This is a deliberately controversial piece, deriving the duties of the
historian of the family from the ethical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It criticizes the
following tendencies in the treatment of the subject: the tendency to read history
backwards (the Whig interpretation of history), to see it in terms of the doctrine of
modernization (disastrous for the history of the family), to fail to recognize that familial
change goes forward at the pace of social structural change, the slowest of all paces of
change. The notion of approaches (a demographic approach, afeminist approach and
so on) is rejected and the subject is defined as one of those within historical sociology,
the type of all social science. An appendix deals with misinterpretations of the introduc
tion to Household and family in past time.
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