excerpted from Family and Civilization, originally published in 1947 and recently reissued in a critical edition, edited by James Kurth, in ISI Books’ Background series

The struggle that took place from the Reformation to the nineteenth century clearly established the principle that the new master power beyond the family was to be the state. Thus the same general process that took place in Greece and Rome has been repeated in Western society. From the laws of Solon (639 b.c.) through the reforms of the sixth and fifth centuries, the state in Greece took over more and more of the social control formerly dominated by familism and religion. Roman history followed the same course. If we view the meaning of its changes, we see that Western society has undergone an almost identical process. In the Dark Ages neither church nor state could control the family. In the terminology of boxing, both had to “roll with the punches” when it came to dealing with the dominant trustee familism. All these agencies could hope to do through internal regulation was to get families to settle quarrels peacefully. In their early legislation they merely tried to regulate the processes of settling family quarrels by transaction rather than by feud.

With the decline of imperial Rome as a state power in Western society, the church assumed an ever-increasing control over family matters. In Rome, from the time of Augustus until the end of the empire, it was the state that decided whether a man could have one or two wives, and all the hundreds of other family matters. It has already been noted that by the time of Gregory of Tours (circa 590 a.d.) the state was more or less helpless in dealing with the family. The famous Sichaire-Ausregisil family feud had to be settled by the church paying half of the composition (or family fine) to one family and half to the other. Even this gracious settlement did not secure a permanent amend of the breach between the two families. Familism was in power. From that time onward the power of the state to regulate the family declined until, between the tenth and the twelfth centuries a.d., the church gained complete ascendancy. After the Augustinian reforms, the state said “no” to polygamy, either a combination of two wives in the higher sense of the term or to a combination of two in the lower sense. The concubinatus form of marriage had to be monogamous as well. But in the tenth and twelfth centuries, and from then until the Council of Trent, the positive law of the family was church canon law. The church prohibited polygamy of any type. One of its strongest attacks against Luther occurred because he permitted secret polygamy to a north European German prince. Furthermore, the church rules on adultery and polygamy not only paralleled those of the Roman emperors, they frequently were much stronger and tried to hold familism on an even stricter level. All family issues were decided by the church, as formerly these had been decided by the Roman law codes. Age of marriage, the meaning of engagement (the sponsalia controversy), the relation of engagement to marriage, the nullification of marriage, its partial breakability (from bed and board), and its absolute divorce or nullification—all these and many other questions were decided by the various councils of the church.

Whenever neither the state nor the church was in authority over the family, the family ruled itself. This is the essential meaning of trustee familism, regardless of the period or region in which it has appeared. It was the case for early Greece and Rome, during the Dark Ages in Europe; it exists today in the mountain regions of Southeastern Europe, in Ireland, and in our Appalachian-Ozark family groups, concerning whom we Americans know so little.

Whereas under other conditions in the West, the vicissitudes of the church or of the great family determined what kind of rule the smaller family had, now the conception again arose that the state and the family were interdependent. (This is Hume’s idea that familism is essential to the state.)