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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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always takes place where the debt and the bond of family sentiment are regarded as sacred and binding. Thus upon each succeeding generation is laid the heavy hand of the preceding one, and the authoritarian paternal family invested with sentimental sacredness acts as a drag on human development as a whole.
The force of those considerations is becoming more and more vividly felt at the present time, when the economic conditions of industrial society are moving to a critical climacteric. The defence of traditional sentiments attaching to the paternal family is an aspect of the defence of the conditions of private property upon which the family group is founded. The fears for the security of the paternal family are fears for the economic order of which that social group is rightly regarded as the foundation. The defence of traditional sentiments and relations attaching to the paternal family is an aspect of the defence of the conditions of private ownership which it represents. To the anxieties felt by the moralist in regard to the decay of family life and sentiment is added as an ally the interest shown by the conservative social thinker and anthropological scientist in upholding by their interpretations the credit of the institution. The concern exhibited by a large section of academic social science to prove that the paternal family has been the original basis of social organisation is an expression of those anxieties. As Professor Malinowski correctly states: "Functional anthropology is an essentially conservative science"[1].
The controversy between such conservative social science and progressive science reflects the conflict of economic and social powers by which the contemporary world is more and more sharply divided and by which all thought and all values are inevitably coloured.
The decay of family sentiment is not, however, equivalent to the decay of social sentiment. The formation, with the development of personal property, of the paternal family within the larger social group constituted, in a sense, an impairment of social solidarity, a form of social disruption. The emotional reactions which previously had reference to the whole group became canalised within the channel of the paternal family and concentrated on individuals, whether or not in association with the sexual urges. If the decay of the family as a consecrated ideal were to give rise to stark individualism, the process of dissolution would, so far as regards the psychological basis of social bonds, be carried a stage further, and the social aggregate would be broken up into its individual atoms. That is the term of the tendency so long as the
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 378. 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/60&oldid=- (Version vom 9.6.2022)
- ↑ Parenthood, the Basis of Social Organisation, p. 168.
