Seite:Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung Jahrgang 2 Heft 3.pdf/37

	Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3

Family Sentiments.

By

Robert Briffault ^[1].

Like all established social groups, such as the tribe and the nation, the family has been conceived as an idealised object of emotional sentiment. In several instances, as in China, India, ancient Rome, the family has been the object of established religious cults. One of the main purposes served by those cults was to impart sanctity to family ties and to lend emotional emphasis to family obligations. Apart from such organised cults, sentiments of devotion to the family are accounted among the most important of moral duties and virtues, while deficiency of feeling in that respect is looked upon, like lack of patriotism, as immoral, perversely unnatural, if not criminal.

In burgher societies the family virtues and affections are accounted the foundations of social life, happiness, and good repute. The domestic circle gathered round the hearth of the home is the ideal of earthly blessedness and the goal of endeavour. If in typical bourgeois society the family is not, as in China, the object of a ritual cult, it is nevertheless held to be sacred. Family ties are inviolable. Love of the family and respect for the obligations it imposes are the basis of social virtues. To honour one's father and mother is set down among the cardinal commandments. It is "the first commandment with promise" for such filial piety is said to insure long days in the land. The family is the foundation of society.

Those sentiments owe obviously a great deal to tradition and education. The devotion of a Chinese to a person bearing the same name and whom he has never beheld before arises from

Empfohlene Zitierweise:
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 355. Digitale Volltext-Ausgabe bei Wikisource, URL: https://de.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Seite:Zeitschrift_f%C3%BCr_Sozialforschung_Jahrgang_2_Heft_3.pdf/37&oldid=- (Version vom 31.5.2022)

1. Der Autor dieses Beitrages ist der Verfasser der "Mothers". Da dieses für die Sozialforschung bedeutende Werk in Europa heute noch viel zu wenig bekannt ist, gibt unser Mitarbeiter Erich Fromm im Anschluss an diesen Aufsatz eine Besprechung des Buches. In einem der nächsten Hefte dieser Zeitschrift wird E. Fromm die Bedeutung der Mutterrechtsheorie für die Sozialforschung ausführlich behandeln.
   
   Die Schriftleitung.