Critique of Instrumental Reason by Max Horkheimer

Author:Max Horkheimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

THE FUTURE OF MARRIAGE

(1966)

Anyone proposing to speak on the future of marriage must analyze the present tendencies discernible in the phenomenon of marriage and recall its earlier forms. In dealing with the historical aspect, however, I am forced here to pass over important problems and content myself with brief and highly subjective reflections. I shall not, for example, touch on the divorce statistics, although in any attempt to assess the future they deserve serious consideration.

The image of marriage that was generally regarded as correct around the turn of the century, as well as various ideas connected with marriage (from its holiness to the hierarchy of husband, wife, and children), have long since been relativized by serious thinkers, and marriage is today considered to be a social phenomenon that constantly changes as society develops. At various historical periods the type of society—primitive tribes, food-gatherers or hunters, settled peoples, shepherds, or city-builders—determined whether the woman, the man, or their parents were to be the decisive factor in the choice of spouse and even in the course of the marriage itself. Nomadic tribes of herdsmen were for obvious reasons patriarchal and recognized the sole authority of the head of the family. That authority passed to his son; daughters were disposed of as the leader judged best. The temporal and geographic extent of the opposite way of life, matriarchy, is disputed today as are other phenomena of early history, such as promiscuity and primitive communism. Among a number of peoples at least, monogamy seems to have been a relatively late pattern. Moses, to say nothing of the Patriarchs, had several wives, and the people, especially his relatives, began to complain only when he took a black woman to wife.1

As monogamy is but one of several forms of marriage to be found in the world today, so the moral and juridical conceptions connected with monogamy are by no means the original ones, even though they existed, along with others, as early as biblical times and to some extent in Greco-Roman antiquity. Thus Lewis Henry Morgan and others have thought that sexual intercourse between brother and sister was certainly practiced in early human society. Even in some higher civilizations such a relationship was considered meritorious, not criminal. In ancient Egypt where women, at least among the ruling classes, enjoyed high honor and property-rights, a brother-sister marriage was considered to be the best of marriages; it was especially holy when the partners were the offspring of a brother-sister marriage. Even the man in the street felt such marriages to be the most reasonable, and a number of researchers have found that this kind of marriage was “the rule, not the exception.”2 Concerning the Egyptians, Frazer writes that “their Macedonian conquerors [i.e., the Ptolemies] appear, with characteristic prudence, to have borrowed the custom from their Egyptian predecessors for the express purpose of conciliating native prejudice.”3 He finds the reason for incest as an accepted custom in “the wish of brothers to obtain for their own use the family

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