Richard Dien Winfield

The Just Family.

Albany: State University of New York Press 1998. Pp. xi + 273.

(cloth: ISBN 0-7914-3997-6);

(paper: ISBN 0-7914-3998-4).

Review by E.P. Brandon to appear in Philosophy in Review, vol. XIX, no. 4, 313-314, August 1999

Here we have political philosophy in a grand if somewhat unusual style, another piece of Winfield's extensive reworking of Hegelian themes in Rechtsphilosophie, a revision of Hegel's pages on the family in the light of subsequent recognition of Hegel's own patriarchal blinkers ('he ties the family to a heterosexual monogamous union, where roles are defined by gender, dictating for the husband a privilege to represent the family in society and state and for the wife a bondage to domestic affairs' [32]) and greater responsiveness to the structural injustices of the world ('only when social as well as kinship groups are divested of political power can citizenship become an agency of self-rule, where the will that governs derives from those who are governed' [206]). In seeking to delineate the structures of rational self-determination, Winfield is careful not to be swayed by the contingencies of human history - rational beings might reproduce asexually and feel nothing corresponding to our love or sexual pleasure so marriage should not be defined in terms of these things (42); adoptive parents need not be of the same species as their children, or indeed each other (141). In general, he has a keen eye both for the obvious contingent and for the often dubious contingent generalisations invoked to support claims about the family (as for instance Blustein's appeal to developmental psychology to ground moral preference for a nuclear heterosexual family, 135). He keeps separate the notion of marriage, a union of adult moral agents, and parenting, a relation of mature to immature moral agents.

While the negative points are often well-taken, we are not given a perspicuous reason to accept Winfield's positive account. Marriage is fundamentally a mode of association in which two or more persons 'define themselves by autonomously and directly willing the common good of the association as the already embodied structure enabling and obliging them to exercise that volition' (69). Winfield is clear that history reveals few cases where such a union of free equals can be found, but fails to make a compelling case that we should now even bother to try. His comments on legal developments in the West move between praising their freeing marriage from irrelevancies and warning that they are making it virtually indistinguishable from friendship. A logical extension of the latter aspect would be the disestablishment of marriage altogether. Lacking an ear for Hegelian reasons (offered on pp. 32-8 for instance), I could not see why Winfield would not applaud such a thing. We have abolished slaves and serfs, why not spouses?

Winfield is not afraid of social and political change. In discussing objections to the family based on its partiality, he mandates social welfare provisions more extensive than any we find, permits state abolition of inheritance (beyond what is necessary for the education of any minors in a family to adulthood - grown-up children cease to have any ethical, rather than moral, relationship with their parents) and the taxation of the surviving spouse(s) to 'reduce resultant advantages within the limits dictated by social justice' (198).

Parenting can hardly be dispensed with. But here again Winfield is too fixated on rationalizing changing legal provisions. It is only after pages in which children are not persons, not responsible for caring for parents, not co-owners of family property, and ought not to be given state resources to raise their own children that Winfield notes the impossibility of drawing a clear factual line between child and adult (152) and thus the inescapable need for discretion and the desirability of a progressive assumption of what he treats as an absolute status.

Winfield can find nothing good about the extended family or traditional kinship group. It is perhaps rather presumptuous for reason to banish so unceremoniously the contingencies upon which marriage and parenting are based. Some among a set of equally free rational beings might want to set up an exclusive family Winfield-style, just as others might want to band together as a monastic community; most, surely, would prefer a life of greater mutual but limited interactions. At one point Winfield admits that people can live unmarried, but he seems to think this a pretty desperate state: they 'may well fall into ... double bondage.... First, because single persons owe no one an accounting for their private behavior, they are slaves to their own whims in their personal life.... Second, lacking the obligation to be strictly open with any one else, unmarried individuals are strangers in the world, liable to become enslaved to those on whom their solitary domestic upkeep depends' (85). Only an 'objective, juridically binding commitment' can allegedly free them from such caprice. Winfield's line is not entirely without its own contingent psychological commitments.

Winfield covers the ground - a more determined editor might have cut some repetitions. He is careful in distinguishing issues. His book offers an uncommon perspective on them. Your Library should have a copy.

HTML prepared February 10th, 1999, revised 27th July, 1999.

URL http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/epb/winfield.html