatment in different directions. Hamlet is the case of the son whose bond to his dead father is the motive of his action throughout, and whose relations with his mother, turned by her hasty remarriage into something uncertain, are among the matters the play will not let him set aside. The Tempest, by contrast, is the case of the father whose one care is the happiness and the preparation of his daughter, and whose exercise of authority over her is both tender and almost total. The Shakespearean plays between them present the whole range of the relations the older writers had schematized: the relation of the young to the old, the duty of honor and support owed to parents, the tenderness of the parent for the child, and the questions raised when these are met with ingratitude, with misunderstanding, or with indifference.

The philosophical discussions of the family belong to several other ideas. The claims of the household against the claims of the city are the matter of Justice and of Law, and are discussed under those heads with reference to the Antigone of Sophocles. The bearing of the parent-child relation on the education of the young is considered under Education. What Shakespeare contributes to the idea of Family is the showing, in cases of extreme disorder, of what the bonds of the family are and what happens to the members when those bonds are cut.

Locke, who argues against the patriarchal conception of political authority, takes some of his examples from the sort of case the Shakespearean plays had made familiar. Rousseau, writing in the Emile on the education of the young, has in view the whole question of the natural affection between parent and child and the corruptions to which it is exposed. Hegel, in the Philosophy of Right, places the family as the first moment of ethical life, a stage which is to be transcended into civil society and then into the state. Each of these treatments is in part an answer to questions the Shakespearean plays had set, and the setting is what gives the questions their grip on readers who would not otherwise attend to them.

Locke reconstructs the family on contractarian and voluntarist grounds, explicitly against the patriarchalism of Robert Filmer, who had grounded political authority in the natural authority of the father. In the Second Treatise, Locke distinguishes conjugal society — the voluntary compact between man and woman for mutual assistance and the raising of children — from both political society and the absolute paternal authority Filmer claimed. The family is a human institution with human purposes, not a divinely instituted hierarchy.

Locke insists that parental authority is temporary and purposive rather than proprietary. Children are born to eventual freedom; the parent's authority over the child is held in trust, exercised for the child's benefit, and must be relinquished when the child reaches maturity. The father does not own the child but educates and governs the child toward the child's own autonomy. This account differs substantially from the Roman tradition of patria potestas, under which the father's power over his children extended far beyond what Locke regards as its proper scope. When the educational task is complete, the authority dissolves.

Similarly, marriage is a contract with specific purposes: procreation and the long-term care of human children (which requires more extended cooperation than animal offspring need). Locke controversially implies that when those purposes are fulfilled, the marriage compact might in principle be revisable. He is careful here, acknowledging complexity, but the logic of contractualism pushes toward revisability in a way that the sacramental tradition could not accommodate.

Locke's contractarian account transforms the family from a natural institution (Aristotle) or sacramental one (Aquinas) into a voluntary association with defined purposes. This opens the door to the liberal critique of traditional family structures. Rousseau will contest Locke's rationalism while sharing his contractarianism. Hegel will argue that the contractual model fails to account for what love and family life are in their essential character.

Rousseau gives the family a paradoxical status in his social thought. On one hand, in the Social Contract, he describes the natural family as the earliest and most genuinely natural of human associations — the mother nursing the infant, the brief dependency of children, the dissolution of the family as children become capable of independence. This natural family is pre-social and pre-conventional; it reflects genuine natural sentiment rather than calculated interest or legal compulsion.

On the other hand, Emile reveals that Rousseau believes the natural family must be transformed by education and civic sentiment if it is to serve human flourishing in a society already corrupted by inequality and vanity. Emile is raised by an ideal tutor who shapes him to be capable of genuine love and genuine citizenship; Sophie is raised differently, for a complementary role. The family that Emile will eventually form is not the natural family but a morally educated institution, carefully cultivated to resist the corruptions of bourgeois life.

