JPI 959
The Family in America: Historical Perspectives
This course addresses the effects of capitalism and other liberal institutions on marital-familial integrity and stability, fertility rates, the roles of men and women (i.e. the feminist question), homosexuality, and so forth, while at the same time taking up the agrarian (e.g., Berry) and distributivist (e.g., Chesterton) movements and their implications for the family. How do liberal institutions shape the American family? What are the long-term implications of capitalism's collusion with socialism, according to which, on the one hand, familial relations and roles are increasingly appropriated to governmental institutions, while, on the other, both parents are directed toward employment in the market economy? What is implied for the family by alternative proposals (e.g., agrarianism and distributivism)? As a backdrop, the course also discusses the relationship, antecedents, similarities and differences, between the American situation and historical developments in Europe.
