Families Without Fatherhood
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Families Without Fatherhood Families Without Fatherhood Third Edition Norman Dennis George Erdos with a Foreword by A.H. Halsey and an Afterword by Peter Saunders Institute for the Study of Civil Society London First published by IEA Health & Welfare Unit, September 1992 Second Edition, October 1993 Reprinted July 1996 Reprinted May 1998 Third Edition, ISCS, August 2000 © The Institute for the Study of Civil Society 2000 email: [email protected] All rights reserved ISBN 1-903 386-03-9 Typeset by the Institute for the Study of Civil Society in New Century Schoolbook Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Trowbridge, Wiltshire Dedicated to Robert Andrew Hodkinson Born 16 August 1991 John Maxwell Norman Dennis Born 10 September 1993 Sarah Jane Hodkinson Born 8 February 1996 Contents Page The Authors vii Editor’s Foreword to Third Edition ix Editor’s Foreword to the 1993 Edition ix Foreword A.H. Halsey xii Preface to the 1993 Edition xvi Introduction 1 1 Thou Shalt Not Commit A Value Judgement 6 2 Residues of Judgementalism 11 3 Self-Interest, Easy Virtue and Social Costs 16 4 The Evidence: Growing Up in the Late Nineteen-Sixties 25 5 The Evidence: One Thousand Newcastle Children and Their Fathers 1947-1980 40 6 What’s Left and Right in Childrearing, Sex and Face-to-Face Mutual Aid? 46 7 The Consequences for Fellow Citizens 60 8 The Causes of Incivility 71 9 The Intellectuals’ New Betrayal 80 Appendix 91 Afterword: Family Research and Family Policy Since 1992 Peter Saunders 93 Notes 107 Index 133 vi The Authors Norman Dennis, who was Reader in Social Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, has been a Rockefeller Fellow, Ford Fellow, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, California, Leverhulme Fellow, and Visiting Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. With Professor A.H. Halsey he is author of English Ethical Socialism, Clarendon Press, 1988. The Institute for the Study of Civil Society published Rising Crime and the Dismembered Family, 1993 and The Invention of Permanent Poverty, 1997. He edited and with Detective Superintendent Ray Mallon contributed two chapters to Zero Tolerance: Policing a Free Society, 1997 and contributed ‘Beautiful Theories, Brutal Facts: the welfare state and sexual liberation’ to Welfare, Work and Poverty, 2000, edited by David Smith. He is also well known for his study of a Yorkshire coal-mining town, Coal Is Our Life (with Cliff Slaughter and Fernando Henriques), Eyre and Spottiswood, 1956, and two studies of bureau- cracy and politics as they affected the working-class district of his birth, Millfield, Sunderland, People and Planning, Faber and Faber, 1970, and Public Participation and Planners’ Blight, Faber and Faber, 1972. He has been a Sunderland city councillor, and is active in his local Labour party. He is currently studying the struggle between the bureaucratic, political, academic and media advocates of family, drug and educational permissiveness in Zürich and one of their most important opponents, a Zürich citizen’s organization called the VPM. He lives in Sunderland. He is married, with two children and three grandchildren. George Erdos was born in 1946 in Hungary, and spent his formative years there. He left in 1964. He finished his secondary education in Germany. He then studied psychology at the universities of Frankfurt, New Hampshire, Bar-Ilan, Mainz and Cambridge. He settled in England and is currently lecturer in psychology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He experienced communism directly, and through his German relatives he experienced fascism indirectly. He saw that in times of growing crime and disorder people can be brought to abandon their civil liberties for the sake of security. From 1985 he worked on the Educational Opportunities programme run by Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Its basis was that, in the course of studying for and by obtaining a university degree, the African-American male would assimilate his conduct to that of the white middle-class male and be enabled to enjoy success in American vii viii FAMILIES WITHOUT FATHERHOOD terms. Although the programme was targeted at African-American men, it was actually utilised with enthusiasm by the African-American women participants. Changes taking place at that time in the culture and conduct of white middle-class men stimulated Dr Erdos’ interest in the role of the male in English and American society. Dr Erdos is an adherent of ethical socialism, in the sense given the term in English Ethical Socialism. He is married with three children. A.H. Halsey is Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford; and Emer- itus Fellow of Nuffield College. He is the author of numerous books on sociology and social policy, including Origins and Destinations: Family, Class, and Education in Modern Britain, with A.F. Heath and J.M. Ridge, 