The Policing of Families

In The Policing of Families, Jacques Donzelot, a student and colleague of Michel Foucault, offers an account of public intervention in the regulation of family affairs since the eighteenth century, showing how this intervention effected radical changes in the structure of what had traditionally been a private domain. Treating the family as a focal point of multiple social practices and discourses, Donzelot examines the role of philanthropy, social work, compulsory mass education, and psychiatry in the control of family life and describes the transformation of mothers into agents of the state. Donzelot also provides a critique of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and feminist conceptions of the family and shows how the policies of the state and the professions molded working-class and middle-class families in quite different ways. “An essential corrective both to the old overly optimistic interpretation and to the new pessimistic and apocalyptic vision of the recent history of the family and society in the West.”–Lawrence Stone, New Republic