A New Birth of Marriage

Love, Politics, and the Vision of the Founders

Brandon Dabling

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780268201968
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A New Birth of Marriage provides a history of the changes to marriage throughout the American experience and a theoretical argument for the goodness of the traditional American family in fostering private happiness and the public good.

A New Birth of Marriage argues that the American Founders placed marriage as the cornerstone of republican liberty. The Founders' vision of marriage relied on a liberalized form of marital unity that honored human equality, rights, and the beauty of intimate marital love. This vision of marriage remained largely healthy in the culture until the Progressive Era and persisted in law until the 1960s. A New Birth of Marriage vindicates the Founders' understanding of marriage and argues that a prudential return toward this understanding is vital to America's political health and Americans' private happiness.

Brandon Dabling argues that Founders at the state and national level shaped marriage law to reflect five vital components of marital unity: the equality and complementarity of the sexes, consent and permanence in marriage, exclusivity in marriage, marital love, and a union oriented toward procreation and childrearing. Devoting a chapter to each of these principles, A New Birth of Marriage gives a thorough account of how each tenet has been challenged and stands now vindicated in American political thought. The book provides a philosophical and political case for the beauty and vitality of each of these components to the nature of marriage and will appeal to students and scholars of marriage, family, the American founding, democracy, and liberalism.

CHAPTER 1

Statecraft and the Background
of American Marriage

[ We must now address] whether any of the compounding sciences anywhere willingly puts together anything (pragma) whatsoever of its works, even if it’s the most trifling thing, out of some poor and good stuff, or does every science everywhere throw out as best it can the poor stuff and accept the suitable and good, and from these things, which are both similar and dissimilar, by bringing them all together into one, craft some single power and look (idea)?

—The Eleatic Stranger in Plato’s Statesman

The Declaration of Independence is not a self-interpreting document, and liberalism is not a self-sufficient creed. The Declaration’s principles do not exist in a vacuum. It does little good to speak the nouns “liberty” and “equality” without the corresponding adjectives and direct objects that give meaning to this founding document. Regarding marriage, the unique contribution of the American founding of marriage was seeing marital unity, parental responsibilities, and communal duties regarding marriage and child-rearing in a way that was consistent with equality and liberty. The logic of consent alone does little to understand the family’s accidental yet transcendent nature. Wives may choose husbands, but parents do not choose children and children do not choose parents. No one individual chooses the life a couple will share together. No individual who loves chooses the life he lives. Yet, if family means anything, all of these individuals are morally bound to each other, and these bonds restrict individual autonomy. This bondage secures meaningful private and public goods. Nonliberal principles such as courageous love and marital unity give consent meaning in marital and familial relationships. Courageous love is always chosen, but it differs from liberationist love in confining future choices according to love’s bondage. Courageous love is prerequisite to marital unity, because it provides spouses and children the assurance necessary to build a life together. The Founders’ vision of marriage and family flows from courageous love more than from mere consent or liberationist love because they knew that trying to build a republican society on liberationist love was like building a house on quicksand. Marriage reveals, perhaps more than any other phenomenon, the need for liberalism to be complemented and reinforced with nonliberal goods such as education, gratitude, familial duty, mutual dependence, and transcendent love—the very goods courageous love honors and marital unity secures. The founders of American marriage were committed to the politics of equality, but they also knew that one principle—even equality or liberty—could never capture the complexity and richness of the human experience. The nonliberal goods of courageous love and marital unity are necessary to human flourishing and the maintenance of republican liberty because they reinforce the relational goods and responsibilities that liberationist love’s unreliable consent cannot.

Early-twentieth-century Progressives conflated the Declaration’s moral claim to human liberty with an embrace of liberationism and liberationist love. Progressive liberty required the freedom (moral and legal) to breach sacred promises (secular and religious) at any point and for any reason. Social opinions enforcing monogamy confined the human personality and stripped it of the liberty promised in the Declaration. Meanwhile, polygamists in the western territories wondered why liberty did not leave consenting adults free to marry whomever and however many they please. Today liberationist love imagines a world where liberty eradicates the pretense of enduring commitment,¹ monogamy,² social expectations regarding child-rearing,³ and most traditional sexual ethics reinforced through social honors. The battle over the Declaration’s application to marriage rages on.

