Fifty years ago, the phrase "family policy" was rarely heard in America. Individual states maintained laws governing marriage, divorce, education, inheritance, and child protection, which regulated the formation, childrearing practices, and dissolution of families. However, these scattered policy issues were not seen as closely related. Until the 1960s, the nuclear family was an institution that was part of the natural life-course expected of most adults. Family meant marriage, children, the establishment of a home, care of the elderly, but perhaps most of all, bonding of the generations. As early as the 1840s, certain elements of states' policies hinted at a weakening family structure, but not until the 1960s was the family openly attacked. Feminists objected to a male-oriented home economy, demographers encouraged negative population growth, the sexual revolution was on the rise, and religiously grounded morality in public life was challenged in the federal courts. Married couples with children had to shoulder a larger tax burden, further discouraging people from building and maintaining families. Perhaps because family was so central to the founders' lives they found no need to mention it in the Constitution. But today, generational bonds have fractured, while family policy is a paramount public concern. As Allan Carlson makes clear no nation can progress, or even survive, without a durable family system. Contemporary family policy represents an attempt to counter the negative forces of the last four decades so as to restore the natural family to its necessary place in American life. Fractured Generations' chapters follow the life-course of the human family--marriage; the birth of children; infant and toddler care; schooling; building a home; crafting a durable family economy; and elder care. This is a passionate and well-reasoned appeal for a return to the institution that is the last best hope for America's future: the family.

Fractured Generations: Crafting a Family Policy for Twenty-First-Century America

Politics & Social Sciences

Carlson, Allan C.

Social Sciences

Routledge

Conjugal America: On the Public Purposes of Marriage

The institution of marriage has become perilously weak in America. Changes in the law over the past three decades, such as the spread of no-fault divorce and broad acquiescence to cultures of divorce and intentional childlessness, have stripped traditional marriage of important legal supports. Half of all marriages end in divorce and just as many are childless. Conjugal America seeks to recapture the real purposes of marriage and the unchanging nature of this most vital and fundamental human institution.  Confronting contemporary issues and drawing heavily on the natural and social sciences, each chapter also reaches into the past to find truths grounded in human experience. Carlson reexamines the basic bond of marriage to procreation, showing that this tie has been no less than the foundation of the unwritten sexual constitution of Western civilization. He also shows how the Gnostic heresy, which despises procreation, posed a stark danger to the early Christian movement and to "the sexual constitution" of our own time as well. He then dissects claims regarding the "evolution of marriage," showing that true marriage always represents the vital connection of the sexual with the economic.  Carlson explores the political nature of marriage showing, why every ambitious totalitarian government seeks above all to destroy marriage, and why the true marital bond actually stands for liberty. He concludes by arguing for the necessity of marriage policy. Because both the nature of the centralizing state and the pressures of modernity have altered family circumstances, new protections and encouragements to marriage are now imperative. Conjugal America will be central to the new debate on marriage and its purposes. This book sees the current moment as an opportunity to revitalize a necessary institution that has recently been abused and neglected and reinstate it as the primary source of commitment and care in the modern world.

Self-Help

Relationships

The Family in America offers a fresh interpretation of American social history, emphasizing the vital role of the family and household autonomy and threats to both imposed by industrial organization and the state. Allan Carlson shows that the United States, rather than being "born modern" as a progressive consumerist society, was in fact founded as an agrarian society composed of independent households rooted in land, lineage, and hierarchy.
Carlson argues that family survival continues to be of paramount importance today. He critically examines five distinct strategies to restore a foundation for family life in industrial society, drawing on the insights of Frederic LePlay, Carle Zimmerman, and G. K. Chesterton. Carlson shows that family survival depends on the creation of meaningful, "pre-modern" household economies. This new edition includes an introduction by Allan Carlson, detailing the continued press of the industrial process onto the American family structure since initial publication of the book in 1993.

