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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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economic importance. That sacramental character, which had at first exclusive reference to the legal guarantee of the economic transaction, came to be understood as referring to the sacredness and permanency of the sentiments between the contracting parties.
The character and extension of family sentiments vary in different countries according to the conditions of the economic factors involved. For example, the solidarity and traditional force of family sentiment is considerably more apparent in the bourgeoisie of France, where according to the Code Napoleon property is divided among all immediate relatives, than it is in England where the laws of succession are founded upon the principle of primogeniture. Acts which concern the family as a whole are in France traditionally subject to the decisions of "conseils de famille", and the duty of maintaining social intercourse with related kindred is much more profoundly established in French, than it is in English habits. The scrupulous conscienciousness with which every branch of a French family assumes the funereal garb of deep mourning upon the decease of a great-aunt twice removed often imparts to a French community the appearance of a society of undertakers. In England, family feeling, though imbued with no less profound moral sentiment, is generally conceived in a more restricted acceptation. Reverence towards the father, as the authoritative head of the family, is more pronounced, while the independence of brothers and sisters from one another is greater. The position of the English wife and mother is more subordinate and surrounded with less sentiment than that of the French "mère". Solidarity is a more conspicuous trait in the French family; duty and respect for paternal authority in the English. The attitude of the English father partakes of that benevolent despotism which has characterised the relation of the English ruling classes towards their dependents, and is known as paternalism.
The profound social-economic changes deriving from the industrial revolution have not failed in profound repercussions on family sentiment. Industrial wealth, which has come to overshadow in importance the more settled and permanent wealth of older forms of property, being less stable and more fluid, is in a much larger measure individual and is less closely associated with inherited family holding. The family as a medium for the transmission of property has lost much of its former importance in fully developed industrial society. It is therefore not surprising that in the later phases of the industrial era the axioms of family sentiment have tended to lose much of their traditional authority.
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 376. 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/58&oldid=- (Version vom 9.6.2022)
