By Ugo Stornaiolo Silva

In the history of ideas, the meaning they have on the establishment and function of an ordered society, few institutions are as important or are as closely related as Family, Property, and Inheritance.

Most modern conceptions do not see as far as a legal bond between these institutions with the general political order,  and most of them tend to forget this particular order only follows the whim of whoever has political power and can formally legislate on matters related to these institutions, most of the time rejecting their natural meaning for a more politically correct, or one that appeals to a particular group of voters. Opposition 

On Family, Property, and Inheritance, many perspectives have been taken by legal and political thinkers and philosophers in history, and the most common of them, at least on both the traditional Catholic and libertarian schools and their contemporary variants is that all of this institutions are products of a perennial order, in most cases organic and spontaneous, that manifests itself with Natural Law, and as such, must be protected by positive legislation, although its relation is always understood as one of logic and not one of institutions.

The opposing perspective on Family, Property, and Inheritance, which sums a general hostile view on all three is the one promoted by revolutionary Marxism, something that reveals that, at least on its negation, there is an universal outlook on the mutual need of these three institutions to subsist as part of the social order, and particularly, as legal institutions, which uses and formal aspects are protected by legislation to be applied in a particular community.

By exploring these contradictory stances, there are more arguments to be considered, form the proper definition of Civilization, as well as the proper concept of order, the respective meanings for family private property and inheritance, their legal conceptions on the history of ideas, and the way they are opposed by revolutionary schools of thought, based on their own, particular, ends. 

First, we have to begin by a broader understanding of what civilization and order means: for the former, its Merriam-Webster definitions are “the culture characteristic of a particular time or place” and “the stage of cultural development at which writing and the keeping of written records is attained”, whereas for the latter, that very dictionary defines it as “the arrangement or sequence of objects or of events”, “a sequential arrangement of […] elements”, “a regular or harmonious arrangement the order of nature”, “a sociopolitical system” or a “a particular sphere or aspect of a sociopolitical system”, and “the state of peace, freedom from confused or unruly behavior, and respect for law or proper authority.”

As one can see, these definitions of civilization and order are related by the way they can be applied to the way human social customs, forms and knowledge are disposed and arranged in an adequate way, which means, in the end, a  fair and just arrangement, according to the classical definition of justice by Roman thinker Ulpian, “to give each one its own”.

Given that certain elements of civilization, such as customs, knowledge and arts, have to be ordered according to the principles of fairness and justice to allow for their material, social, cultural and political development, that order have to be composed by institutions, which means there have to be rules and norms to guide their application, and to frame them in a particular context, for them in the end to produce the common good, or as John Rawls would define it, “certain general conditions that are… equally to everyone’s advantage”, which is the quintessential goal of ordered society.

The legal meaning of order goes in that same direction, and according to Spanish legal scholar Manuel Ossorio, can be defined as “the sum of positive and valid laws under a hierarchical relation with one another that rules all of the institutions of a determined country. […] the legal order is essential for the existence of a country as without it there would not be any social community”. 

It is also necessary to conceptualize  the meaning of the word ‘institution’, in order to define as such a la Family, Property, and Inheritance: for the social scholar Samuel Huntington, institutions are “socially stable, valued and recurrent conduct patterns” , which refer to both governing mechanisms for a community’s social conduct that  transcends its individual members as a social purpose, to the very stable associative bodies created from those patterns and mechanisms, and the social and legal rules that establish and lead them.

Family, Property, and Inheritance  are widely known as institutions: the three of them are composed of normative patterns that rule their workings for an ordered society, the three of them are used as mechanisms of social governance in particular contexts, the three of them transcend the individual persons that they rule or that use them, existing in an ethereal way, and the three of them are contemplated, as part of a perennial natural order, for which the three of them can be considered as full-fledged institutions. 

Moreover, Family, Private Property, and Inheritance  are what Austrian School economist and legal philosopher Friedrich Hayek defines as part of the spontaneous order, which means that “are part of society’s adaptation processes to the circumstances in which [that very] spontaneous order grows […] and are selected rules that have worked well in the past and presumably will be maintained […] to better the purpose of the existing order, whose distinguishing trait is to be a product of human action and not of human design, in which the empirical experience of generations past is summed on a body of knowledge greater than the one possessed by any individual person”.

On the other hand, tradicionalist brazilian thinker Plinio Correa de Oliveira includes the Family and Private Property institutions (and subsidiary Inheritance as a direct consequence of the former two) as part of what can be considered organic institutions, that constitute which each other a working order in which the action of the hierarchically superior institution can only be subsidiary to help the hierarchically inferior one. 

In both conceptions, property is understood as a power and as an attribution of the individual person, that entitles to him or her the goods and rights that person possess and that can be defined as “the total control on the services that can be derived from a good”.

In the same fashion, family is said to be “a community that is constituted for everyday life according to nature”, and that arises from the cellular society born out of the mutual agreement of heterosexual marriage, whose objectives are union, procreation y mutual help, and from which are spawned kids.

Inheritance, at last, combines the previous elements, in what Ludwig von Mises describes as “a human device […] where virtually each property owner is directly or indirectly the legal successor of the person that had previously acquired property”, creating a logical and consequent succession order from an owner to his or her natural heir, who generally is a descendant of said owner and has been educated and guided to possess and preserve that property.

With this foundational principle, the constitution of these particular types of human relations with the objects of their environment, with other individuals or a combination of both, establishes an institutional category, which means an ordered conduct pattern that allow for these individual relations to be guided to the material and social development of those who participate in them.