The Family in America: Searching for Social Harmony in the Industrial Age

Parenting & Relationships

The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

The self-sufficiency and regional outlook of farm life characterized the United States until the Civil War period. With the triumph of the industrial North over the rural South, the expansion of urbanism, and the closing of the frontier, the agrarian sector became an economic and cultural minority. The social benefits of rural life--a sense of independence, commitment to democracy, an abundance of children, stable community life--were threatened. This volume examines the rise of a distinctive agrarian intellectual movement to combat these trends. The New Agrarian Mind, now in paperback, synthesizes the thought of twentieth-century agrarian writers. It weaves together discussions of major representative figures, such as Liberty Hyde Bailey, Carle Zimmerman, and Wendell Berry, with myth-shattering analyses of the movement's cultural diversity, intellectual influence, and ideological complexity. Collectively labeled the New Agrarians to distinguish them from the simpler Jeffersonianism of the nineteenth century, they shared a coherent set of goals that were at once socially conservative and economically radical.

History

Americas

How is it that the United States, long considered one of the most family-centered countries, has experienced a social upheaval of the last 25 years, amounting to an unraveling of its basic social order? And why is it that ideologues of the 1960s and the early 1970s found such common cause in their opposition to the suburban American family? Drawing upon evidence from the fields of history, sociology, psychology, economics, and biology, Allan Carlson offers a number of provocative explanations. He denies that the family is merely changing, and shows how recent trends in marriage, divorce, illegitimacy, and fertility are interconnected, and so pervasive as to warrant the term "crisis." He explores the relationship of the family to the American economy, emphasizing the critical importance of strong families to effective functioning of the market system, as well as the pressures that capitalism brings upon family structure. He analyzes the particular importance of gender roles and the historic "family wage" system to social stability and economic progress, and he describes the consequences of their decay. Finally, he emphasizes the fundamental ethical conflict between the family and the state, and shows how governmental efforts to preserve the family have commonly had perverse results. In his search for solutions to the American crisis in the family, Carlson borrows from a number of traditions. From conservatism, he adopts an unswerving commitment to natural law, and to the father-mother-child unit that constitutes the human family form. From recent feminist scholarship, he applies insights concerning the central importance of gender roles in social and economic structure and change. And from socialist and Marxist critics of the family, he gleans and critically examines the evidence of capitalism's troubled alliance with the traditional family as well as the corrosive effects on the family of the partial American commitment to the welfare state.

Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis

This devastating account of the work of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal is a monumental case study in the uses and abuses of social science. It portrays how these two young scholars used the power of ideas to help engineer a new domestic order in Sweden. The book focuses on the Myrdals' unique fusion of socialism and feminism with nationalism and pro-nationalism in their joint 1934 book, Crisis in the Population Question turning the issue of Sweden's declining birthrate into "the most effective argument for a radical socialist remodeling of society." The author uses interviews with many of the figures involved and extensive archival research (including restricted materials held by Sweden's Social Democratic Party) to weave an uncommonly personal account of triumphant social engineering.  The work of the Myrdals covered every major area of family policy and planning from a marriage loan program to maternity relief. Using theories and research of a then new science of demography, the Myrdals did not so much demonstrate the interpretation of facts and values as blue the distinction between them in order to insinuate ideological claims and policy mandates. Carlson provides careful historical documentation of social welfare and policy in Sweden, indicating the uneven path to the brave new "middle way." There was renewed emphasis on domesticity and traditionalism in the 1950s, and only in the 1980s was the Myrdal "revolution" truly completed. For Carlson that revolution was less a tribute to the Myrdals' perspicacity than to a concurrence of circumstances: weak and inconsistent data, confusion over cause and effect, and avoidance of controls in experimental settings.  Swedish experiments in marriage and family yielded a variety of results: a triumph of feminism over socialism; of reason over tradition, central government over regionalism, urban multi-family dwellings over suburban single family models, the therapeutic over the moral; and finally the state over the family. Because the Swedish "model" is widely regarded and emulated, this critique is of immediate significance. It offers the general reader remarkable insight into the nature of Scandinavian social life; and to the specialist in demography, economy, and sociology, a perspective on how social science can become itself the problem rather than provide solutions in contemporary post-industrial life.  Allan Carlson is president of the Rockford Institute, and a member of the National Commission on Children. He is the author of Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis.

