Most of the revolutionary movements in Greek and Roman history, all of which yielded some legislation either during the revolution or when the reformer came into power, effected some change in the family. None of them tried to abolish the family legislatively. They tried to weaken the family and justly so, because the former family law in many cases gave the family so much power that a strong aristocratic group could have material effect upon the course of the state, through family solidarity. As Sorokin has shown in his Sociology of Revolution, in all revolutions the people commit sexual excesses. But to abolish the family as a social institution by making it an object of private will through unilateral and non-notifiable negation of family bonds through legislation—that is where these two revolutions were unique. I discuss this merely to show that when an overhead institution dominates the family, the family is subject to the prevailing philosophy of these overhead social institutions.

Apparently the American Revolution did not touch the family. The Americans had had two violent family reforms within a century: the complete public control of marriage as against the church and the establishment of absolute divorce largely by legislative decree. Thomas Paine, the philosopher of the revolution, was not grounded in philosophy as were Rousseau for the French Revolution and Marx for the Russian Revolution. Paine was a Quaker and, as far as can be found in his writings, he did not attack the family. The common people of the revolution (Sons of Liberty in the East and Scotch-Irish frontiersmen in the West) never really came into power. Furthermore, these were rural peoples, interested in land rights and fee simple ownership and antagonistic to feudal land holding, rather than a group interested in any family doctrine. Peasant revolutions, as Sorokin and I have shown elsewhere, generally concern themselves with land rights. (For this see Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology, vol. II, and my earlier researches on land as a factor in the family budget of various classes at the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station as discussed in Carle C. Zimmerman, Consumption and Standards of Living, New York, 1935, chs. 13 and 14.)

The “spirit” of the American Revolution finally did achieve fruition in extreme antifamilism, in the omnibus divorce clauses, the feme sole conception of married women and the early divorce-mills or easy divorce states. But these were driven back by the counterrevolution, our American Civil War, which established the principle that freedom could not be carried to nullification. In the years immediately following the Civil War, omnibus divorce, feme sole, and divorce-mill conceptions disappeared. The divorce-mill, or migratory divorce, reappeared in the twentieth century, but for different reasons.

The Nazi and Fascist revolutions were intended to build strong dictatorial states, so they created a rigid familism in order to have soldiers and workers for the omnipotent state. However, they established the new principle: the state will try to mold the family entirely to its aims. If these aims change, changes will also be attempted in the family.

As far as the family was concerned, these changes in society resulted in an almost complete revolution in the conception of the nature of the family. According to canon law, the family was an expression of the will of God, one of the sacraments, and as immune to state control as the act of communion with God. According to trustee family ideas, familism was something no decent man would let anyone outside his own family and kin group interfere with. According to the new conception, the family is but one of the corporate persons of the state and is entirely at the discretion and will of the state.

These changes came about slowly, over centuries, and almost imperceptibly. They were achieved in part by a growth of new ideas, in part by philosophies of family negationism, in part by changed ideas regarding the “original” nature of man, and in part by the social destructions of bloody revolutions. Nevertheless, by the twentieth century the idea had begun to clarify itself. Hume, of all the philosophers of the eighteenth century, was possibly the one who recognized the central idea most clearly. Others have felt it, but no one has expressed it clearly.

Thus, from the Reformation period on, the whole process has been one of attempting to change the family from an organization that was to guide itself by divine law as interpreted by canon-law doctors to a state-controlled institution guided by interpreters of the philosophy of the state. The nineteenth century apparently was influenced to a considerable extent by the fact that the old order was materially but not completely broken and the new order, while in formation, had no definite philosophy of the family. The power of kinship groups was shattered. All over the Western world there were several hundred millions of people who could and did move to the town, the city, or a new land where kin-control meant nothing.

The same futility existed in the church and in the state attempts to control familism. The standard of established values of the church could be flouted. Neither Protestant ministers nor Catholic priests had close and effective control over members of their congregations. As far as the real power of the state was concerned, literally thousands of laws were passed, but familism was really less regulated at the end of the period than at the beginning.