This is also why, as the family, property and inheritance relations get institutional, they become fair, because they answer to an organic and spontaneous order built on several lifetimes on trial and error, always proving they are the most adequate for human governance, and mostly, since they suit the most the principles of Natural Law as a perennial order of things born of our human nature and which we can rationally comprehend.

However, if family, property and inheritance are defined as institutions, their civilization aspect can only be explained by its opposition promoted by revolutionary thinking, and how this is a constant adopted in any aspect of their effort to abolish them by both positive, normative and coercive means.

As such, there is a need to define what revolution is, which “in physics and astronomy, refers to a complete object rotation, a 360-degree spin around an axis, a return to the point of origin. By adopting this concept to politics, to law and institutions, it means exactly the same: a revolution does not promote reforms, but a return to the state of nature. Revolution, consequently, is as accelerationist (as it promotes a constant regression) as it is primitivist (because its end is to take back humankind to ignorance and the obscurity of irrationality).”

In that sense, revolution means entropy, disorder and chaos, it means the destruction of the institutions that make up the ordered framework in which individuals, communities and civilization itself develop, by promoting a return to the most basic and primitive ways of living and to govern society, which are always the least ordered and the least institutional.

On the civilizer aspect of family, Lew Rockwell says it represents “an anarchical institution […] that doesn’t require of government act to exist but that flows from fixed realities of human nature and refines itself with the development of sexual norms and the development of civilization”, which means it’s a spontaneously ordered institution, and as such, answers to the needs of human nature and allows for a fair development of individual and communities as they grow in such order.

Traditionalist ideas, and particularly, the work of Plinio Correa de Oliveira, explain why revolutionaries oppose so vehemently to family, both as an ideas and as an institution, declaring that “revolutionary dictatorship tends to eternize itself by violating genuine rights and inserting itself in all aspects of society to destroy them, deconstructing family life, attacking genuine elites, subverting social hierarchy, feeding utopias and disordered aspirations to the masses, extinguishing social group life, and making everything and anything subject to the State: in a word, favoring the work of the Revolution. A clear example of it was Nazi Germany.”

Dr. Plinio equals genuine rights to the spontaneous order described by F.A Hayek), of which family is part, and places them as a set of institutions that must abolished for the revolutionary end of returning back to the state of nature proposed by Marx in his materialistic view of the end of history, in which communism will be imposed and no private property nor family nor civilization will be able to exist. 

He insists that “no matter how much the Revolution hates the absolutism of kings, it hates intermediate bodies even more. […] Among the intermediate groups to be abolished, the family ranks first. Until it manages to wipe it out, the Revolution tries to lower it, mutilate it, and vilify it in every way.”

And in this line of thinking, this quote by Ludwig von Mises can be added “the proposals to transform sexual relations have been long attached to the socialization of producer goods […] marriage would disappear with private property… Socialism not only falsely promises economic welfare but also universal happiness in free love”. 

The reason why revolutionary thought schools, specially Marxist ones, look to abolish traditional and institutional family forms is because it is closely related to their conception on the abolition of private property, considering the very Communist Manifesto calls for “bourgeois family to disappear as a consequence of the full disappearance of its complement [private property], and for both to disappear when capital goods disappear.”

On this, Plinio Correa de Oliveira, would also say another of the goals of the Revolution is “economic equality: nothing belongs to no one, everything belongs to the collective. It would be the suppression of private property, of each own’s right to the integrity of their own work and to the election of their professional activities.” 

One may ask how and why the destruction of the family institution affects private property, as they are only apparently connected by logics, and not on an institutional level. Inheritance answers this question, as it allows for the transmission of property and for the succession on specific rights between blood-related individuals, inside of the framework created by a contract-based society whose goal is indeed to  procreate and mutually assist its members (both the married couple and family itself), and to conform an institutional community born out of the organic, spontaneous order of Natural Law.

Naturally, the view espoused by revolutionary communism, illustrated by Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of Family, Private Property and State, rejects this, stating “in most cases, man has to work his way through life to maintain his family, at least among poorer social classes. That way he gets a higher social position without any special legal privilege. For the family, he is the bourgeois, and women represent the proletariat. Family, instead of a collective tribe, had become ‘the industrial unit of society’. […] the coming [communist] revolution will reduce any care for inheritance to the minimal, changing, in part, at least, the greater part of permanent and inheritable wealth, capital goods, as social property.”

On civilization’s institutional order, which certainly represents development and fair work, family is exists to be a property transmission unity between husband and wife, and from them to their descendants, in a way that keeps private property in the same unbroken line of succession. Revolutionary schools of thought identifies this institutional relation and calls for its destruction on three complementary approaches: without family, there is no private property, as inheritance is destroyed, and if there is no private property, there will be no family as there isn’t any reason to hereditarily transmit any property, and finally, if there is no inheritance, family is destroyed, and with her the stimuli to amass private property.

Coincidentally, the ways these three institutions are being destroyed match what F.A Hayek called legislation, understood as “the main tool for deliberate change in modern society”, as a violently imposed constructivist rationalism, which is nothing but the irrational will to try to design discretional institutions and mechanically subvert society and civilization. 

This constructivist rationalism is applied with positive laws whose main purpose are to disguisedly destroy  private property, by eliminating the reasons to keep it or acquire it using higher taxation and by allowing confiscatory actions justified on eminent domain that consume any inheritance amassed, or by allowing the State to keep it without any real right over it, and to destroy the legitimate order of the family institution as an heterosexual union whose goal of procreation, couple life, mutual help, and ultimately, to allow for an ordered and guided transmission of property to one’s own descendants. .

Sources:

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Codex Iustinianus, Digest of Book One

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