Concept
Family
Overview
Family (from Latin: familia) is a group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or affinity (by marriage or other relationship). It forms the basis for social order. Ideally, families offer predictability, structure, and safety as members mature and learn to participate in the community. Historically, most human societies use family as the primary purpose of attachment, nurturance, and socialization.
Anthropologists classify most family organizations as matrifocal (a mother and her children), patrifocal (a father and his children), conjugal (a married couple with children, also called the nuclear family), avuncular (a man, his sister, and her children), or extended (in addition to parents, spouse and children, may include grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins).
The field of genealogy aims to trace family lineages through history. The family is also an important economic unit studied in family economics. The word "families" can be used metaphorically to create more inclusive categories such as community, nationhood, and global village.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Family is discussed.
Hence the ideal type of this form of the family is the Roman family. The word familia did not originally signify the composite ideal of sentimentality and domestic strife in the present day philistine mind. Among the Romans it did not even apply in the beginning to the leading couple and its children, but to the slaves alone. Famulus means domestic slave, and familia is the aggregate number of slaves belonging to…
Friedrich Engels, The origin of the family, private property, and the state
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; the book is about it; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Neither of these errors can be corrected apart from the other. It is in the mutual permeation and interaction of the respective spheres of family and cultural life, not in their isolation, that the family is to be strengthened. Here, as in the economic field, no one family can succeed entirely by itself. The problem is largely a social one.
John Dewey, Ethics
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
The family being, in his mind as in that of Frenchmen generally, the foundation and essential type of all society, the separation of the two powers commences there. The spiritual, or moral and religious power, in a family, is the women of it. The positivist family is composed of the "fundamental couple," their children, and the parents of the man, if alive. The whole government of the household, except as regards…
John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism
states what it is; names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
When a family is complete, it consists of freemen and slaves; but as in every subject we should begin with examining into the smallest parts of which it consists, and as the first and smallest parts of a family are the master and slave, the husband and wife, the father and child, let us first inquire into these three, what each of them may be, and what they ought to be; that is to say, the herile, the nuptial, and…
Aristotle, Politics
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
The children who grow up under such conditions are utterly ruined for later family life, can never feel at home in the family which they themselves found, because they have always been accustomed to isolation, and they contribute therefore to the already general undermining of the family in the working-class. A similar dissolution of the family is brought about by the employment of the children. When they get on far…
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 with a Preface written in 1892
names the idea; states what it is; author linked in the graph
Philosophers who discussed Family
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Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Conservatism.