The founders of American marriage thought their principal responsibility was to merge the Declaration’s commitment to human beings’ political liberty with marital unity’s commitment to a transcendent and courageous love that secured public order and human flourishing. They drew from a rich intellectual and experiential background, but American marriage was not a matter of reflexive inheritance. The Founders deliberately made liberalized marital unity the institution’s beating heart—its undeniable animating principle and effectual truth. American marriage results from a careful process of weaving and discarding principles. They wove together the ancient tenets of marital unity with the modern principles of liberalism. They rejected a liberationist reading of liberalism but embraced Christian and Greek courageous love. The visions of marriage discussed in this chapter form the intellectual background of American marriage, but no one tradition tells the full story on its own—just as liberalism or ancient marital unity alone fails to capture its complete essence. American marriage must be seen as a new birth of marriage.

The Founders saw this new birth of marital unity as the full and comprehensive giving of one spouse to another. It consisted of at least five principles, whose philosophical and historical backgrounds are discussed in this chapter: (1) Sexual relations between man and woman often result in procreation. Fathers and mothers have the responsibility to provide for and educate these children in some understanding of virtue (Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, English Common Law, and Locke). (2) Consent requires that adults be sovereign over their own choices, but marital goods require that choices in marriage be enduring as a general principle (Aristotle and English Common Law). (3) Marriage must be confined to two individuals, lest the union become subject to divided devotions and the corresponding lack of intimacy that fosters virtue (Plato, Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Christianity). (4) The equality of the sexes allows for sexual distinction and therefore an appreciation for sex roles, which are prudentially (flexibly) applied at the individual level (Liberalism and Aristotle). (5) Marriage and marital love require the full giving of a man to a woman and a woman to a man to form a unified marital entity (Christianity).

BACKGROUND OF AMERICAN MARRIAGE I:
THE ANCIENT GREEKS

America’s two most important thinkers on marriage, James Wilson and John Witherspoon, were products of a Scottish Enlightenment education. Learning from the Greek philosophical tradition, the Scots argued that politics should be directed at man’s liberty and flourishing. The two ends were compatible and even interdependent in politics as they were in marriage. Human beings must be free if they are to govern themselves well in public and private affairs. They must govern themselves well if they are to be free. The Scots thought liberalism compatible with teleology and therefore understood marriage as both contractual and ordained for happiness.

Wilson reveals this Scottish influence while showing that the American founding of marriage was an act of statesmanship—a prudential weaving together of individual liberty and equality with marital love, unity, and the public good. Much of Wilson’s thought on marriage can be traced to the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Francis Hutcheson, who thought that humanity’s sexual desire signaled its need for enduring intimate union. As drinking does more than quench thirst and eating does more than cease hunger’s pangs, sex provides for a deep longing in the human soul for another that is only found in complete unity. All moral sentiments lead to moral goods; the sex drive testifies to humanity’s coupling nature and to the happiness that only the enduring eros of marriage can provide.⁴ Similarly, humanity’s longing for sociality signals the need to develop structures and virtues that allow society to flourish.

Family life and sociality were inseparable in Wilson’s mind. The home laid the seeds for social cohesion and civic virtue. Human sociability is nurtured in the home, and the “bonds of affection . . . created there [stretch] ever outward, from the family, to friends, the community, the nation, and even humankind itself.”⁵ The family gives individuals a touchstone that teaches, demonstrates, and demands courageous love rather than a generalized abstract love. The family further teaches that duty and love always exist at least partially outside consent’s realm, which is more than a little useful in developing good citizenship. Individuals have limited choice in choosing their families, just as they have limited choice in choosing their fellow citizens. It is the home that first prepares the individual to meet these responsibilities of love and good citizenship.

Wilson explicitly praises Christianity for “restoring the dignity of marriage” that existed in ancient Greece when Solon grounded the institution on unity and affection.⁶ Christian marriage was not created ex nihilo but was a restoration or gathering of the best precepts and practices of past civilizations. While Wilson and other Founders’ thoughts on marriage cannot be directly sourced in the Socratics, we know that the Socratics had an overarching influence on the Founders’ vision and that Greek thought and practices affected Wilson’s views on the institution.⁷ I use Plato and Aristotle simply as the most profound and philosophical articulators of ancient Greece’s emphasis on marriage’s unitive nature, its political importance, and male-female complementarity for the sake of procreation and fostering virtue.⁸ These features would later find a home in Christianity and in the American conception of marriage, and that is precisely the point. These principles were gathered and deemed good first by reason and then by revelation—and both independent of each other.

