The Character of Familial History, Its Limitations and the Conditions for Its Proper Pursuit

Abstract

This is a deliberately controversial piece, deriving the duties of the historian of the family from the ethical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It criticizes the following tendencies in the treatment of the subject: the tendency to read history backwards (the Whig interpretation of history), to see it in terms of the doctrine of modernization (disastrous for the history of the family), to fail to recognize that familial change goes forward at the pace of social structural change, the slowest of all paces of change. The notion of approaches (a demographic approach, afeminist approach and so on) is rejected and the subject is defined as one of those within historical sociology, the type of all social science. An appendix deals with misinterpretations of the introduc tion to Household and family in past time.