“This is an intriguing work....Historians of the family will benefit by engaging with Thornton's sweeping theories, even if these theories will require serious revision in the light of more rigorous historical analysis.”
- Susannah Ottaway, Carleton College
Susannah Ottaway's review of Reading History Sideways
Susannah Ottaway. Review of Reading History Sideways: the Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life by Arland Thornton. The American Historical Review 2006 111(5):1465.
Reproduced below with the Author's Permission.
Like so many works of family history, Arland Thornton's book begins with an explication of the myth that Northwest European family life underwent a dramatic transition from traditional to modern form by 1800. Thornton's primary concern is not to prove the fallacy of the myth, which has been thoroughly refuted in the past half-century, but to explain its origins. He locates these origins in what he terms developmental thinking and methodology, and he then goes on to assess the impact of "developmental idealism" on world history. This is an accessible and provocative book, but its dramatic claims rest on a rather slender and uneven base of evidence.
In the first half of the book, Thornton argues that scholars of the family from the 1700s through the mid-twentieth century worked within a developmental paradigm: the belief that individual and social change through a series of uniform and progressive stages is inevitable and desirable. In particular, they believed that the family as an institution progressed from its traditional form, characterized by early and universal marriage within authoritarian, extended households, to a modern form with nuclear households that supported individual autonomy and higher status for women. This teleological view of civilizations' progress was reinforced and legitimated by the common methodology of "reading history sideways." Assuming that contemporary "less developed" cultures exhibited traits that were common to European societies in the distant past, researchers from the West used their observations of societies in Asia, the Americas, and Africa as a substitute for missing historical sources on family life and social history in their own countries. This methodology produced the conclusion (accurately enough) that the Northwest European marriage pattern was distinctive, but it also (fallaciously) led to the belief that this pattern emerged in Europe only after a dramatic transition out of the traditional stage in the early modern period.
Thornton argues that the scholarly legacy of developmental thinking and "reading history sideways methodology" continued to pervade aspects of later twentieth-century works of family history including classic texts by Philippe Ariès, Lawrence Stone, and Edward Shorter. Thornton's critique of Ariès and Stone covers arguments already well rehearsed by Linda Pollock and Alan Macfarlane (among many others), but his discussion of Shorter's The Making of the Modern Family (1975) delves more insightfully into the developmental bias of Shorter's sources, and contains an interesting analysis of the neglected eighteenth-century theorist John Millar. Even so, Thornton's discussion of contemporary scholarship on the family seems somewhat disconnected from much of the more recent, subtle work of family historians in the past two decades.
The second half of the book examines the extent to which developmental thinking has influenced communities and individuals throughout the world, and over a considerable sweep of time. Thornton defines developmental idealism as "a package of powerful propositions and aspirations," which includes the beliefs that "1)modern society is good and attainable; 2)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" (pp. 134-144, 8). Here, the book moves very quickly through a wide variety of arenas in which developmental idealism has been irrefutably important.
Disseminated through education, mass media, and colonial conquest, the ideology of development profoundly altered individual lives and societies in colonial and postcolonial Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. Thornton briefly mentions the importance of colonial resistance to development, and its potential to create hybrid family systems, but he does not dwell on ambivalence; his goal is to demonstrate developmental idealism's "incredibly strong influence on family change for centuries" (p. 240).
The book's chief weakness is its lack of evidentiary depth. Thornton, a sociologist, is apt to refer indiscriminately to "writers of the 1700s and 1800s," assuming an unlikely homogeneity of attitudes and assumptions among early modern authors. Moreover, where he does pause to examine individual scholars and their works, he makes quite sweeping generalizations, sometimes without citing specific evidence. For example, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's complex array of relevant writings are reduced to the point where they appear simply as unproblematic promoters of developmental idealism. There are also some odd gaps in Thornton's discussion of developmental thinkers: why is Karl Marx barely mentioned in this work? Such problems are exacerbated by the University of Chicago Press's choice to utilize a very abbreviated and unhelpful footnote style.
This is an intriguing work, and it is clear from the conclusion that Thornton means it to provoke new scholarship, and particularly to serve as a catalyst for finding new comparative methodologies for studying the history of the family: methods that emphasize cultural and intellectual rather than economic and social history. Historians of the family will benefit by engaging with Thornton's sweeping theories, even if these theories will require serious revision in the light of more rigorous historical analysis.
Publication details for Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life.