1980; Change in British Society, 3rd edition, 1986; and English Ethical Socialism, with Norman Dennis, 1988. He edited, with Jerome Karabel, Power and Ideology in Education, 1977. Peter Saunders is professor of sociology at the University of Sussex, but is currently on a two-year secondment as research manager at the Australian Institute of Family Studies in Melbourne. He has published ten books in the areas of urban sociology, social inequality and social policy, and has held visiting academic positions in the USA, Germany and New Zealand as well as Australia. Recently he has been working on youth welfare dependency and on issues surrounding the reform of the Australian welfare state. Editor’s Foreword to the Third Edition Families Without Fatherhood was first published in 1992 and a second edition followed in 1993. This third edition reproduces the now classic text of 1993 and supplements it with an Afterword by Professor Peter Saunders, who updates the statistics and reflects on the continuing relevance of the argument. David G. Green July 2000 Editor’s Foreword to the 1993 Edition The Family and Liberty The family is the foundation stone of a free society. In it children learn the voluntary restraint, respect for others and sense of personal responsibility without which freedom is impossible. Yet family life has received surprisingly little attention from the intellectual supporters of liberty. The probable reason is that, until very recently, solid family life could be taken for granted. But today family life is breaking down. One-parent families now make up about 20 per cent of all families; 31 per cent of births now take place outside marriage; and each year about 150,000 children become the victims of divorce. On any reckon- ing these are dramatic developments which have caused many commentators, whether they incline to socialism or to liberty, to re- think their philosophy. The term ‘underclass’ has come into use to describe people who live outside the norms of social life: their family life tends to be broken, they rely on welfare benefits rather than work, and they resort to crime and drugs. The IEA published Charles Murray’s The Emerging British Underclass in which he gauges the rise of this group on three measures: illegitimacy, crime and failure to work. The term ‘under- class’ makes sense as a description of life in some American inner cities, but Dennis and Erdos—despite sharing Murray’s concerns—do not accept that the problem can be understood as that of a self- contained inner-city underclass. For them, growing illegitimacy and family breakdown, the reduction in the work ethic and rising crime are signs of a more general malaise. What is also important about their thesis is that Dennis writes as a socialist who is concerned about the decline of socialist morality. His standpoint is that of an ethical socialist (a point of view described in ix x FAMILIES WITHOUT FATHERHOOD English Ethical Socialism, co-authored by Dennis and Professor A.H. Halsey) which is in essence the moral view of the respectable working class, based on solid family life, devotion of parents to their children, hard work, honesty and consideration for neighbours. The Labour party was once the party of such decent, straightforward men and women, but today it has been captured by middle-class intellectuals whose values are very different. To Dennis, they have adopted a philosophy of absolute laissez-faire in personal lifestyle which is not compatible with socialist scepticism about laissez-faire in economics. In Dennis’ view, socialists can be divided into two groups, ‘ethical socialists’ and ‘egoistic socialists’. Ethical socialists hold that individ- uals are personally responsible in all social circumstances, whereas egoistic socialists contend that society (or the environment, or ‘the system’) causes individuals to behave as they do. For the egoistic socialist, individuals may live whatever lifestyle they choose and, if things go wrong, the State should pick up the pieces. They are, according to Dennis, socialist only in that they call for the State—which means other people—to pick up the bill for their folly. Dennis asks what would happen if everyone took that view: who would be left to care for the casualties? And what are the prospects for a ‘caring society’ if parents are not inclined to care fully for their own children? The division among socialists can also be found among capitalists. ‘Egoistic capitalists’, more commonly called ‘libertarians’, believe that people should be able to do as they wish. For some libertarians a bad conscience—guilt they might call it—is as objectionable as State coercion. Other libertarians believe that without State interference human existence would settle down to a natural harmony. People, they say, are essentially good and do not need to be controlled. If Dennis and Halsey are ethical socialists, then classical liberals such as Friedrich Hayek and Michael Novak might be called ‘ethical capitalists’.