The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage

By Ferdinand Mount

Book Overview

A "brilliantly written and convincingly researched argument that marriage and the family, far from being the handmaidens of oppression by a ruling class, are in fact the chief obstacles to the exercise of any authority, whether political or religious, temporal or spiritual" (Auberon Waugh, "The Daily Mail").

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0049421808
• ISBN13: 9780049421806
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Unwin Hyman
• Length: 282 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Family Really is Subversive and Wonderful

An amazing tour in common sense. You will know his thesis about the family is right after the first few pages and you will drift gleefully across the remaining pages, forever changed. Read this!!! Now.

Brilliant, fascinating, common sense book

This book so influenced when I first read it 20 years ago that it permanently and indelibly changed my view of the world, history and politics. I think of it often. Mount's (well documented) premise that the nuclear family has always been the greatest threat to public organizations, be they religious or political, is insightful and important. Public organizations, in and of their nature, do and will try to suppress the loyalty of individuals to their immediate family. This short and important book deserves to be widely read and to exert the influence it merits.