The Origins of the
Morgan.
Red State–Blue
State Divide
by Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D.
This article was first published by Family in
America.org in their Winter 2009 issue.
When first published in 1947, Family and
Civilization was a significant book on the
sociology of the family. Thanks to the
Background imprint of ISI Books, it is back
in print. In this classic, Carle Zimmerman
brings clarity to the precise area of today’s
greatest confusion: the definition and
evolution of the family. Instead of the
Triumphant March of Liberation presented
by the Life Style Left, the late Harvard
sociologist sees an ebb and flow of changes
in family structure. Instead of a contrast
between the nuclear family and the
individualist family, Zimmerman contrasts
three different family types. While he agrees
with Marx and Engels that family structure
is powerfully linked with economics and
politics, Zimmerman is more analytical and
less ideological. Providing evidence for
some of his most fascinating claims sixty
years later is The War between the State and
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse • 663 S. Rancho Santa Fe Road Suite 222 San Marcos CA 92078
www.jennifer-roback-morse.com • email: drj@jennifer-roback-morse.com • 760/295-9278
©2007 No part of this document may be reproduced or disseminated in any way without the expressed written consent of the
Ruth Institute.
the Family, by British scholar Patricia
As an older work, Family and Civilization
can be a challenging read. But the
introduction by Allan Carlson makes the ISI
Books edition accessible to the intelligent
reader, including many non-academics who
have become marriage activists by necessity.
The edition would also be good reading for
college courses in history or sociology.
Carlson helps situate Zimmerman, who
opposed the neo-Marxist sociologists of the
Chicago School, within the larger stream of
twentieth-century family sociology. The
Chicago School argued that the American
family was losing its functions, with fathers
and later mothers leaving the home for
outside employment. But while mainstream
American sociology applauded this trend,
giving it the greatest of modern accolades—
“historical inevitability”—Zimmerman
denied that there was anything permanent or
inevitable about the “shucking off or
negation of familistic bonds.” He argued:
“The disintegration of the family into
contractual and non-institutional forms is so
devastating to high cultural society that
these atypical forms can last only a short
while and will in time have to be corrected.
The family reappears by counterrevolution.”
Zimmerman argues that the contractual
thinking of the eighteenth-century
rationalists channeled the issues in the
wrong direction. Political theorists such as
Locke and Hume, as well as prominent
French and German thinkers, viewed the
family as a private agreement between a
man and a woman for specific civil
functions. This definition constricted the
range of issues that these analysts could see
clearly enough to take seriously. Once the
contractual model is accepted as the basic
form of the family, scholars will interpret
history as the steady march from non-
contractual marriages to contractual
marriages, from forced or arranged
marriages to love or companionate
marriages. Stephanie Coontz is the best-
known modern exponent of this view.
Things are getting better because they are
getting freer, which means more contractual.
Zimmerman escapes this trap by focusing on
the sovereignty of the family. He lays out
his key analytical questions in the second
chapter:
Of the total power in society, how much
belongs to the family? Of the total amount
of control of action in the society, how much
is left for the family? What role does the
family play in the total business of society? .
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse • 663 S. Rancho Santa Fe Road Suite 222 San Marcos CA 92078
www.jennifer-roback-morse.com • email: drj@jennifer-roback-morse.com • 760/295-9278
©2007 No part of this document may be reproduced or disseminated in any way without the expressed written consent of the
Ruth Institute.
. . If we want to marry or break up a family,
whom do we consult, the family, the church
or the state? If we are in need, to whom do
we go, the family or the community? If we
violate a rule, who punishes us, the family or
the state?
These questions suggest that no necessary
reason requires society to “progress” on all
fronts from one type of family inexorably to
another type of family. He deploys three
types of family: the trustee family, the
domestic family, and the atomistic family.
The domestic family and the atomistic
family would correspond roughly to the
modern family before and after the sexual
revolution. The trustee family is probably
the least familiar to modern readers.
The Trustee Family and the Atomistic
Family
In the trustee family, “the living individual
members are not the family, but mere
“trustees” of its blood, rights, property,
name and position for their lifetimes.”
According to Zimmerman, this family
system dominated in Homeric Greece of the
ninth century b.c., in Rome from the earliest
tribes to the period of the Twelve Tables
around 450 b.c., and from the so-called Dark
Ages from the sixth to the twelve centuries.
