Hazony on Conservatism, part II

This is the second in a series of posts on Hazony's Conservatism (recall the first one here). Hazony's conservatism fuses nationalist and religious themes. Here I explore his account of the family. For, while I am no expert on contemporary conservative thought, and generally Hazony presents his views polemically against liberal or Marxist (or so-called "woke") views, his account of the family is, in fact, rather revisionary relative to the public statements of those "who regard themselves as political conservatives" and when they "speak of the importance of the 'the family' as a cultural matter or in regard to government policy." (p. 213). His views on the family, thus, give a fascinating oblique glimpse into some serious rethinking on 'the right.'

Hazony's account of the family is offered as part of a larger account of the significance of families in congregations and congregations, in turn, in the life of the nation (or clan). Congregations are composed of families, and together with the families that constitute them are key to passing on traditions. (p. 218) The account of the family itself is functional in character. I return to this below. 

Now, a casual reading of Hazony's argument seems to suggest that it is based on sex-essentialist views of human nature. In particular, Hazony denies that enduring sexual monogamy is natural to men, especially, in fact, "nothing is more contrary to human nature." (p. 208) And so, in so far as "the lifelong bond of a man and a woman" is advocated by Hazony (which it is) as the "first pillar" of "civilized life," (p. 209) it turns out that for Hazony this lifelong bond is really the effect of the proper organization of social life (including families and traditions), that is, (what the Aristotelians would call) our second nature. So, it turns out that Hazony's sex-essentialist views are dispensable for his argument (which are compatible with all kinds of constructivist views).

And, in fact, in Hazony's favored account of the family -- what he calls "the traditional family" -- gender based dimorphism is rather small. It is much smaller, in fact, than in the patriarchic account of the nuclear family familiar from those "who regard themselves as political conservatives" Let me explain.

Because  he is attuned to the changing dynamics of the function and composition of families, Hazony works with a clear three-fold distinction among three ideal types: (i) the traditional family; (ii) the nuclear family; (iii) the hollowed out family. In brief: the traditional family is a business enterprise consisting of multiple generations in daily contact; the nuclear family involves a sexed division of labor within the household with the mother devoted to child-rearing and the father as breadwinner on a Fordist family wage; the hollowed out family has all its adult members involved in society's extended division of labor and purchases services from it to take on childrearing, cleaning, and education tasks.

While the distinction is conceptual (and normative) in character, it is presented as a temporal (and conceptual) descent, even thought it is possible for a great society to have instances of all three kinds of families existing at the same time (but usually one will predominate numbers-wise and/or normatively). 

Let me quote the passage in which he makes this three-fold distinction. (And then I return to what he calls the 'traditional family.') I suspect it will be received as a bombshell among Hazony's target audience:

As anyone who has lived among traditional families can immediately see, the nuclear family is a weakened and much diminished version of the traditional family, one that is lacking most of the resources needed effectively to pursue the purposes of the traditional family. When this conception of the family became normative in America after the Second World War, it gave birth to a world of detached suburban homes, connected to distant places of employment and schools by trains, automobiles, and buses. In other words, the physical design of large portions of the country reflected a newly rationalized conception of what a family is, which had been reconstructed in light of the economic principle of the division of labor. In this new reality, there were no longer any business enterprises in the home for the family to pursue together. Instead, fathers would “go to work,” seceding from their families during their productive hours each day. Similarly, children were required to “go to school,” seceding from the family during their own productive hours. Young adults would then “go away to college,” cutting themselves off from family influence during the critical years in which they were supposed to reach maturity. Similarly, grandparents were excised from this vision of the home, being “retired” to “retirement communities” or “nursing homes,” which cut the older generation off from the life of their family in much the same way that going away to college cut the younger generation off from it.
Under this new division of labor, mothers were assigned the task of remaining by themselves in the house each day, attempting to “make a home” using the minimalist ingredients that the structure of the nuclear family had left them. Much of this involved increasingly desperate efforts to keep adolescents somehow attached to the family—even though they now shared virtually no productive purposes with their parents, grandparents, and broader community or congregation, and instead spent their days seeking honor among other adolescents. The resulting rupture between parents and their children was poignantly described in numerous books and films beginning in the 1950s. But these works rarely touched upon the reconstruction of the family, which had done so much to inflame the natural tendency of adolescents toward agonized rebellion, while depriving parents of the tools necessary to emerge from these years with the family hierarchy strengthened.
But mothers had the worst of this new family life. Some did succeed in maintaining the cohesion of their families in a world in which grandparents and other family relations had grown impossibly distant, in which the family business had disappeared from the home, and in which the congregation or community, with its sabbaths and festivals, had likewise been reduced to something accessed by automobile once each week like a drive-in movie. However, many other “housewives” despaired and fell into the arms of the feminist movement, which, not without reason, declared the nuclear family to be a tomb for women. Feminist writers were mistaken in supposing that the reconstructed household of the postwar era was itself the traditional family. But they were right that the life of a woman spending most of her productive hours in an empty house, which had been stripped of most of the human relationships, activities, and purposes that had filled the life of the traditional family, was one that many women found too painful and difficult to bear. Many of these mothers quickly joined their husbands and children in leaving the home during the daytime—thus completing the final transformation of the post-traditional “nuclear family” into a hollowed-out shell, a failed imitation of the traditional institution of the family.--Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Chapter 4, pp. 213-215 (emphasis added)

I doubt a conservative has ever been so frank in acknowledging the solidity of key features of the argument of Friedan's The Feminine Mystique!

