In his programmatic essay of 1995 Paul Ginsborg sets out a choice to be made by those studying the modern European family and its relationship to politics. The choice, he argued, is between a dichotomous model descending from Aristotle and a tripartite model deriving from Hegel. The Aristotelian model revolves around a set of binary divisions between oikos and polis, between household and political sphere, a set of distinctions that derive ultimately from Aristotle's dualistic description of man as a ‘political animal’, both political and animal, that is. This dualism, Ginsborg argues, is too simple to capture the complex position of the family in modernity. Instead, he prefers a Hegelian tripartite scheme, which distinguishes between family, civil society and state. The state is constituted by law, the family by a bond of love. The economy, relegated by Aristotle to the household, is assigned by Hegel to a third sphere of civil society. Ginsborg does not rest here. In keeping with modern usage he makes a further distinction. Whereas in Hegel the economy and associational life are intermingled in the sphere of civil society, Ginsborg removes the economy to its own sphere and defines civil society essentially as what Habermas has taught us to call the ‘public sphere’. As Ginsborg makes clear, what is at stake in these differing models are fundamental conceptions of the social order.