The Surprising Liberal Defense of the Traditional Family in the Enlightenment

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis Article shows that many Enlightenment liberals defended traditional family values and warned against the dangers of sexual libertinism and marital breakdown. While they rejected many traditional teachings in their construction of modern liberalism, Enlightenment liberals held firmly to classical and Christian teachings that exclusive and enduring monogamous marriages are the best way to ensure paternal certainty and joint parental investment in children who are born vulnerable and dependent on their parents' mutual care. Stable marital households, furthermore, are the best way to ensure that men and women are treated with equal dignity and respect, and that husbands and wives, and parents and children, provide each other with mutual support, protection, and edification throughout their lifetimes. The positive law of the state must not only support the marital family but also outlaw polygamy, fornication, adultery, and "light divorce" that violate the other spouse's natural rights as well as desertion, abuse, neglect, and disinheritance that violate their children's natural rights to support, protection, and education from their parents. This argument about the natural norms and laws of sex, marriage, and family life, was adumbrated by Aristotle, elaborated by Thomas Aquinas, and then extended by scores of later theologians, philosophers, and jurists. Many of the great architects of Western liberalism embraced these traditional teachings and defended them with arguments from nature, reason, custom, fairness, prudence, utility, pragmatism, and common sense. Their arguments echoed loudly in sundry Anglo-American common law texts, statutes, and cases until the twentieth century, and they remain instructive even for our post-modern polities and families.INTRODUCTIONFor better or worse, we are in the midst of a family law revolution that is upending millennium-long laws and customs of the West.1 A century ago, American law defined marriage as an exclusive and enduring monogamous union between a man and a woman with the freedom and capacity to marry each other.2 Marriage was considered to be the heart of the family and household, and it was designed for the mutual love and support of husband and wife, their mutual protection from sexual temptation, and their mutual procreation, nurture, and education of children. The law required that engagements be formal and that marriages be contracted with parental consent and witnesses and with a suitable waiting period, sometimes accompanied by the publication of banns. It required marriage licenses and registration and solemnization before civil authorities, religious authorities, or both. It prohibited marriages between couples with various blood and kin ties identified in the Mosaic and Roman law. It discouraged marriage where one party was impotent or had a contagious disease that precluded sex and procreation or physically endangered the other spouse. Couples who sought to divorce had to publicize their intentions, to petition a court, to show adequate cause or fault, and to make provision for the dependent spouse and children. Criminal laws outlawed fornication, adultery, prostitution, sodomy, polygamy, incest, contraception, abortion, and other perceived sexual offenses. Tort laws held third parties liable for seduction, enticement, loss of consortium, or alienation of the affections of one's spouse. Many of these legal rules had millennium-long roots in the civil law, canon law, and common law traditions of the West, with several rules going deeper still into ancient Greek and Roman laws.3Today, much of this traditional family law has fallen or been pushed aside in favor of new cultural and constitutional norms of sexual liberty, privacy, and autonomy.4 Marriage is viewed increasingly at law and at large today as a private contract to be formed, maintained, and dissolved as the parties see fit. Requirements of parental consent and witnesses to the formation of engagement and marital contracts have largely disappeared. …