The family of nations: Kinship as an international ordering principle in the nineteenth century (original) (raw)

Kinship in Europe: a new approach to long-term development

2007

Kinship has been said to be in decline at almost every moment during Western history. Historians have viewed the appearance of the most diverse new social structures-guilds and brotherhoods in the Middle Ages, the state in the early modern period, the market and voluntary associations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or social security in the twentieth-as either displacing kinship or replacing its lost functions. Western self-identity has a heavy investment in understanding the long-term development of its kinship practices as successive contractions toward the modern nuclear family. Within this framework, kinship is the functional predecessor of almost everything, but never a constructive factor in the emergence of anything. In what follows, we will suggest that a growing number of studies not only contradict widely held assumptions about the declining importance of kinship, but also point to broad, common, structural shifts in the configurations of kin across Europe between the Middle Ages and the early modern period and again at the turn of the modern era. In this introduction and in this book, we do not bring the story of kinship into the twentieth century, which would require considerations of a third transition and new structural features that demand treatment in their own right.

Time, Kinship, and the Nation

Genealogy 2018, 2(2), 17., 2018

There remains both a great deal of confusion over the nature of kinship and an inappropriate resistance to understanding the nation as one form of kinship, specifically, territorial kinship. Although one finds the relatively early and occasional analysis of the nation in terms of kinship, for example, by Lloyd Fallers, anthropologists, including paradoxically Ernest Gellner, have avoided understanding nationality in this way. Despite Anthony Smith's attention to ethnie, those associated with nationalism studies have also generally avoided analyzing the nation in terms of kinship, as can be seen by the ill-informed hostility to the category "primoridal". This article rectifies this mistake by reexamining the category of kinship, along both its vertical, temporal axis and horizontal, geographical axis, with attention to nationality in general and, in particular, in antiquity.

Kinship in international relations. Introduction and framework (chapter 1)

Kinship in International Relations, 2019

This introductory chapter discusses some ways in which kinship may be of use to IR scholars. We begin with some examples of how kinship relations have manifested themselves historically in international relations, seeking to demonstrate how blood kinship from the beginning has been accompanied, reinforced and challenged by metaphorical kinship – that is, how certain non-blood related relations in or via practice come to be treated as kin, with the duties, obligations and expectations that entails. We then proceed to observing how kinship has been dealt within its home discipline, social anthropology. Some early anthropologists, like Lewis H. Morgan (1877), treated kinship as a chief principle of social organization, while others, like Bronislaw Malinowski, did not. Disciplinary developments led structural-functionalists to focus on the law-like tendencies of kinship (Yanagisako 2002), and by the mid-twentieth century, British anthropology focused on what we may call ‘kinshipology’: identifying kinship structures and their effects on lived life. Over the last half century or so, the focus has moved towards treating kinship from what it is to what it does. This move from the structures of kinship to kinship’s role for social organization, which may be summed up as treating kinship as an enabling metaphor, has produced a number of insights on the level of everyday political practice, which IR scholars may apply to the level of relations between polities. We conclude the chapter with a presentation of the individual contributions to this volume.

Family Power. Kinship, War and Political Orders in Eurasia 500-2018

Cambridge University Press, 2020

Since the seventeenth century, scholars have argued that kinship as an organizing principle and political order are antithetical. This book shows that this was simply not the case. Kinship, as a principle of legitimacy and in the shape of dynasties, was fundamental to political order. Throughout the last one and a half millennia of European and Middle Eastern history, elite families and polities evolved in symbiosis. By demonstrating this symbiosis as a basis for successful polities, Peter Haldén unravels long-standing theories of the state and of modernity. Most social scientists focus on coercion as a central facet of the state, and indeed of power. Instead, Haldén argues that much more attention must be given to collaboration, consent and common identity and institutions as elements of political order. He also demonstrates that democracy and individualism are not necessary features of modernity.

European civilization and the “emulation of the nations”

History of European Ideas, 2008

In the mid-1930s Paul Hazard's analysis of the upheavals in the European ''spirit'' in the years between 1680 and 1715the years of the crisis of Europe's conscience-underlined the vital ''sentiment of national differences''. 1 Europe, as it emerged transformed from the ''crisis'' of the late seventeenth century, may have become the Europe of reason, of the enlightenment, but it was still the Europe of the French, the English, the Spanish, and the Italians. ''What is Europe?'' was the question Paul Hazard frequently asked in the conclusion of his great book. He was revisiting a theme, that of national differences, which had dominated European reflection on the idea of Europe and of its civilization since the eighteenth century. The Europe under consideration was an ensemble of nations which shared a civilization, a history, a spirit, the same ''good manners'', but at the same time was divided into different nations, with their own psychological peculiarities, traditions, customs, and laws. Europe as a space of nations, each (as was stated in nineteenth century) with its own path in the context of a common civilization and history. And at the same time Europe as a distinctive ''civilization'', the highest point in the evolution of a progress. A civilization which was to serve as the model for any possible progress. In allegorical representations, Europe, from antiquity to the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries, and as late as the eighteenth, accepted the tributes of non-European lands as a woman/queen. Europe was indeed a body mysteriously able to contain many bodies/peoples, not all of them sharing the same entitlements and the same rights. In the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, the idea of European civilization, as formed in the ''strong'' centers of European society-London, Paris, Amsterdam-consolidated this complex interweaving of values and meanings which the idea of Europe was taking on. On

Kinship in International Relations

Routledge New International Relations, 2018

While kinship is among the basic organizing principles of all human life, its role in and implications for international politics and relations have been subject to surprisingly little exploration in International Relations (IR) scholarship. This volume is the first volume aimed at thinking systematically about kinship in IR – as an organizing principle, as a source of political and social processes and outcomes, and as a practical and analytical category that not only reflects but also shapes politics and interaction on the international political arena. Contributors trace everyday uses of kinship terminology to explore the relevance of kinship in different political and cultural contexts and to look at interactions taking place above, at and within the state level. The book suggests that kinship can expand or limit actors’ political room for maneuver on the international political arena, making some actions and practices appear possible and likely, and others less so. As an analytical category, kinship can help us categorize and understand relations between actors on the international arena, it presents itself as a ready-made classificatory system for understanding how entities within a hierarchy are organized in relation to one another, and how this logic is all at once natural and social.