When was the last time that most kids were born outside marriage, as they will be this year? Decades, centuries or millennia? This was the fact I couldn’t nail down for my post yesterday (which Philip Johnston has done a vg story on in the Telegraph today). I am excluding immigrants, who flatter most economic and social indictors in Britain, and I think I may have to concede defeat unless any CoffeeHousers out there know.
The left has a tradition of arguing that the nuclear family is a bourgeoisie innovation. Engels wrote a whole book on it and some academics see the family as a “transient phase in our society” But Ferdinand Mount’s book The Subversive Family (available for a mere 56p on Amazon) shows how, to the chagrin of the left, the family has been around since primal times and has proved “the permanent enemy of all hierarchies, churches and ideologies”.
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