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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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those who possess "a stake in the country". One of the chief social
arguments for marriage, and against celibacy, is that a man cannot
be regarded as fully conscious of his responsibilities as a citizen
unless he possesses a family. "The history of jurisprudence must
be followed in its whole course", remarks again Sir Henry Maine,
"if we are to understand how gradually and tardily society dissolved
itself into component atoms, by what insensible gradations
the relation of man to man substituted itself for the relation of
the individual to his family, and of families to each other"[1].
The Roman cult of the family lares — a term identical with the Etruscan lars, meaning a chief, ruler, or master — by which the sacred character of the family was ritually commemorated and family sentiment promoted, was an exclusive privilege of the patrician, or property-owning families. The plebs or proletarians, who owned no property, were excluded from such a cult, and were understood not to have families. The juridic relations of proletarians, who merely proliferated without founding a family, had reference to the clan, not to the family. The Christian Church, which, after at first rejecting the institution of marriage, adopted the juridic conceptions of Roman law, gave in the sixth century, its official recognition to the marriages of noble classes owning property, while it did not consider it necessary to concern itself with the marriages of "common people"[2].
An enormous amount of discussion and controversy has taken place with reference to the origin of the family. In harmony with the sentiments centering round its importance as the "foundation of society", the group has commonly been regarded as representing the original foundation of human association also, that is, as the first form of a social group. One of the conclusions to which the extension and analysis of ethnographical knowledge, during the period of its active growth, led such students as Tylor, L. H. Morgan, McLennan, Robertson Smith, Sir James Frazer, Letourneau, Köhler, was that the family group does not exist in the lower cultures. More recently many writers on social anthropology, such as Westermarck, Malinowski, Lowie, Keller, and others, have, however, devoted their activities to interpreting ethnographical facts so as to retain the conception that the paternal family has been from the first the foundation and nucleus of social organisation.
The question has a much wider bearing than may at first appear. It involves much more than a conception of the mode
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 358. 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/40&oldid=- (Version vom 31.5.2022)
