The Family, Morality and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813-1890

This dissertation has as its subject the Anglo-American cooperative response to ‘the family question’, which this project defines as the set of intellectual and practical puzzles deriving from the family’s social and moral dualism. The first chapter examines the family question as framed by eighteenth-century moral philosophy. It considers Smith, Hume, Wollstonecraft and Godwin. Subsequent chapters examine four distinct movements in the Anglo-American tradition, each of which engaged with the family to answer questions about morality, sociability and the role of the new social sciences. These movements include Owenite socialism, Oneida Perfectionism, Mormonism and Modern Times. It is the contention of this dissertation that to these movements the family embodied a complex set of social, moral and scientific questions that had, in fact, been central to thinkers in the British Enlightenment—questions about sociability, perfectibility and the role of social science. Secondary literature has overlooked this rich dialogue, and consequently each of these movements has been labelled myopic in its account of human nature and reductive in its approach to social theory. Secondary accounts oversimplify their ideas about the family in order to reinforce conventional stereotypes about the intellectual boundaries of each movement: Owenite socialists are relegated to the sphere of economic egalitarianism, Oneida Perfectionists and Mormons to that of spiritual fanaticism, and Modern Times is consigned to political anarchism. This dissertation claims, however, that despite the radical nature of their solutions, these movements found no simple or one-sided solution to the family question. Their ambitions were not single-minded, limited to economic, spiritual or political radicalism; rather, in their efforts to provide a coherent account of the family’s moral and social role they engaged with a multitude of moral, social and scientific theories, from economics and moral psychology to physiology and biological theories of racial improvement. It is the conclusion of this dissertation that what is historically and intellectually salient about these movements is not their unmitigated devotion to a single, monistic ideology, but rather their attempt to reconcile the family with two conflicting conceptions of social science: one in which human beings are the natural subjects of scientific principles and methodologies, constrained by the same laws and principles that regulate the immutable physical world, and one in which humanity transcends nature as an entity of limitless selfreflection and perfectibility.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Westover, Tara

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Runciman, David

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/c6b4b63a-2979-43b1-94e7-530ea613e9d2/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.106065

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/364372