The Church’s Crusade Against Cousin-Marriage Did Not Create the Western Nuclear Family
16th May 2021
The Explanation of ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems (1985) was based on the insight that the world map of communism corresponded extremely closely with a specific family system, that of the exogamous communitarian family. Following Walt Rostow, the Kennedy intellectual, Todd argued that the violent process of modernization exposed societies to communist subversion in a brief window when the traditional institutions, such as the authority of the landlord, have decayed but new institutions and higher standards of living are still not in place. Todd’s corollary to Rostow’s dictum was that, while all societies are traumatized by the process of modernization, some societies were more exposed to communist subversion than others. And what determined this conditional exposure to the risk of communism subversion was a specific sort of traditional family system where marriage was exogamous (cousin marriage was taboo) and there was coresidence of the father and all his married sons.
Don’t ever say we don’t deal with Really Obscure Shit here.