Plato’s Laws and the Family’s Public Virtue and Private Honors

The regulation of intercourse between spouses is the first and inescapable responsibility of any lawgiver in Plato’s Laws.⁹ The Socrates-like Athenian Stranger argues that sexual passions must be connected to key features of marital unity—namely, monogamy, procreation, and child-rearing. Marriage can never be a strictly private affair, because it generates the literal life of the community and provides that life its first education. While children do not belong primarily to the city, parents have a duty to provide the community the noblest children possible.¹⁰ The city’s laws therefore support marriage and help parents achieve this aim. Marriage laws punish wrongdoing and educate citizens regarding the virtues of marriage and child-rearing. This method combines the arts of the doctor and the gymnast: it corrects what ails but also strengthens citizens for the future.

Marriage is the proper state of all capable citizens. Adultery is prohibited. Those who do not marry by the proper age are fined.¹¹ After marriage, the laws persuade couples to procreate and sometimes threaten them if they don’t.¹² Following procreation, a committee of women monitors the parents’ child-rearing, offers them education, and, when necessary, uses compulsion to prevent harmful parenting.¹³ The city aligns society’s honors with the goods of marriage to foster a healthy marriage culture. Yet trying to create a healthy polis through prohibitions and fines alone is like trying to slay the Hydra by cutting off its heads.¹⁴ True reform requires education. The city must educate the people’s passions—namely, their longing for food, drink, and sex. The needs for food and drink come first, but “erotic longing” is the “greatest need”—the thing that “makes human beings burn with complete madness: that most insolent flame involved in the engendering of offspring.”¹⁵ The law moderates the sex drive by linking it to marriage, procreation, and child-rearing. Human sexual passions must be connected to the community.

Men are to marry between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, and men who remain unmarried are dishonored so that all men might be disabused of the corruption that “the bachelor’s life is a source of gain and ease.” Those who reject marriage choose material advancement over the soul’s increase. Marriage and procreation secure nonmaterial goods by ensuring that all who participate in them receive “a share in immortality.” Those who marry and care for spouse and children will never lie without glory in a grave. Progeny will reap honor on their name. Their children and their children’s children will forever be living memorials to their noble sacrifices. Marriage and procreation bind the individual not only to their children and the community but to all of time. “In this way, the species is immortal; by leaving behind the children of children and remaining one and the same for always, it partakes in immortality by means of coming-into-being. For anyone voluntarily to deprive himself of this is never pious, and whoever does not care for children and a wife does so intentionally deprive himself.”¹⁶ Achilles became immortal because of his battlefield heroics. Most Athenian men become immortal through marriage, procreation, and the noble raising of children. It is the most democratic path to immortal greatness.¹⁷

The Symposium and the Generative Beauty
of Man-Woman Complementarity

Plato’s Symposium supplies one of the most trenchant explorations of love, man-woman complementarity, and their connection to the most transcendent goods. In particular, it shows how men and women’s erotic nature and sexual distinction work toward personal and public improvement. The Symposium features an assembly of the Athenian intellectual elite who dedicate the evening to drinking wine and making speeches to and about Eros. The speeches generally ascend from the most common conceptions of love to the highest. Still, after listening to these men praise the indiscriminate love of bodies (Eryximachus), the longing for wholeness in one’s authentic love (Aristophanes), and the narcissistic love for one’s self-sufficient soul (Agathon), Socrates finally argues that not one of these men has understood love’s true nature. He too had long misunderstood love, and he needed a woman, Diotima (lover of honor), to show him its true nature. Like Faust, he required “the Eternal Feminine” to “lead [him] ever upward.”

Love is not a virtue, as it is not self-sufficient or whole. Love is lack. Love aches with the awareness of its own imperfection and need. Love is longing. Love is not a god, but a demigod—half human and half divine. Its dual nature leaves our mortal incompletion longing for the beautiful. Aristophanes recounts a myth in which human beings once had four hands, four feet, and two sets of genitals; they are now half what they once were. Worrying that these creatures were becoming too powerful, Zeus cuts the...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: How Autonomy Conquered Love
• Chapter 1. Statecraft and the Background of American Marriage
• Chapter 2. The Founding of American Marriage
• Chapter 3. Coverture and Divorce Law through the Progressive Era
• Chapter 4. Tocqueville’s Democratic Woman in the Early Republic
• Chapter 5. Divorce and Enduring Consent
• Chapter 6. Polygamy, Despotism, and Marital Unity
• Chapter 7. Free Love and Marital Love: John Humphrey Noyes and Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Chapter 8. As Long as You Both Shall Choose: Marriage in the Progressive Era
• Conclusion: A New Birth of Marriage
• Notes
• Index
• Author