Hayek's Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions

Scholars within the Hayekian-Austrian tradition of classical liberalism have done virtually no work on the family as an economic and social institution. In addition, there is a real paucity of scholarship on the place of the family within classical liberal and libertarian political philosophy. Hayek's Modern Family offers a classical liberal theory of the family, taking Hayekian social theory as the main analytical framework. Horwitz argues that families are social institutions that perform certain irreplaceable functions in society. As economic, political, and social circumstances change those functions change, and the forms of the family that sufficiently fulfill those functions also change over time as those functions and the surrounding social structures change. In Hayekian terms, the family is an evolving and undesigned social institution. Horwitz offers a non-conservative defense of the family as a social institution against the view that either the state or the village is able or required to take over its irreplaceable functions.