Rousseau appeals to nature against convention while simultaneously insisting that good families require the most careful moral formation. The bourgeois family of his time is corrupted by vanity, property, and artificial sentiment. The only satisfactory alternatives, in his view, are either the very primitive natural family or the carefully reformed republican one; the ordinary domestic arrangements of his contemporaries are, in his judgment, the least defensible of the available forms.

Rousseau's idealization of natural sentiment over artificial convention in the family becomes one of the most influential themes in modern thought about the domestic sphere. Hegel will argue that an appeal to natural sentiment fails to account for the way in which love and family life are themselves social and ethical formations. Mill will follow Rousseau's egalitarian instinct while rejecting the differential treatment of men and women that Rousseau's educational scheme prescribes.

Hegel gives the family its most philosophically developed modern treatment in the Philosophy of Right. The family is the first stage of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) — that domain of social institutions in which freedom becomes concrete and objective. Its animating principle is love: the immediate, unreflective unity of persons who feel themselves to be not two separate individuals but one. This is precisely why the family cannot be reduced to a contract: contracts are between self-interested individuals who remain separate throughout; the family is a union that genuinely dissolves individuality into something larger.

The family has three moments in Hegel's account: marriage (the ethical union), family property (the external embodiment of the family's unity in the world), and the upbringing of children (the family's ethical purpose, which is to produce individuals capable of entering the wider world). The family's own dissolution is therefore part of its telos: good parents raise children who eventually leave to form their own families and enter civil society. The family does not persist; it passes over into something else, and this passing-over is its success.

The passage from family to civil society, and thence to the state, constitutes the movement of Hegel's philosophy of right. Civil society, the sphere of individual interest and contractual relationships, is ethically less rich than the family but historically and logically necessary. The state, at the highest level of his analysis, reconciles the particularism of family love with the universalism of law, bringing the ethical life of both to its fullest realization. The relation between family, civil society, and state is treated more fully in the chapters on STATE and GOVERNMENT.

Hegel transforms the family question from sociology and ethics into a philosophy of freedom. His account of love as the animating principle of family life remains influential. Mill will share his concern with the freedom of family members but will focus on the power relations within the family that Hegel's idealizing account tends to obscure.

Mill's account of the family is driven by his concern with justice, particularly the justice owed to women. In The Subjection of Women, he argues that the legal and social subordination of women within marriage is an unjustifiable remnant of primitive power relations, maintained by custom rather than reason. Marriage as it actually exists in Victorian England is not a partnership of equals but a form of domestic servitude: the wife owes legal obedience to the husband, cannot own property independently, cannot leave without forfeiting her children. This is not natural; it is the residue of conquest.

In On Liberty, Mill extends his general principle to the domestic sphere: the family can be the school of either tyranny or justice. If children grow up in a family where one parent is subject to the arbitrary will of the other, they learn that domination is the natural order of things. If they grow up in a family of genuine partnership and mutual respect, they learn the habits of mind appropriate to free citizens. The domestic sphere is not separate from political life but continuous with it; the character formed in the household shapes the character of the polity.

Mill's positive vision is of marriage as an equal partnership, what he calls "the ideal of marriage." Both partners would develop their capacities freely, contribute to the household on the basis of agreement rather than legal compulsion, and raise children who see in both of them models of rational self-governance. Whether the differences between men and women that custom has established reflect natural differences or the effects of unequal education and opportunity is, Mill argues, a question that cannot be answered until equal conditions have been established and the results observed.

Mill's engagement with the family transforms it from a natural or sacramental institution into a political one, subject to the same norms of justice and freedom that govern public life. Freud will enter from a completely different angle, focusing not on the legal structure of the family but on its psychological dynamics and the costs those dynamics impose on every member.

In Anna Karenina Tolstoy treats the family as the ground on which lives are made and unmade. The novel opens with what has become one of the most cited observations in the literature of the family: that happy families resemble one another, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The book proceeds by counterpoint. Two marriages are set side by side, one forming and the other dissolving, and the reader follows them through the ordinary acts of courtship, quarrel, child rearing, and mourning in which a household is either built or betrayed. Where Aristotle and Locke give accounts of the family's origin, and Hegel gives its place in the structure of ethical life, Tolstoy presents a sustained portrait of what those formal accounts leave out: the interior weather of marriage and parenthood as it is actually lived from day to day.

