Family Changes Over the Long Term: A Sociological Commentary

Family structures and family law have been moving in the same direction all over the world over the past two centuries. Although general agreement exists that these changes have something to do with industrialization and with the ensuing transformation of the material basis of individual subsistence, it is nearly impossible to disentangle cause and effect in this process of the simultaneous revolution of economic and family structures. The transition from a society in which status and the family constitute the basis of social security to a society in which survival and success are based on merit has led to a disintegration of the family. But a society cannot go on functioning well unless it protects its inept, and hence the disintegration of the family is a threat to social cohesion itself.