“A superb piece of serious scholarship and an intellectual tour de force that deserves to be on the desk of....all social scientists....interested in societal change.”
- Tim Futing Liao, University of Illinois
Tim Futing Liao's review of Reading History Sideways
From Contemporary Sociology. Washington: May 2006. Vol. 35, Iss. 3; p. 260.
Reproduced below with the Author's Permission.
In 1886, Edward Westermarck, a Finn who later became a prominent sociologist of the time, left his native land for London; upon arrival, he spent a lot of time in the British Museum, reading and working on his doctoral thesis. In addition to all the reading, he sent out questionnaires to 125 people in various places in the world. After completing his doctoral degree, he published a book in London in 1891, titled History of Human Marriage, a collection of cross-cultural data about various historical aspects of human marriage. The book was so influential that five editions had been issued by 1921 and it was translated into at least six foreign languages. Of interest here is Westermarck's research methodology, which is only the tip of a gigantic intellectual iceberg representing social science giants like John Locke, Robert Malthus, Frédéric Le Play, and Edward Tylor, among others, who shared the same modus operanti with Westermarck of employing cross-sectional data from a multitude of locations to describe a trajectory of societal and social change. This methodological approach, termed by Thornton as reading history sideways, dominated the social sciences for all of the 18th and the 19th centuries and the first half of the 20th century, and is the focus of his ambitious book that studies such intellectual tradition in family studies. The methodology underlies developmental thinking, popular even to this day. There are two major themes, one methodological and the other theoretical, in Thornton's book–the influence of the developmental paradigm on scholarship about the family and the influence of the developmental paradigm on actual family structures, relationships, and processes–that are explored in the two major parts of the book.
Today, any well-trained graduate student in sociology will know that longitudinal claims can only be made with support from longitudinal data. Then why did it take us so long to realize what had been amiss? In chapters 2 through 7, Thornton gives a careful critical review of both the broader intellectual tradition regarding development and the specific literature contributed by family scholars over the last two to three centuries. I summarize from the review four elements for explaining the persistence of the developmental paradigm: (1) The strong belief that there was a common origin of family life for (Northwest European) cultures in the world; (2) the attractiveness of using a unidirectional model of progress for describing societal change; (3) the powerful ideas by scholars such as John Locke that influenced generations of later scholars; and (4) the lack of falsifying evidence until the second half of the last century when Cambridge luminaries (e.g., Peter Laslett, Alan Macfarlane, and Tony Wrigley) showed with historical data that the prevalence of the nuclear family and the emphasis on individualism extended far back before industrialization in English history.
The second theme is about how the developmental paradigm actually brought about changes in individual behavior and governmental action with regard to family life. Unlike the methodological critique of the first theme, whose validity is established as long as the method under scrutiny is found inadequate or inappropriate, the second makes a theoretical claim that must square with empirical evidence and must be properly assessed. Let me play devil's advocate for a moment and argue that one cannot make such claims without accounting for the counterfactuals. In this case, we must know what would have occurred to family life around the world had there been an absence of developmental ideas in the last three centuries. The task involved, of course, is a very tall order bordering on mission impossible. Without making any efforts to deal with the counterfactuals, however, Thornton does provide what I consider the most powerful and the most systematic analysis in the book in chapters 8 through 12. He calls the package of powerful propositions and aspirations of the developmental paradigm developmental idealism,and identifies four fundamental propositions as its components (chapter 8): (1) modern society is good and attainable; (2) Intimate Relationships, Family, and Life Course-261 the modern family is good and attainable; (3) the modern family is a cause as well as an effect of a modern society; and (4) individuals have the right to be free and equal, with social relationships being based on consent. For him, even if just one or two of the propositions was widely embraced, developmental idealism would still have considerable power in producing behavioral consequences.
In the ensuing chapters, Thornton convincingly demonstrates how developmental idealism has shaped individual behavior and governmental action pertaining to the family. He traces in detail how developmental idealism (especially a la Locke) has influenced Western family forms (chapter 9); how developmental thinking in the United States has guided the campaigns to eliminate barbarism that targeted against Native Americans, Mormons, the Oneida Community, and nonNorthwest European immigrants (chapter 10); how developmental ideas have disseminated to regions outside Northwest Europe through European colonization, revolutionary movements, governmental initiatives, and family planning programs (chapter 11); and how some general social and economic forces have helped spread the developmental paradigm worldwide (chapter 12).
The arguments therein are powerful, the referencing is exhaustive, and the description, accurate with good examples (to the point of reminding me of Achebe's Things Fall Apart where the impact of European colonization on Ibo life is narrated, albeit fictionally). Curiously, however, the author is silent about another intellectual tradition that has also found fault with developmental thinking even though the scholars in the tradition (e.g., Cardoso, Wallerstein, etc.) are much more concerned about economy than family life. Nevertheless, the author does deal with economic change in the form of industrialization and urbanization in the final substantive chapter, thus making connections between the changes in economic life and in family life and rendering dependency theory and world-system theory relevant for the discussion. Alas, an engagement with the broader (political) economic issues could be another book project.
Thornton's book is a superb piece of serious scholarship and an intellectual tour de force that deserves to be on the desk of not only family scholars but all sociologists, indeed all social scientists, who are interested in societal change. It is a must-read too for anyone who is involved with any (family) policy making at the national and the international level.
Publication details for Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life.
