Lauren K. Hall, Family and the Politics of Moderation: Private Life, Public Goods and the Rebirth of Social Individualism
Abstract
Lauren K. Hall’s Family and the Politics of Moderation: Private Life, Public Goods and the Rebirth of Social Individualism concerns the nature of moderation as much or perhaps even more than it concerns the family. Hall reveals the character of a moderate family first through a critical assessment of how an extreme collectivist (Marx) and an extreme individualist (Ayn Rand) seek to overcome the family and then through a treatment of how moderate liberals (Edmund Burke and Montesquieu) conceive of the family. From these confrontations with immoderate and moderate thinkers emerges a picture of the human condition and the place of the family in it that Hall then applies to some contemporary debates concerning the family. From her analysis of contemporary debates on the family we derive her understanding of moderation. Bad thinking about the family is a source of political immoderation and the cure for such bad thinking is an appreciation of what we might call the limits of family life.