The 19th ce and the Rise of the Atomistic Family, part 1

The Nineteenth Century and the Rise of the Atomistic Family (part 1)
Carle C. Zimmerman - 02/26/08

The following movements were particularly outstanding in the nineteenth-century confusion over the family:

1. The rise and popularization of absolute and “causeless” divorce.
2. The rise of race suicide again in France (Roman Gaul) where the dignitas family lost once more its conception that it exists for purposes of reproduction. Sacramentum and fides had been attacked; now proles was rejected.
3. The spread of this idea into cultures derived from barbarian law (England, Sweden, Germany, and the United States) where the dignitas family also lost its reproductive conceptions. As proles was rejected in France, so it was rejected in the Western world.
4. The rise of “evolutionary” history, with its conceptions of ever-moving, formless society, in place of factual history based upon what is known about man.
5. The American nonrevolutionary experiment in family law nullification.
6. The rise of the earlier Marxian antifamilism in Europe and its spread with the growth of Marxian conceptions of politics and economics.
7. The instruction in nihilism of the family bond among the Slavs through the Russian Revolution. (This time the Eastern Empire gets an antifamilistic philosophy from the West, repaying it for the education in antifamilism received by the West from the East in the code of Solon to the Twelve Tables and in the introduction of later Greek philosophy to Rome.)
8. The development of a “public” which would not permit dual marriage forms, along with the rise of social and intellectual classes who want non-dignitas marriage. Not being able to achieve it, especially among those cultures derived from the barbarian, by the use of a concubinatus or non-dignitas form, they have led the way in breaking up the dignitas form.

All of these changes, whether good or bad, are characteristic of the period from the end of the French Revolution to World War I. Absolute and causeless divorce became accepted and popular. For a period in the middle of the century, America nullified the family as a public contract under the control of law. In its formative stages, the Marxian conception of the all-powerful state was extremely antithetical to former conceptions of the family. It is true that Marxism visualized a perfected family, but this was to be achieved by freeing man rather than restricting him by positive laws. (The later Marxism, or all-powerful state conception, has gone in for rather severe family regulation by the state.)