The Policing of Families

By Jacques Donzelot and Robert Hurley Jacques Donzelot

Book Overview

In The Policing of Families, Jacques Donzelot, a student and colleague of Michel Foucault, offers an account of public intervention in the regulation of family affairs since the eighteenth century,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394503384
• ISBN13: 9780394503387
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Length: 269 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Tale of Two Families

Through the 18th and 19th centuries in France, through various means, but particularly by the juvenile courts and its assemblage of notables, including mothers, which Donzelot calls the tutelage complex, families became a mechanism through which the government extended its control over workers, particularly 'delinquents,' rendering them docile by increasingly severe oversight, successively imposed by mothers, social workers and ultimately penal authorities. In contrast, for the bourgeois, the family was reoriented away from its former purposes of self-aggrandizement and propertied alliances toward the protection and cultivation of children. While working class and bourgeous children alike became subject to school supervision and education, bourgeois families also employed private extracurricular education to assure advancement and address the problem of 'difficult children.' Counselors spoke to the entire family, not offering prescriptions but therapy, maturation not being measured as the acceptance of duty, but a negotiated rapprochement, having the consequence of releasing well-to-do mothers to find a measure of sexual liberation. Thus, while a state-sponsored institution, the meaning of family manifested very contingently and particularly, depending on the power of its members, particularly, and ultimately, in their relation to the state. Donzelot especially marvels at the way psychotherapy could be employed for such varied and contradictory purposes, suggesting that Freud was to psychiatry and medicine what Keynes was to economics, each making necessity appear provisional.

State-driven force homogenization of family structures

Donzelot's historical review of the French government's attempt to engineer society via force homogenization of family structures is not only a message of the historical conditions of the early 1900s. It is also an intimidating description of what can happen when social engineering goes bad. The book describes the mechanization not only of the centralized institutions such as the judicial system, but also of local agencies, such individual philanthropists and community help organizations. Donelot traces the transition of control from the Church where priests constructed the images of the "ideal" family to educational, judicial, medical and psychiatric constructed images of the ideal family. In all cases, Donzelot is able to illustrate how the structural construction of familial roles fails to inculcate meaning into familial life. Moreover, he is able to illustrate how these maneuvers actually inhibit meaning or destroy already existing emotionally supportive structures. His writing is a critically important look back in time that allows a clearer vision of the future of the interrelations of social structures and individual lives.