In such an environment both males and females had to contribute in multiple ways to the survival of the household. The family of the Middle Ages was an all-encompassing social unit, bound together by the need to survive economically.
In addition, with limited financial resources and opportunities to store material wealth over long periods, having a large family was a form of old-age insurance. With limited physical capital, labor-intensive methods of production were required, especially in agriculture, making larger families preferable. In an economy based mostly on agriculture and secondarily on small crafts, economic production was largely for the family’s own survival and performed with the limited capital possessed by the household. Before capitalism, the family was both the central unit of economic production and the core political institution. Over history measured in centuries, the evolution of the family can be summarized as a movement of work from the household to the market, with the results being the liberation of human beings from unnecessary labor and a shift in the central functions of the family. The more recent changes of the last 40 years are simply accelerations of those longer-term trends. My goal here, however, is to make the argument that the more fundamental and long-run changes have been the result of economic growth fueled by the market and that those changes have largely been good. Any comprehensive analysis of the changes in the family would have to account thoroughly for those factors.
It is certainly true that various forms of government regulation, including, importantly, the welfare state, have influenced the direction in which families have evolved in the last 40 years. In making the dual claim that the market is a key reason why the family has changed the way it has in recent years and that such changes are good, I need to respond to one objection off the top.
#CAPITALISM II SINGLE PLAYER FREE#
Those of us who value the dynamism of the free market and its power to expand the range of human freedom could do well to apply those ideas to the recent changes in the family and begin to see the ways in which those changes have resulted from the creative powers of the market and have thus expanded human freedom. Meanwhile, those on the left who embrace the dynamism of culture refuse to see or credit the dynamism of the market for making those changes possible and sustaining them. The result is that many on the right who offer at least lip service to the market order continue to resist the cultural changes that it has made possible (and that cannot be undone). What has been lost in the standard left-right debate is the crucial role played by the market economy in many of those changes. The changes in the form and functions of the family have provoked an assortment of responses from the political left and right, with the former largely tolerant or sympathetic to those changes and the latter critical of them. Although the magnitude and rapidity of those changes are exaggerated by the unusual stability in the family from just after World War II until the mid-1960s, the 40 years since have seen a continuing evolution in a variety of ways.
It is hard to think of a human social institution that has undergone more change in less time than has the family in the last several decades.