Talk:Familialism

Neutrality
This article is mostly based around Deleuze & Guattari's critiques. No rebuttals or alternate viewpoints are offered. If the concept is a fundamentally critical one, this should be explained and contextualized. DarwinPeacock (talk) 06:23, 17 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I've been reading around D&G for more than 15 years, and in that time I have not personally encountered any substantial rebuttals of their critique of familialism. This isn't evidence, of course, but I'm going to remove the tag until appropriate sources for a 'critique of their critique' are identified. DionysosProteus (talk) 13:44, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

If the article is about Deleuze and Guattari's 'critique', then the idea that you have not personally encountered any substantial rebuttals would be relevant, if you are the author of this article. But the article is not about Deleuze and Guattari, it's about a purported ideological concept. As such there are lots of implicit critiques. The Islamic view of the family, for example, or the Natural Law view promoted by the Catholics, are two major ones. These two display a sort of view of family vaguely evident behind the critique of 'familialism'. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Richardson mcphillips (talk • contribs) 12:42, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

This article reads as a biased hit-piece against family from an LGBT perspective; as if taking the family as the fundamental social unit is somehow odd or unhealthy. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.29.83.154 (talk) 12:07, 10 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I've edited the article to deal with all these criticisms. --Loremaster (talk) 23:53, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Even now the article looks to be mostly about the criticisms of the idea as opposed to explaining what it is and its history. 86.45.42.228 (talk) 17:26, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

Other meanings
Familialism also denotes the application of integrated family structure to the corporate workplace and other social, cultural and aesthetic constructs, including state socialist governments. 

Familialism is not only Western; Eastern familialism affects business: Limits to globalization: welfare states and the world economy; Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent

The larger meanings of the term should be discussed. Binksternet (talk) 13:46, 21 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Feel free to edit the article to include new content based on reliable sources. --Loremaster (talk) 23:54, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Import from other entry
The below sections now appear under Paternalism but do not belong there. They should be incorporated into this page instead. Filofil (talk) 13:45, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Ancient political familialism
"Family as a model for the state" is an idea in political philosophy that originated in the Socratic-Platonic principle of Macrocosm/microcosm, which identifies recurrent patterns at larger and smaller scales of the cosmos, including the social world. In particular, monarchists have argued that the state mirrors the patriarchal family, with the subjects obeying the king as children obey their father, which in turn helps to justify monarchical or aristocratic rule.

Plutarch records a laconic saying of the Dorians attributed to Lycurgus. Asked why he did not establish a democracy in Lacedaemon (Sparta), Lycurgus responded, "Begin, friend, and set it up in your family". Plutarch claims that their government resembled the family in its form.

Aristotle argued that the schema of authority and subordination exists in the whole of nature. He gave examples such as man and animal (domestic), man and wife, slaves and children. Further, he claimed that it is found in any animal, as the relationship he believed to exist between soul and body, "which the former is by nature the ruling and the later subject factor". Aristotle further asserted that "the government of a household is a monarchy since every house is governed by a single ruler". Later, he said that husbands exercise a republican government over their wives and monarchical government over their children, and that they exhibit political office over slaves and royal office over the family in general.

Arius Didymus in Stobaeus, 1st century CE, wrote that "A primary kind of association (politeia) is the legal union of a man and woman for begetting children and for sharing life". From the collection of households a village is formed and from villages a city, "So just as the household yields for the city the seeds of its formation, thus it yields the constitution (politeia)". Further, he claims that "Connected with the house is a pattern of monarchy, of aristocracy and of democracy. The relationship of parents to children is monarchic, of husbands to wives aristocratic, of children to one another democratic".

Modern political familialism
Some modern thinkers, such as Louis de Bonald, have written as if the family were a miniature state. In his analysis of the family relationships of father, mother and child, Bonald related these to the functions of a state: the father is the power, the mother is the minister and the child as subject. As the father is "active and strong" and the child is "passive or weak", the mother is the "median term between the two extremes of this continuous proportion". Like many apologists for political familialism, De Bonald justified his analysis on biblical authority:
 * "(It) calls man the reason, the head, the power of woman: Vir caput est mulieris (the man is head of the woman) says St. Paul. It calls woman the helper or minister of man: "Let us make man," says Genesis, "a helper similar to him." It calls the child a subject, since it tells it, in a thousand places, to obey its parents"

Bonald also sees divorce as the first stage of disorder in the state, insisting that the deconstitution of the family brings about the deconstitution of state, with The Kyklos not far behind.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn also connects family and monarchy:
 * "Due to its inherent patriarchalism, monarchy fits organically into the ecclesiastic and familistic pattern of a Christian society. (Compare the teaching of Pope Leo XIII: 'Likewise the powers of fathers of families preserves expressly a certain image and form of the authority which is in God, from which all paternity in heaven and earth receives its name—Eph 3.15') The relationship between the King as 'father of the fatherland' and the people is one of mutual love".

George Lakoff has more recently claimed that the left-right distinction in politics reflects a different ideals of the family; for right-wing, the ideal is a patriarchal family based upon absolutist morality; for left-wing, the ideal is an unconditionally loving family. As a result, Lakoff argues, both sides find each others' views not only immoral, but incomprehensible, since they appear to violate each sides' deeply held beliefs about personal morality in the sphere of the family.

Christian criticisms?
I would like to see more criticisms of this ideology from a Christian (particularly Eastern Christian) perspective, such as arguing that familialism undermines early Christianity's heavily monastic and ascetic character, or that the nuclear family is a relatively recent development and that 1st millennium Christian families were often non-nuclear (and still are in some traditional Middle Eastern Christian communities, whose way of life has changed the least in 2000 years), that the fundamental social unit for Christians ought not to be the family but rather the parish, village/town, or monastery, or that familialism denigrates celibacy and is implicitly Jovinianist. FiredanceThroughTheNight (talk) 07:29, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

"See also" links of unknown relation
I moved the following "See also" links to here, because their relation to familialism were not really clear: I think it would be better to integrate links as these into article prose, like I did for social conservatism and Focus on the family. Mikael Häggström (talk) 12:12, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Paleoconservatism
 * American Decency Association
 * American Family Association
 * Christian Coalition
 * Christian Voice
 * Concerned Women for America
 * Families First
 * Family Research Council
 * National Legion of Decency
 * Parents Television Council
 * Traditional Values Coalition
 * United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film and Broadcasting

Familism in England and New England- disambiguation needed?
I think that some mention of other uses of the word Familist should be included somehow.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinomian_Controversy

John Winthrop (1638) "A Short Story of the Rise, reign, and ruine of the Antinomians, Familists & Libertines". The work includes an incomplete transcript of the trial of Hutchinson. The history is discussed Michael P. Winship: Making Heretics (2002) and The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson (2005).

Christopher Hill "Liberty against the law" also makes passing reference to this use of the word.

71.186.131.57 (talk) 14:47, 23 May 2016 (UTC)
 * There is already a hatnote at the top for this purpose. Mikael Häggström (talk) 22:06, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

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