Facing a Crisis of Family Formation

The idea that the family is an institution at all is hard to deny and yet difficult to comprehend. This is in part because the family occupies a distinct space between two meanings of the term “institution.” It is not an organization exactly, but neither is it quite a practice or a set of rules or norms. In a sense, the family is a collection of several institutions understood in this latter way—like the institution of marriage and the institution of parenthood. The family arranges these institutions into a coherent and durable structure that is almost a formal organization. It resists easy categorization because it is primeval. The family has a legal existence, but it is decidedly pre-legal. It has a political significance, but it is pre-political too. It is pre-everything.

This is sometimes a real problem for our liberal society, because it casts doubt upon the idea that our natural state is some kind of libertarian individualism. Some important political theorists in our liberal tradition have tried to ground their ideal of liberty in a pre-social condition, or a state of nature, that is populated by wholly independent individuals. Yet these kinds of thought experiments, for all their value, are plainly implausible as descriptions of the human condition. No human being has ever lived a life in circumstances of utter individualism, without some degree of community—which often is at first an extended family. Our social order flows out of the basic conditions of how we come into the world, move through it, and depart it, and so it unavoidably flows outward from the family. Family is the most primordial, and therefore the most foundational, of the institutions that form a society.

Read the rest over at the American Conservative.