The seduction of Lydia Bennet: toward a general theory of society, marriage, and the family.

• Author: FitzGibbon, Scott
• Position: Special Issue: The Nature of Marriage and Its Various Aspects

The anxiety surrounding the topics of marriage and family, which I perceive everywhere, illustrates the urgent need to put marriage back in its place as a natural institution. (1)

~Alfonso Cardinal Lopez Trujillo

This article sketches the foundation for a general theory of society. Rejecting portrayals that make society a field of exploitation and dominance, it proposes instead an account that locates the foundation of society in its service of certain basic goods. Society is a kind of friendship. It is to be defined based on the goods of friendship and the projects that serve those goods. Its elements, including those of obligation, office, shame, and rehabilitation, further those goods. The society that emerges from this account is a "society of life."

This article also proposes the concept of "components of society," reflecting the observation that society is comprised not only of individuals, but also of villages, towns, business organizations, leagues, and alliances that further interests and ideologies, and even perhaps clubs and teams for sport and recreation. Such groups are not the same thing as society as a whole. Some may have no connection with it--a few even work against it--but many can rightly be considered components of society. Building on its account of the society of life, this article identifies the elements that make an association a component of society. This article then sketches the outline of a morality of components of society, which morality indicates when a smaller association should regard itself--and be regarded by others--as a component institution.

This article proposes that marriage and the family are properly regarded as components of the society of life, reflecting and instilling basic goods of society. This may further the project, recommended by Cardinal Trujillo, of relocating marriage "in its place as a natural institution." (2)

PART ONE: SOCIETY

Everyone is entitled to a social ... order. (3)

~Universal Declaration of Human Rights

1. SCOPING OUT THE SUBJECT: THE SEDUCTION OF LYDIA BENNET

   Lydia Bennet was but sixteen years of age when, one dark summer night, Mr. Wickham carried her off to London with false assurances that they were soon to be married. (4) The events that ensue upon her abduction are recounted with particularity throughout the last third of Pride and Prejudice and deeply affect the lives of all concerned. These episodes should hold a special fascination for students of society and the family.

   The most intriguing aspect of the affair concerns the identity of the applicable normative order. In a different time or place, events might have involved primarily the government and the courts. The Bennets might have invoked their legal rights as parents, complained to a department of social services, or secured Mr. Wickham's indictment for statutory rape. (5) But in Jane Austen's world, no one dreamed of summoning a constable or bringing the matter before a justice of the peace. (Nor, it seems, did anyone contemplate bringing the matter before the ecclesiastical authorities or invoking the teachings of the Church of England.) (6) The episodes of Pride and Prejudice unfold under the guidance of another system of rules and principles.

   Front and center in Austen's England, invoked at every crucial turn of events and never successfully flouted, stands not the governmental or the religious system, but another order, whose components are neighborhood, village, town, and city; manor house, cottage, and castle; family, friendship, and social rank. This order sustains roles, defines relationships, and establishes what can reasonably be called "social offices." It acknowledges the authority and defines the obligations of social positions. It calls upon people to perform their duties and it registers the fulfillment or the neglect of responsibility. It confers credit, and it casts blame; it honors, and it disgraces. For those who severely offend, it applies sanctions, which at the greatest extreme may involve ostracism or even death in a duel. For those who repent and make restitution, it offers a chilly sort of rehabilitation.

   The order that takes this prominent place in Pride and Prejudice is the order of society. The term "society" refers to a basic component of what we refer to as a "country." It is not a government. It often is protected and supported by a government, but it is not the same thing. Rules and principles (those establishing the authority of a father-in-law, for example, or those governing dress and courtship) may be sustained by the social order while lacking any recognition in the legal system, and people (Lady Catherine de Bourgh, for example) may hold well-defined social positions that are not government offices. (7)

   A society may perdure through changes in government and survive when constitutional orders pass away. A society (the Ibo society portrayed in Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, (8) for example, and the social order of Aristotle's Athens) may subsist among a people who do not maintain a government in the modern sense. (9) A society (the nineteenth-century Irish population portrayed in Walter Macken's novel The Silent People, (10) for example) may manage to sustain many of its elements even under a hostile governmental regime. American society--that "union" which is celebrated on the Fourth of July--is not the same as the government.

   A society is an affiliational order of a general nature rather than of a subsidiary kind. The League of Women Voters and the United Way are not "societies" in the sense in which that term is used in this article, as those groups would make no sense at all, and could not pursue their purposes, except as components of a wider affiliational system. A "society" as that term is used here is capable of functioning successfully on its own. It is self-directing and it is independent: either in fact or, as in the case of nineteenth-century Irish society, by reasonable aspiration.

   A society is an order of affiliation whose aims are high and wide. The Boston Red Sox and the American College of Physicians are not societies in the sense used here because, although they could perhaps continue without the support of a wider order, their purposes are specific rather than general. A society involves more than athletic excellence and entertainment, or health and profit.

2. TOWARD A BASIC ACCOUNT OF SOCIETY: SOME ROADS NOT TAKEN

   Most modern academic treatments of society present a morally impoverished account. Some have attempted to define society without reference to its goods or without reference to more than one or two minimal purposes, such as subsistence and survival. Thus, Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils state:

   Any system of interactive relationships of a plurality of individual actors is a social system. A society is the type of social system which contains within itself all the essential prerequisites for its maintenance as a self-subsistent system. Among the more essential of these prerequisites are (1) organization around the foci of territorial location and kinship, (2) a system for determining functions and allocating facilities and rewards, and (3) integrative structures controlling these allocations and regulating conflicts and competitive processes. (11) Another recurrent treatment accounts for society as a field of power and exploitation, in the view that "modern civil society is composed only of individualized strategists engaged in a struggle of each against all, pervaded by power and politics understood as war carried on by other means." (12)

   Theories such as these would make "societies" out of the Colombian drug lords and their subjects. They would make the term "society" refer to deformed and distorted arrangements that could not be what the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had in mind when they provided that "[e]veryone is entitled to a social ... order," (13) nor what anyone would favor when establishing, with Cardinal Trujillo, a "place" for marriage and the family. (14) Those projects call for a normative account of society along the lines proposed in this article.

3. SOCIETY: SOME BASIC ELEMENTS

   Most societies operate in major part through the medium of obligation. They form judgments as to compliance with or violation of social rules; they reward or punish; and they provide for rectification, restitution, and repentance. A society that displays these characteristics is here called "juristic." Several elements deserve special attention:

   Obligation--Obligation, a synonym for duty, is the condition of being tied; bound to do something or to omit some course of action. The obligatory norm is not supererogatory. It is a "must," rather than a "perhaps you should."

   Societies often amply recognize obligations. They define them carefully and impose them widely. In the development of the relationship between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, so prominent does the matter of obligation and its fulfillment become that their courtship takes on some of the characteristics of a lawsuit. She defends her suitor against others' allegations of his injustice. He "demand[s] it of [her] justice" that she read his defense: "Two offences ... you last night laid to my charge." (15) In the end, he satisfies her of his innocence. In the remarkable passages that ensue upon Elizabeth's acceptance of Darcy's proposal of marriage, the happy couple indulges its new intimacy by discussing the extent to which, during a conversation two months previously, either party may have violated obligations to the other. (16)

   Office--Another recurrent project of societies is that they define and acknowledge offices: not only, of course, government offices like judge and senator, but also social offices. In Austen's England, master of the foxhounds and perhaps village squire were offices, as were many of the positions occupied by servants in great houses, from chaplain and steward down through footman and "groom of the...