A New Birth of Marriage: Love, Politics, and the Vision of the Founders

by Brandon Dabling

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268201975
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	04/15/2022
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Brandon Dabling is an independent researcher. He has written many articles on American marriage law.

Read an Excerpt

The Declaration 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. Non-liberal 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 flow from Courageous Love more than 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 non-liberal 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 non-liberal 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: How Autonomy Conquered Love

1. Statecraft and the Background of American Marriage

2. The Founding of American Marriage

3. Coverture and Divorce Law Through the Progressive Era

4. Tocqueville’s Democratic Woman in the Early Republic

5. Divorce and Enduring Consent

6. Polygamy, Despotism and Marital Unity

7. Free Love and Marital Love: John Humphrey Noyes and Nathaniel Hawthorne

8. As Long as You Both Shall Choose: Marriage in the Progressive Era

Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

The problem with America’s family order today is a failure to recognize genuine goods—and looking to the founding, Dabling shows, helps us to see dynamic models for reinvigorating family life. An indispensable book for anyone interested in reviving the family today.” —Scott Yenor, author of Family Politics

From the Publisher