Our culture in the West is infected deeply with the cult of the family. This can be witnessed daily from Westminster power politics to recommendations on millions of foods - 'suitable for the whole family.' When does a mainstream advertisement on the television or in a glossy magazine not evoke a sense of family harmony in conjunction with the product it promotes? 'Family values' are force - fed to the nevertheless apparently grateful population through many of society's institutions from the judiciary, the media , the police at an unstoppable rate. And it is not now an exclusively Conservative...

Industrialisation altered the family significantly, as an ideology and in practise. In the 1950"s in America, when the "family" was at its height, sociologists described as "functionalist" saw the family as the stabilising factor of a society; because such a unit existed, capitalism and its associated political ways of thinking could function. This maybe true, but these sociologists had it the wrong way around: the economy demanded such as stabilising unit as the family to exist to perpetuate the economic arrangement itself: the family is a child, not the father, of the basic structure of Western society.