Neil J. Smelser

The Historical Triangulation of Family, Economy, and Education

As the appearance of this special issue of the American Journal of Sociology testifies, the field of the history of the family has recently become one of the most active and exciting fields of historical inquiry. As is almost always the case, such a burst of empirical inquiry has turned up new and often unanticipated findings which force us to challenge our conventional theories and ways of thinking about the family and social change. In this introductory essay, we are going to try our hand at this kind of rethinking and revising. We shall introduce a number of concepts and perspectives we believe useful for the study of the dynamics of change in the family and elaborate these ideas with special reference to the contributions to this volume.