The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics: Myrdals and the Interwar Population Crises

This book offers a fresh interpretation of American social history, emphasizing the vital role of the family and household autonomy and the joint threats to the family imposed by industrial organization and the state. Carlson shows that the United States - rather than being "born modern" as a progressive consumerist society - was in fact founded as an agrarian society composed of independent households rooted in land, lineage and hierarchy. It also explains how the social effects of industrialization, particularly the "great divorce" of labor from the home, has been a defining issue in American domestic life, from the 1850s to the present. The book critically examines five distinct strategies to restore a foundation for family life in industrial society, drawing on the insights of Frederic Laplay, Carle Zimmerman, and G. K. Chesterton and outlines the necessary basis for family life. Family survival depends on the creation of meaningful, "pre-modern" household economies. As the author explains, "both men and women are called home to relearn the deeper meaning of the ancient words, husbandry and housewifery."

From Cottage to Work Station: The Family's Search for Social Harmony in the Industrial Age

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Ignatius Pr

Fifty years ago, the phrase "family policy" was rarely heard in America. Individual states maintained laws governing marriage, divorce, education, inheritance, and child protection, which regulated the formation, childrearing practices, and dissolution of families. However, these scattered policy issues were not seen as closely related. Until the 1960s, the nuclear family was an institution that was part of the natural life-course expected of most adults. Family meant marriage, children, the establishment of a home, care of the elderly, but perhaps most of all, bonding of the generations.
As early as the 1840s, certain elements of states' policies hinted at a weakening family structure, but not until the 1960s was the family openly attacked. Feminists objected to a male-oriented home economy, demographers encouraged negative population growth, the sexual revolution was on the rise, and religiously grounded morality in public life was challenged in the federal courts. Married couples with children had to shoulder a larger tax burden, further discouraging people from building and maintaining families. Perhaps because family was so central to the founders' lives they found no need to mention it in the Constitution. But today, generational bonds have fractured, while family policy is a paramount public concern.
As Allan Carlson makes clear no nation can progress, or even survive, without a durable family system. Contemporary family policy represents an attempt to counter the negative forces of the last four decades so as to restore the natural family to its necessary place in American life. Fractured Generations' chapters follow the life-course of the human family--marriage; the birth of children; infant and toddler care; schooling; building a home; crafting a durable family economy; and elder care. This is a passionate and well-reasoned appeal for a return to the institution that is the last best hope for America's future: the family.

Fractured Generations

Godly Seed

Interview with Allan Carlson In an ironic twist, American evangelical leaders are joining mainstream acceptance of contraception. Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973, examines how mid-twentieth-century evangelical leaders eventually followed the mainstream into a quiet embrace of contraception, complemented by a brief acceptance of abortion. It places this change within the context of historic Christian teaching regarding birth control, including its origins in the early church and the shift in arguments made by the Reformers of the sixteenth century. The book explores the demographic effects of this transition and asks: did the delay by American evangelicals leaders in accepting birth control have consequences?At the same time, many American evangelicals are rethinking their acceptance of birth control even as a majority of the nation's Roman Catholics are rejecting their church's teaching on the practice. Raised within a religious movement that has almost uniformly condemned abortion, many young evangelicals have begun to ask whether abortion can be neatly isolated from the issue of contraception. A significant number of evangelical families have, over the last several decades, rejected the use of birth control and returned decisions regarding family size to God. Given the growth of the evangelical movement, this pioneering work will have a large-scale impact.

Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973

Sociology

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Carlson, Allan C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Carlson, Allan C.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Carlson, Allan C.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Fractured Generations: Crafting a Family Policy for Twenty-First-Century America

Conjugal America: On the Public Purposes of Marriage

The Family in America: Searching for Social Harmony in the Industrial Age

The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis

The Swedish Experiment in Family Politics: Myrdals and the Interwar Population Crises

From Cottage to Work Station: The Family's Search for Social Harmony in the Industrial Age

Fractured Generations

Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973

The Family in America: Searching for Social Harmony in the Industrial Age