Family and the Politics of Moderation: Private Life, Public Goods, and the Rebirth of Social Individualism

Chapter 4. Montesquieu, Burke, and the Moderate Family

65 Montesquieu, Burke, and the Moderate Family Chapter 4 While Marxists and Randians fear the family because of the way it challenges ideological purity, other thinkers have championed the family as one of the bastions of moderate political systems. The works of Montesquieu and edmund Burke are emblematic of the eighteenth-century attempt to balance the increasingly polarized conflict between collective sovereignty and individual autonomy.1 Central to this balance are intermediate institutions that perch, like fulcrums, between the claims of individuals and collectives. These intermediate positions bring together individual and collective claims by supporting humanity’s natural sociality. Both Montesquieu and Burke believe that natural social groupings provide the best balance between our individualistic and social natures and that this balance between our individualistic and social natures supports a corollary balance between liberty and equality, a balance that became especially difficult in the twentieth century. The family’s role as the natural home of a kind of “social individualism” makes it the most stable and most central of these intermediate institutions. Both Montesquieu and Burke’s works are located in the broad tradition of classical liberalism, a tradition in which community cohesion is balanced against individual freedom. These thinkers advocate the meshing 66 FaMILy anD tHe PoLItICS oF MoDeRatIon of nature and custom through a spontaneous order that starts in the family and expands into the broader society. Unlike Marx and Rand, these moderate thinkers support the importance of intergenerational relationships as a balance between the need for change and the need for stability. They promote a balance between public and private lives that recognizes the interconnected nature of public and private spheres but nevertheless supports the creation of a private sphere of action that includes a generally autonomous family. Finally, by balancing the claims of the individual and the community through the medium of natural familial affections, their theories champion a reformulation of the conflict between individualistic liberty and collectivist equality, one that harmonizes the two by softening the claims of each. These softened claims promote the equality and liberty of the “civil social man,” or what might be referred to as liberty and equality “well understood.”2 These classical liberals support individual liberty protected by a robust and pluralistic social order, and moral equality protecting the rights and privileges of everyone in the collective. Though the family and familial analogies play central roles in the works of Montesquieu and Burke, little scholarly attention has been paid to these aspects of their works, even by thinkers working explicitly on the family.3 Burke scholars often focus on the intergenerational compact, or Burke’s rejection of Lockean contract theory, but they fail to address Burke’s intentional analogy between the family and the state.4 Scholarship on Montesquieu dissects Persian Letters and The Spirit of the Laws for lessons contra despotism but fails to address the importance of family forms, particularly polygamy, for his analysis.5 Both thinkers address the importance of balancing nature and custom, public and private, and the needs of individuals and groups in order to create complex, pluralistic communities that support a range of human goods and values. The Family and the Meshing of Nature and Custom as the works of both Marx and Rand make clear, the interaction between nature and custom is pivotal in the balance between individual and collective needs. Collectivists like Marx reject nature because it is an uncompromising limitation on the power of human invention and social evolution. Individualists like Rand reject nature as a limitation on the power of individual reason and choice. Moderate political thinkers characterize nature as a limitation on radical change of both kinds, but they reconcile this limit on human ingenuity with nature’s role in providing a standard for social and MonteSQUIeU, BURKe, anD tHe MoDeRate FaMILy 67 political systems that support human flourishing. Far from being entirely inflexible, natural desires can be molded and channeled within certain limits through gradual adaptation to particular circumstances. Human life is a complex combination and intertwining of nature, custom, and reason. Moreover, because humans are naturally social yet naturally self-interested, the natural desires of humans must be made compatible with the needs of other individuals and the stability and function of the group to which those individuals belong. Politics, then, is the balancing of these natural desires against the desires, needs, and interests of the group at a particular point in time. It is...