The trustee family exercises the most
sovereignty of any of the family types. The
family is the primary power in society,
controlling individual action, punishing
transgressions, and providing protection
against enemy attack. The concept of the
“house” is more powerful than the concept
of the “home.” This family type tends be the
dominant one in periods when the political
authorities are relatively weak. The family
keeps order, out of necessity: no one else is
doing that job. Individuals in the trustee
family do not typically own landed property.
Rather, the living members of the family
receive the property as a “patrimony” from
past generations and hold the property in
trust for future generations.
Modern economists might view the trustee
family as a family form based on “common
property,” but this is an anachronistic
interpretation. The “tragedy of the
commons,” in which no one takes care of
commonly owned resources, does not occur
in societies dominated by the trustee family.
That tragedy develops only in situations in
which a) the state hold the exclusive or
dominant power to enforce property rights
and b) people view themselves as individual
agents rather than as part of an infinitely-
lived family, with powers of its own.
Neither condition appears in the trustee
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse • 663 S. Rancho Santa Fe Road Suite 222 San Marcos CA 92078
www.jennifer-roback-morse.com • email: drj@jennifer-roback-morse.com • 760/295-9278
©2007 No part of this document may be reproduced or disseminated in any way without the expressed written consent of the
Ruth Institute.
family, which claims immense non-state
power to enforce norms of behavior
internally amongst its members and
externally against its enemies.
The trustee family is simply the strongest
social entity in its time, stronger than both
the state and the individual. This is why the
trustee family is almost incomprehensible to
Americans today, in an era of hugely
powerful government and fiercely
independent individuals. In contrast, the
atomistic family holds that sovereignty lies
with the individual, as against the family.
But society pays a price for this freedom
from family bonds. The very idea of liberty
itself changes, according to Zimmerman:
The individual is left more and more alone
to do as he wishes. At first the freedom
becomes an incentive to economic gain. . . .
But sooner or later the meaning of this
freedom changes. The individual, having no
guiding moral principles, changes the
meaning of freedom from opportunity to
license. Having no internal or external
guides to discipline him, he becomes a
gambler with life, always seeking greener
pastures. When he comes to inevitable
difficulty, he is alone in his misery. He
wishes to pass his difficulties and his misery
on to others. Consequently, he continually
helps build up institutions to “remedy” his
misery. He willingly follows any prophet
(and they are mostly false ones) who comes
along with a sure-cure nostrum for the
diseases of the social system.
Hence, the atomistic family and the
powerful central government tend to co-
exist. This could have been written in 2010
instead of in 1947.
Moderation of the Domestic Family
Between the extremes of the trustee and
atomistic family models lies the moderation
of the domestic family, such as that of the
American family of the 1950s. Here,
Zimmerman’s reasoning provides helpful
background to defenders of the family that is
today deemed “traditional.” He claims the
domestic family “satisfies the natural desires
for freedom from family bonds and for
individualism, yet it also preserves sufficient
social structure to enable the state or body
politic to depend upon it as an aid in
government.” Zimmerman credits the
Catholic Church with the rise of the
domestic family in the Middle Ages. The
Church attempted to moderate the more
barbaric features of the trustee family
system, while preventing people from
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse • 663 S. Rancho Santa Fe Road Suite 222 San Marcos CA 92078
www.jennifer-roback-morse.com • email: drj@jennifer-roback-morse.com • 760/295-9278
©2007 No part of this document may be reproduced or disseminated in any way without the expressed written consent of the
Ruth Institute.
lapsing back into the decadent atomistic
family of the late Roman Empire.
The Church strongly objected to
intermarriage among cousins and closer
relatives. This was a direct blow against the
barbarian trustee family, which used
intermarriage to strengthen the clan. The
Church loosened the power of the family to
control the marriage choices of its members.
Marriage was a union of equals, by mutual
consent of the parties, not of their parents.
The Church insisted that quarrels between
families were to be heard by public
assemblies, not settled by blood feuds and
vengeance. The Church restricted divorce,
which was characteristic of the late Roman
atomistic family, and “repudiation,” the
barbarian trustee-family version of divorce.
The Church also stood strongly against
abortion, infanticide, and the practice of
exposing unwanted infants to the elements.
