THE BREAK-UP OF
FAMILY CAPITALISM
The story of the rise and fall
of social classes in Western society,
as Pirenne and Schumpeter have
pointed out, is that of the rise and
fall of families. Without under–
standing that fact, as many Amer–
ican sociologists, accustomed to
viewing class position in individual–
istic terms, have failed to do, one
cannot understand the peculiar co–
hesiveness of dominant economic
classes in the past, or the sources
of the break-up of power in con–
temporary society today. A bold
statement, perhaps, but one which
the following sketch attempts to
prove.
Capitalism is not only, as Marx
saw it, an economic system with
employer-worker relations and
classes formed on strictly economic
lines, but a social system wherein
power has been transmitted
through the family, and where the
satisfactions of ownership lay, in
part, in the family name by which
the business enterprise was known.
l
The social organization of the fam–
ily rested on two institutions: prop–
erty and the "dynastic" marriage.
Property, sanctioned by law and
reinforced by the coercive power
of the state, meant power; the "dy-
1 In Marcel Pagnol's
Fanny,
the
ecstatic hope of Panisse is to add the
words "and Son" over the door of
his shop, a practice long maintained
by
commercial enterprises.
317
nastic" marriage was a means of
conserving, and through inheri–
tance laws of transmitting property
and so preserving, as the case
might be, the continuity of the
family enterprise.
2
Through the
fusion of the two institutions, a
class system was maintained:
people met at the same social level,
had similar educations, mingled in
specific milieux-in short, created
a distinctive style of life.
The singular fact is that in the
last seventy-five years the old rela–
tion between the two institutions
of property and family, which,
Malthus maintained, represented
the "fundamental laws" of society,
has broken down. The specific
reasons for this breakdown are too
complex to describe here, but the
process is clear. In bourgeois so–
ciety, marriage was a means of
keeping sex relations within
2 A classic instance of this process,
perhaps was the assumption by Gustav
von
B~hlen
of the family name of
Krupp, when the line lacked male
heirs.
7J?AIL
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7NQ(/~r
Social Thought in
America: The Revolt
Against Formalism
By MORTON WHITE
Interpretations of
Niebuhr, Lippmann,
Dewey, Holmes,
V~blen,
Beard and Robmson.
Paperback $1.75
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