Family As A Model For The State

Family As A Model For The State

The family as a model for the organization of the state is a theory of political philosophy. It either explains the structure of certain kinds of state in terms of the structure of the family (as a model or as a claim about the historical growth of the state), or it attempts to justify certain types of state by appeal to the structure of the family. The first writer to use it (certainly in any clear and developed way) was Aristotle, who argued that the natural progression of human beings was from the family via small communities to the polis.

Many writers from ancient times to the present have seen parallels between the family and the forms of the state. In particular, monarchists have argued that the state mirrors the patriarchal family, with the people obeying the king as children obey their father.

Read more about Family As A Model For The State:  Ancient Greek Thought, Confucian Thought, Modern Thought, Politics and The Family

Famous quotes containing the words family, model and/or state:

    Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
    Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866)

    It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing.
    Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)

    Worn down by the hoofs of millions of half-wild Texas cattle driven along it to the railheads in Kansas, the trail was a bare, brown, dusty strip hundreds of miles long, lined with the bleaching bones of longhorns and cow ponies. Here and there a broken-down chuck wagon or a small mound marking the grave of some cowhand buried by his partners “on the lone prairie” gave evidence to the hardships of the journey.
    —For the State of Kansas, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)