Both the late Roman Empire and the
barbarians permitted parents to reject
infants, arguing that they were not social
beings unless their parents accepted them
into the family. Against both the barbarian
trustee and Roman atomistic family systems,
the Church introduced the idea that children
are automatically social beings, the children
of their mother and her husband, and could
not be rejected. Most significantly, the
Church celebrated the bearing and raising of
children. As Zimmerman observes: “The
family gives more and requires more of the
individual than do other social
organizations.” The Church’s spiritual
incentives motivated people to undertake the
material sacrifices necessarily involved in
the bearing and rearing of children.
Modern Culture Wars
Zimmerman’s understanding of the
transition from the trustee family to the
domestic family corrects modern
misconceptions about the evolution of the
family. But his analysis of the transition
between the domestic family and the
atomistic family is particularly relevant to
the current “culture wars” and leads
naturally to The War between the State and
the Family. In this book, Patricia Morgan
argues that the movement toward
individualism in the family was not an
inevitable result of impersonal social forces,
but rather the direct result of specific
policies enacted by specific people.
Zimmerman shows why this happens, not
only in the United Kingdom of the twentieth
century but also in post-Revolutionary
France and in many other historical settings.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse • 663 S. Rancho Santa Fe Road Suite 222 San Marcos CA 92078
www.jennifer-roback-morse.com • email: drj@jennifer-roback-morse.com • 760/295-9278
©2007 No part of this document may be reproduced or disseminated in any way without the expressed written consent of the
Ruth Institute.
Zimmerman saw that not everyone in
society actually participates in familism,
meaning the social system that brings forth
the next generation: “Reproduction, even in
the most virile times of a society, is limited
to a small segment of the living population.”
He estimates that before World War Two,
only about one-third of the wives were
producing more than three-quarters of the
children. Men and women do not necessarily
understand and respect the demands of the
family, just because they grew up in one:
The great and revealing experiences of
familism come primarily after adulthood.
The child has gone through most of the basic
experiences of familism before he has even
a faint idea of their real meaning. He
understands only the pleasurable and
receiving aspects of the family system and
few or none of the sacrificial (pleasurable in
a different sense) and giving aspects of the
family.
Likewise, if the elites of society do not
participate in familism, they will create
institutions that encourage others to do the
same. Everything from the design of houses,
the durability of children’s toys, and the
dynamics of the labor market become geared
toward those with few or no children. For
families to sustain themselves becomes
progressively more difficult. More and more
people abandon the effort, and the society
stagnates demographically. Society doesn’t
immediately dissolve, notes Zimmerman,
because “the backward, rural, mountainous,
isolated and distant populations or countries
still have to be drained of their surplus
population and familistic values.” In the
meantime, the urban elites have no capacity
to even see the problem, much less see the
remedy, because they have never actually
participated in the domestic family as
opposed to the atomistic family.
Red states versus blue states, anyone?
Morgan illustrates this point from the other
side of the Atlantic. The government of the
United Kingdom has steadily enforced the
march towards the atomistic family. The
state wishes to show no favoritism toward
marriage and no animus toward unmarried
mothers. The state does not wish to
encourage “income sharing” between adults.
The idea that mothers and fathers cooperate
in raising their children is alien, or perhaps
worse, to Her Majesty’s government.
Marriage is penalized in the markets for
housing, for child-care options, and in the
tax code. Morgan shows that under the
influence of policies like these, the
proportion of one-person households in the
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse • 663 S. Rancho Santa Fe Road Suite 222 San Marcos CA 92078
www.jennifer-roback-morse.com • email: drj@jennifer-roback-morse.com • 760/295-9278
©2007 No part of this document may be reproduced or disseminated in any way without the expressed written consent of the
Ruth Institute.
United Kingdom increased from 14 percent
in 1961 to 30 percent by 2004. The
proportion of out-of-wedlock births rose
from 8 percent in 1970 to 42 percent in
2004.
It is sometimes claimed that Americans, like
their European peers, have abandoned
marriage as part of the Triumphant March of
Liberation. But Morgan’s data strongly
suggest that people of modest means have
done no such thing. Marriage has been taken
from them by their “betters.” As industrial
societies continue their race toward greater
individualism, fewer people have the vision
to even see the problem, much less the
solution. Yet Carle Zimmerman, who would
not have been surprised at this, provides a
profound and excellent guide to those
wishing to restore a culture of familism.
Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. is an
economist and the Founder and President of
the Ruth Institute, a nonprofit educational
organization devoted to bringing hope and
encouragement for lifelong married love.
She is also the author of Love and
Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a
Village and Smart Sex: Finding Life-Long
Love in a Hook-Up World.