Introduction: three interpretive scenarios

No matter how natural it is to depict the family as the nucleus of private life, in fact it has long been a concern of public authority. But the nature of this public impact has changed. This chapter proposes a historical typology for the relationship of state and family during the last two centuries. To be sure, this is a history of the conceptual bases of the relationship, for actual practice was far less clear-cut, and carried forward older as well as more recent concepts.

Three scenarios in the history of Western societies are especially relevant. The first is the scenario in which the modern state came into being in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second is the welfare state as it took shape in Britain from the 1940s through the 1960s. The third scenario comprises the present day. Sociologists have advanced and debated several hypotheses to analyze these stages in the history of contemporary society. The terms “modern state” and “welfare state” can be used to summarize the first two phases. The third scenario has no clear designation, but the ideas of pluralism and complexity may provide the best interpretive guidelines for understanding its evolving interaction of state and family. I shall consider all three scenarios briefly in this introduction to set out the main lines of the argument.

For the modern state, the term bonheur public (“welfare” may provide the closest modern equivalent) became an issue of concern in the eighteenth century.