Familialism or familism is a philosophy that puts priority to family. The term familialism has been specifically used for advocating a welfare system wherein it is presumed that families will take responsibility for the care of their members rather than leaving that responsibility to the government. The term familism relates more to family values. This can manifest as prioritizing the needs of the family higher than that of individuals. Yet, the two terms are often used interchangeably. Researchers have measured a similar concept called "responsibilism," which emphasizes duties to family and close relationships over acquaintances and weak ties in 100 cultures around the world.
In the Western world, familialism views the nuclear family of one father, one mother, and their child or children as the central and primary social unit of human ordering and the principal unit of a functioning society and civilization. In Asia, aged parents living with the family is often viewed as traditional. It is suggested that Asian familialism became more fixed after encounters with Europeans following the Age of Discovery. In Japan, drafts based on French laws were rejected after criticism from people like by the reason that "civil law will destroy filial piety".
Regarding familism as a fertility factor, there is limited support among Hispanics of an increased number of children with increased familism in the sense of prioritizing the needs of the family higher than that of individuals. On the other hand, the fertility impact is unknown in regard to systems where the majority of the economic and caring responsibilities rest on the family (such as in Southern Europe), as opposed to defamilialized systems where welfare and caring responsibilities are largely supported by the state (such as Nordic countries).
Western familism In the Western world, familialism views the nuclear family of one father, one mother, and their child or children as the central and primary social unit of human ordering and the principal unit of a functioning society and civilization. Accordingly, this unit is also the basis of a multi-generational extended family, which is embedded in socially as well as genetically inter-related communities, nations, etc., and ultimately in the whole human family past, present and future. As such, Western familialism usually opposes other social forms and models that are chosen as alternatives (i.e. single-parent, LGBT parenting, etc.).
Historical and philosophical background of Western familism
Ancient political familialism
"Family as a model for the state" as an idea in political philosophy originated in the Socratic-Platonic principle of macrocosm/microcosm, which identifies recurrent patterns at larger and smaller scales of the cosmos, including the social world. In particular, monarchists have argued that the state mirrors the patriarchal family, with the subjects obeying the king as children obey their father, which in turn helps to justify monarchical or aristocratic rule.
Plutarch (46–120 CE) records a laconic saying of the Dorians attributed to Lycurgus (8th century BCE). Asked why he did not establish a democracy in Lacedaemon (Sparta), Lycurgus responded, "Begin, friend, and set it up in your family". Plutarch claims that Spartan government resembled the family in its form.
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) argued that the schema of authority and subordination exists in the whole of nature. He gave examples such as man and animal (domestic), man and wife, slaves and children. Further, he claimed that it is found in any animal, as the relationship he believed to exist between soul and body, of "which the former is by nature the ruling and the later subject factor". Aristotle further asserted that "the government of a household is a monarchy since every house is governed by a single ruler". Later, he said that husbands exercise a republican government over their wives and monarchical government over their children, and that they exhibit political office over slaves and royal office over the family in general.
Arius Didymus (1st century CE), cited centuries later by Stobaeus, wrote that "A primary kind of association (politeia) is the legal union of a man and woman for begetting children and for sharing life". From the collection of households a village is formed and from villages a city, "So just as the household yields for the city the seeds of its formation, thus it yields the constitution (politeia)". Further, Didymus claims that "Connected with the house is a pattern of monarchy, of aristocracy and of democracy. The relationship of parents to children is monarchic, of husbands to wives aristocratic, of children to one another democratic".
Modern political familialism
The family is in the center of the social philosophy of the early Chicago School of Economics. It is a recurring point of reference in the economic and social theories of its founder Frank Knight. Knight positions his notion of the family in contrast to the dominant notion of individualism:
"Our 'individualism' is really 'familism'. ... The family is still the unit in production and consumption."
Some modern thinkers, such as Louis de Bonald, have written as if the family were a miniature state. In his analysis of the family relationships of father, mother and child, Bonald related these to the functions of a state: the father is the power, the mother is the minister and the child as subject. As the father is "active and strong" and the child is "passive or weak", the mother is the "median term between the two extremes of this continuous proportion". Like many apologists for political familialism, De Bonald justified his analysis on biblical authority: "(It) calls man the reason, the head, the power of woman: Vir caput est mulieris (the man is head of the woman) says St. Paul. It calls woman the helper or minister of man: "Let us make man," says Genesis, "a helper similar to him." It calls the child a subject, since it tells it, in a thousand places, to obey its parents". Bonald also sees divorce as the first stage of disorder in the state, insisting that the deconstitution of the family brings about the deconstitution of state, with The Kyklos not far behind.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn also connects family and monarchy: "Due to its inherent patriarchalism, monarchy fits organically into the ecclesiastic and familistic pattern of a Christian society. (Compare the teaching of Pope Leo XIII: 'Likewise the powers of fathers of families preserves expressly a certain image and form of the authority which is in God, from which all paternity in heaven and earth receives its name—Eph 3.15') The relationship between the King as 'father of the fatherland' and the people is one of mutual love".
