The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families - Hardcover

Wilson, James Q.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0066209838 ISBN 13: 9780066209838

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2002

Synopsis

Drawn from thorough research, a thought-provoking study of marriage and the devastating consequences of its collapse on society reveals the two underlying causes of this rapid dissolution--the rise of individualism and the repercussions of slavery, stressing the importance and necessity of a strong marital structure in the world.

About this title

About the Author:

James Q. Wilson is the former James Collins Professor of Management at UCLA and Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard. He is the author of several books, including The Moral Sense, and has served on a number of national commissions concerned with public policy. He currently lectures at Pepperdine University.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Justly renowned for his gift for converting opaque sociology into lucid arguments, Wilson here ponders the cultural dynamics of America's remarkable retreat from wedlock. Though some have blamed the nation's epidemics of divorce and illegitimacy on the tumultuous1960s, Wilson probes much deeper. His careful scholarship uncovers the subtle ways in which ancient African kinship patterns still affect social life in the inner city and illuminates the legal traditions that turned eighteenth-century philosophizing into twentieth-century divorce statutes. But Wilson aims to explain not only how marriage has lost strength in modern America but also why that loss matters. With a raft of recent studies, he shows that once a society loses the anchorage of wedlock, riptides begin to pull entire communities into alienation and despair. Wilson particularly laments the suffering of children exposed to poverty and emotional confusion by the disintegration of their families. And it is precisely because the toll of family dissolution has run so high that Wilson challenges his readers to join in the search for ways to renew wedlock. That renewal, he makes clear, will require more than legislative finesse by shrewd lawmakers; it will require a profound shift in the entire culture. Wilson's sobering analysis will help spark the kind of public discussions that often presage such a shift. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0066209838
• ISBN 13: 9780066209838
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288