Politics and The Family
In her book, Delacroix, Art and Patrimony in Post-Revolutionary France, Elisabeth Fraser analyses Eugène Delacroix's famous “Massacres of Chios” (1824), which helped galvanise philo-Hellenism in France. Delacroix's symbol for the oppressed Greek nation was a family employed as a conceptual and visual structuring device. A reviewer encapsulated Fraser's argument:
- “Equating patriarchal family metaphor with government paternalism and imperialist protectionism, the chapter argues that such familial intimations, heightened by acute emotionalism and hints of a Western culture soiled by Eastern penetration, corresponded to and reflected a paternalistic government urge to protect the victimized Greeks, a thinly veiled justification for French colonial intervention in the Mediterranean.” Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer
More recently, George Lakoff has claimed that the left/right distinction in politics comes from a difference between ideals of the family in the mind of the person in question; for right-wing people, the ideal is a patriarchical and moralistic family; for left-wing people, the ideal is an unconditionally loving family. As a result, Lakoff argues, both sides find each other's views not only immoral, but incomprehensible, since they appear to violate each side's deeply held beliefs about personal morality in the sphere of the family..
Such a model is not a recent addition to modern discourse; J. Vernon Jenson discussed “British Voices on the Eve of the American Revolution: Trapped by the Family Metaphor” in the Quarterly Journal of Speech 63 (1977), pp 43–50.
The idea of the commonwealth as a family is close to cliché; it permeates political discourse at every level:
- “There is an historic American National Family metaphor .. That American National Family frame is like any real extended family-fractious but in the end functional. There are people in it who aren't just like you, but they are still family and we still have to try to solve our problems together, despite our differences.” — Susan C. Strong, Our 'One Big Family' Frame
Read more about this topic: Family As A Model For The State
Famous quotes containing the words politics and, politics and/or family:
“Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self- Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Providing for one’s family as a good husband and father is a water-tight excuse for making money hand over fist. Greed may be a sin, exploitation of other people might, on the face of it, look rather nasty, but who can blame a man for “doing the best” for his children?”
—Eva Figes (b. 1932)