Family feuds: The Enlightenment revolution in the family and its legacy for liberalism (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft stood in the midst of the Enlightenment revolution in the family, responded to it in their writings, and shaped it with their own ideas. They joined the feud over the family---the rancorous public debate about its proper structure and function---that has accompanied its many transformations over the centuries. The European family shifted from a patriarchal to an egalitarian system of household relations over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rousseau, Burke and Wollstonecraft rightly understood the Enlightenment revolution in the family to be as powerful and influential as the revolutions in science, philosophy, economics and politics that infused the era with a spirit of newfound freedom. Traditional scholarship has portrayed these three thinkers as arch-rivals, since Burke and Wollstonecraft publicly condemned both each other and their forerunner Rousseau in their feuds about the family. Yet the careful comparative study of their works surprisingly reveals that they share more in common when it comes to their ideas on the family that even they ever admitted themselves. All three political philosophers viewed the family as the primary "little platoon"---to use Burke's phrase---at inculcates the moral, social and civic virtues that serve as the foundation for any stable and humane society and political regime. Rousseau and Burke believed that the family could only function as a "little platoon" if it retained its patriarchal structure, while Wollstonecraft argued that only once the family was freed from class and patriarchal hierarchies could it fulfill its role as the nursery of the moral, social and civic virtues. It is Wollstonecraft's vision of the egalitarian family that liberalism has inherited and legally enshrined. Yet the common ground between these three thinkers is relevant for resolving the feuds between progressives and conservatives over the contemporary crisis of the family in American liberalism. The little platoons of the family and other sub-political institutions, such as churches and community organizations, serve as the cradle of the moral and civic virtues that the liberal state, with its respect for the sanctity of the private sphere and its toleration of a variety of views of the good life, cannot supply itself yet are crucial for its endurance, prosperity and the fulfillment of its political mission.