Hazony is, thus, explicit that he rejects a restoration of the nuclear family as an unworthy project. His is rather an attempt to restore the traditional family. This traditional family has five dimensions (and main characteristics): "lifelong marriage, permanent relations between parents and children, family business operations, the embrace of multiple generations within the family, and active [that is, daily] participation in a broader community or congregation." (p. 211) These are families, that is, that live on farms or compounds, or above/behind a store-front they own (or rent). As Hazony notes, it "becomes clear that the traditional Jewish or Christian family was a far more active, extensive, and powerful organization than the family as it exists in contemporary imagination and practice." (p. 211)*

As an aside, because Hazony is working with a cultural account of the Anglo-American nation, it's a peculiar fact that he does not explore how in immigrant communities -- including Muslim and Hindu --the traditional family is still very much alive and an attractive ideal. (Hazony's views on immigration are assimilationist in character, but compatible with this fact.) I suspect this reflects the unease on the political right with how to conceive the Anglo-American nation's internal relations with non Judeo-Christian religions. (I return to this in a future post when I discuss this more directly, and his views on public religion.)

While in some of Hazony's auto-biographical vignettes the traditional family has some gendered division of labor, it's pretty clear that within the family men and women are equal and that their contributions to the family functions, including its business and enduring partnership with other families, is valued even honored equally. And while the traditional family is hierarchical in character, the hierarchy is structured around age and contribution to the joint efforts not gender. In so far as there are any patriarchic elements left in it, these seem symbolic in nature. So, in some significant ways the traditional family is a much better home than the nuclear family is for a world that takes women and girls and their interests seriously. While it would be a mistake to ignore the anti-feminist rhetoric and arguments in Conservatism -- or the passages where Hazony expresses his criticism of abortion -- in many ways Hazony's program is not a return to patriarchy, but post-feminist.*

To what degree the traditional family is an attractive (or politically winning) ideal, I leave to others. But it is worth noting how much the political economy of the US would need to be re-shaped if it becomes at all feasible. As I noted above, at the level of dwellings and urban/suburban planning it would involve very different choices from the ones that are presently familiar (including a retreat from the suburb). In addition, the traditional family is incompatible with the large corporation; the underlying political economy is Smithian in character composed of price-taking small firms/units and protected by fierce anti-trust regulations and limitations on incorporation. (This is a bit ironic because Hazony's book has a Hamiltonian polemic with Jefferson.) So, this would have to be a conservatism that commits to non-trivial attacks on very strong vested economic and political interests (in the name of a restoration). Hazony hints at this when he warns against the "excessive accumulation of power by private enterprises and cartels" (p. 343), but this part of his program seems underdeveloped.+

 

*This can be readily noticed if we look at the traditional family's distinctive purposes he enumerates:

(i) bringing children into the world and protecting them until they can provide for themselves....: The traditional family has (ii) economic aims, by means of which its members are kept sheltered, fed, and in good health. It has (iii) an educational purpose, which is to equip the children with the knowledge, traditions, and skills they will need for life. The traditional family also (iv) aims at the security of the household, arming and protecting itself against threats from the outside. It aims at (v) domestic peace, establishing rules, rewards, and punishments in order to attain it. It aims at (vi) cohesion, which is best attained through a just distribution of honor and influence among its members. It aims at (vii) contributing to honorable and mutually beneficial relations with other households in the community or congregation and with the broader tribe or nation. It aims at (viii) maintaining proper relations with God and with one’s ancestors, observing sabbaths and holy days and other festive occasions, with the parents and grandparents undertaking various priestly functions within the family to this end. It provides (ix) honor and care for the elderly. And it serves as (x) a home and a support for relations, friends, and strangers who do not have families of their own, or who are distant from them at a given time, or who are otherwise in distress. (pp. 211-212)

In addition, Conservatism has little to say about sexual choice and policing sexual preferences/activities (including anticonception, and non-heterosexual sexual activity).

 +This is a bit surprising because the first Trump campaign showed that there was interest in such a program.

Comments

[Deborah Achtenberg]

Family structure and dominant values or virtues are in good part shaped by the structure of work. Does Hazony consider that ideas of independence are shaped by leaving the home for work?

For your info, the Tikvah/Hazony-influenced folks at Mosaic (magazine) are defending NY Hasidic schools from the charges levied by the NY Times by asking why Hasidic schools are so popular if the secular schools and the two- (not multi-) generation family are to be the model by which Hasidic schools are to be judged. Plus, they refer to Hasidism as post-modern. Hazony's influence is evident in this response.

[Deborah Achtenberg]

Regarding the recent NatCon conference, Hazony states that a main achievement is the presence of Protestants (including support from a Protestant seminary). He sees Catholics, Protestants and Jews coming together even though they differ as befits the honor and loyalty appropriate to a nation. But when a nation ceases to have separation of religion and state, either (most likely) one religion will be selected and others will be at a disadvantage ( and will not be honored and as a result may not be loyal) or there will be a new religiously based, non-secular state in which what is represented is a vague sort of ethical monotheism (similar to what is present in Alcoholics Anonymous) making this not a traditional state as found in the Bible but something new, dare I say postmodern.