George Lakoff has more recently claimed that the left-right distinction in politics reflects a different ideals of the family; for the right-wing, the ideal is a patriarchal family based upon absolutist morality; for the left-wing, the ideal is an unconditionally loving family. As a result, Lakoff argues, both sides find each other's views not only immoral, but incomprehensible, since they appear to violate each side's deeply held beliefs about personal morality in the sphere of the family.
Criticism of Western familism
Criticism in practice Familialism has been challenged as historically and sociologically inadequate to describe the complexity of actual family relations.DePaulo, B. and Milardo, R. (2011). "Interview: Beyond the Nuclear Family". In modern American society in which the male head of the household can no longer be guaranteed a wage suitable to support a family, 1950s-style familialism has been criticized as counterproductive to family formation and fertility.
Imposition of Western-style familialism on other cultures has been disruptive to traditional non-nuclear family forms such as matrilineality.
The rhetoric of "family values" has been used to demonize single mothers and LGBT couples, who allegedly lack them. This has a disproportionate impact on the African-American community, as African-American women are more likely to be single mothers.
Criticism from the LGBT community LGBT communities tend to accept and support the diversity of intimate human associations, partially as a result of their historically ostracized status from nuclear family structures. From its inception in the late 1960s, the gay rights movement has asserted every individual's right to create and define their own relationships and family in the way most conducive to the safety, happiness, and self-actualization of each individual.
For example, the glossary of LGBT terms of Family Pride Canada, a Canadian organization advocating for family equality for LGBT parents, defines familialism as:
Criticism in psychology Normalization of the nuclear family as the only healthy environment for children has been criticized by psychologists. In a peer-reviewed study from 2007, adoptees have been shown to display self-esteem comparable with non-adoptees.
In a meta-study from 2012, "quality of parenting and parent–child relationships" is described as the most important factor to children development. Also "Dimensions of family structure including such factors as divorce, single parenthood, and the parents' sexual orientation and biological relatedness between parents and children are of little or no predictive importance"
Criticism in psychoanalysis Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their now-classic 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, argued that psychiatry and psychoanalysis, since their inception, have been affected by an incurable familialism, which is their ordinary bed and board.Arthur Redding (1997) God the linguist teaches us to breathe: Ivan Blatný's English poemsMindy Badía, Bonnie L. Gasior (2006) Crosscurrents: transatlantic perspectives on early modern Hispanic drama p. 144Emma L. Jeanes and Christian De Cock (2005) Making the Familiar Strange: A Deleuzian Perspective on Creativity, University of Exeter, Creativity and Innovation Management Community Workshop, 23–24 March 2005, Oxford Psychoanalysis has never escaped from this, having remained captive to an unrepentant familialism.Deleuze and Guattari (1972) Anti-Oedipus pp. 101–2, 143, 181, 293, 304, 393
Michel Foucault wrote that through familialism psychoanalysis completed and perfected what the psychiatry of 19th century insane asylums had set out to do and that it enforced the power structures of bourgeois society and its values: Family-Children (paternal authority), Fault-Punishment (immediate justice), Madness-Disorder (social and moral order).Deleuze and Guattari (1972) Anti-Oedipus p. 102Michel Foucault The History of Madness, Routledge 2006, pp. 490–1, 507–8, 510–1 Deleuze and Guattari added that "the familialism inherent in psychoanalysis doesn't so much destroy classical psychiatry as shine forth as the latter's crowning achievement", and that since the 19th century, the study of mental illnesses and madness has remained the prisoner of the familial postulate and its correlates.Deleuze and Guattari (1972) Anti-Oedipus pp. 293, 393
Through familialism, and the psychoanalysis based on it, guilt is inscribed upon the family's smallest member, the child, and parental authority is absolved.Deleuze and Guattari (1972) Anti-Oedipus p. 304
According to Deleuze and Guattari, among the psychiatrists only Karl Jaspers and Ronald Laing, have escaped familialism.Deleuze and Guattari (1972) Anti-Oedipus p. 143 This was not the case of the culturalist psychoanalysts, which, despite their conflict with orthodox psychoanalysts, had a "stubborn maintenance of a familialist perspective", still speaking "the same language of a familialized social realm".Deleuze and Guattari (1972) Anti-Oedipus pp. 189–1
Criticism in Marxism