The two marriages are those of Anna and Vronsky, and of Levin and Kitty. Anna leaves her husband Karenin on the strength of a passion she cannot finally live with; Levin and Kitty quarrel, reconcile, and over the long middle of the novel make a household together. Tolstoy places these stories in strict alternation and lets the comparison do its work. He shows what adultery costs the woman who commits it, the child she leaves behind, and the man she joins. He shows what marriage requires of those who remain in it. The novel carries as its epigraph the phrase "Vengeance is mine, I will repay," and the judgment that eventually falls on Anna falls through the natural course of her situation rather than by any external stroke. The family, in Tolstoy's hands, supplies both the occasion for its members' moral life and the sanctions against their failures.

The sharp question that organizes the book is whether romantic love, which the modern reader has learned to think of as the natural ground of marriage, can in fact bear the weight that marriage places upon it. Anna's answer is negative. Her attachment to Vronsky, which she takes at first for a liberation, becomes in time a confinement no less severe than the unloved marriage it replaced. Levin's answer is harder to summarize, because Tolstoy follows him through many months of ordinary married life in which nothing dramatic occurs. What Levin comes to understand is that the marriage he has entered has little to do with the transports he felt during the courtship, and that its happiness, such as it is, is a matter of daily labor, fidelity, and the raising of a child. The discussion of romantic love as distinct from conjugal love, which figures in the chapter on Love, finds in Tolstoy its most extended literary treatment.

Among the voices gathered in this chapter, Tolstoy's is distinctive in refusing to resolve the question at the level of law, contract, or sacrament. Where Locke builds his account on a voluntary compact and Hegel on the first moment of ethical life, Tolstoy locates the whole weight of the matter in the quality of the attention that the members of a household give to one another over time. Freud, writing half a century later, takes up a related intuition and translates it into a psychological theory of the family as the primary site of desire and prohibition, though Tolstoy himself remains closer to the moral and religious framing within which the question had traditionally been asked. Readers who wish to measure the distance between the philosophical and the literary treatment of the family may do so by setting Anna Karenina beside any of the accounts that precede it.

Freud makes the family the central institution of psychological development and the primary site of neurosis. The family is where the deepest structures of the psyche are formed: the Oedipus complex (the child's erotic attachment to the parent of the opposite sex and rivalry with the same-sex parent), the superego (formed through internalization of parental authority), and the basic patterns of love and aggression that determine all subsequent relationships. What we call character is largely what the family made of us before we had any say in it.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argues that the family is also where civilization's renunciatory demands are first imposed. Parents transmit the prohibitions of the wider culture to the child, who internalizes them as the superego. The family is therefore not merely a social institution but the mechanism by which culture reproduces itself in individual psychology. The price of this transmission is the neurotic guilt that civilization generates in all its members — the guilt that grows stronger the more civilization advances and the more renunciation it demands.

The Introductory Lectures extend this account: the family romance, the incest taboo, the relation to authority, all are shaped in early family experience. Adult relationships replicate family patterns without the participants knowing it; the analyst's task is partly to make these patterns visible. The family is not, on Freud's account, the school of virtue that Aristotle describes, nor the first moment of ethical life that Hegel identifies, nor the school of freedom that Mill envisions. It is the institution in which desire and prohibition first encounter each other, and in which the characteristic patterns of the adult psyche are laid down.

Freud's account of the family introduces a level of analysis below that at which the earlier accounts operate. Where Aristotle describes natural companionship, Augustine grace and sin, Hegel love as the basis of ethical life, and Mill a structure of justice, Freud attends to the unconscious dynamics of desire and prohibition that, on his view, underlie all of these. What the family produces, in his account, is not virtue, or freedom, or ethical life, but a particular configuration of desire and guilt that both enables and deforms the cultural achievements of civilization.