In the second decade of the nineteenth century America and Britain had settled their controversy and the reaction to the revolution had occurred in France. A remarkable change now took place in the conception of the family. During this century family obligations, from the legal and philosophical points of view, reached the lowest ebb ever attained within a nonrevolutionary period. However, there was no attempt at complete nullification of the family bond, or complete negation such as exists during actual revolutionary periods. Disregarding evaluative conceptions and looking at the matter purely from the sociological point of view—the importance of the family bond as an influence on behavior—this was the century of great atomism in human relations. Such periods had occurred earlier in Greece and Rome, but hardly on the scale seen during this century. During the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, the conception arose in Western society that the mildest disagreements were cause for absolute separation and breaking of the family bond. Personality must flourish, unthwarted by the family. Family bonds were not taken seriously, especially in smart and sophisticated circles. Private family vengeance for adultery or other crimes against the family was looked upon as an anachronism. To illustrate the contrast between these and trustee family times, it may be noted that during trustee periods one person could be asked to sacrifice himself for the family, as soldiers today are asked to volunteer for especially dangerous missions which mean almost certain death. To refuse a family obligation or to disgrace a family meant infamy.

The following movements were particularly outstanding in the nineteenth-century confusion over the family:

1. The rise and popularization of absolute and “causeless” divorce.
2. The rise of race suicide again in France (Roman Gaul) where the dignitas family lost once more its conception that it exists for purposes of reproduction. Sacramentum and fides had been attacked; now proles was rejected.
3. The spread of this idea into cultures derived from barbarian law (England, Sweden, Germany, and the United States) where the dignitas family also lost its reproductive conceptions. As proles was rejected in France, so it was rejected in the Western world.
4. The rise of “evolutionary” history, with its conceptions of ever-moving, formless society, in place of factual history based upon what is known about man.
5. The American nonrevolutionary experiment in family law nullification.
6. The rise of the earlier Marxian antifamilism in Europe and its spread with the growth of Marxian conceptions of politics and economics.
7. The instruction in nihilism of the family bond among the Slavs through the Russian Revolution. (This time the Eastern Empire gets an antifamilistic philosophy from the West, repaying it for the education in antifamilism received by the West from the East in the code of Solon to the Twelve Tables and in the introduction of later Greek philosophy to Rome.)
8. The development of a “public” which would not permit dual marriage forms, along with the rise of social and intellectual classes who want non-dignitas marriage. Not being able to achieve it, especially among those cultures derived from the barbarian, by the use of a concubinatus or non-dignitas form, they have led the way in breaking up the dignitas form.

All of these changes, whether good or bad, are characteristic of the period from the end of the French Revolution to World War I. Absolute and causeless divorce became accepted and popular. For a period in the middle of the century, America nullified the family as a public contract under the control of law. In its formative stages, the Marxian conception of the all-powerful state was extremely antithetical to former conceptions of the family. It is true that Marxism visualized a perfected family, but this was to be achieved by freeing man rather than restricting him by positive laws. (The later Marxism, or all-powerful state conception, has gone in for rather severe family regulation by the state.)

During this same century, a new conception of “history” began to dominate the mind of man. Prior to that time, philosophers of history had noted recurrent stages in history, but now the straight-line evolutionary conception arose. Hegel and Comte set the example for this by reducing all human movement and change from the beginning of time to three succeeding stages of human progress. According to Hegel, in the first stage one individual was free (monarchy), in the second a few were free (aristocracy), and the third stage would occur in the modern state, when all would be free (representative government). Comte conceived of the earliest, or theological, stage as one in which men believed in a personal god. This was followed by a second metaphysical stage, when men believed in God and religion as a force or essence. The last stage was to be a period of positivism, in which men measured and weighed society empirically and were to take conscious control of its direction.

These ideas were hidden beneath a profuse verbiage in the original works of these writers, but no words can cover the fact that they were simply “catchy” beliefs that overturned the philosophy of history which since the beginning of time had dominated Greece, Rome, and Western society. Greek or Roman historians took a period or a great social movement within history and described and analyzed it to arrive logically at their conclusions.

Herodotus wrote about the wars between Asia and Greece. Thucydides dealt with the Peloponnesian War. Polybius described and philosophized about the process by which Rome eventually became master of the Mediterranean world. Livy dealt with facts and ideas of the rise of the Roman Empire from the alleged first migrations from Troy.

After the Renaissance, modern philosophers of history seemed dominated by an idea expressed by Machiavelli in his Discourses on Titus Livius and by Montesquieu in his Spirit of the Laws. They compared similar movements in classic and modern history and tried to determine the sociological principles involved. But the philosophical historians of the nineteenth century, following Hegel and Comte, fitted historical fact into a preconceived theory. This trend was followed by Maine, Spencer, and all the evolutionary sociologists of the century. They assembled numerous facts, but fitted them into pre-conceived straight-line evolutionary theories.

These successive changes in social thinking were closely paralleled by changes in the attitude toward the family which, for the most part, were questioned only by a few traditionalists. Few sociologists felt impelled to search through history for the real facts that would give meaning and validity to their interpretations.