Peter Laslett

Debating Deliberative Democracy

Notes on Contributors. Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. Deliberation Day: Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin. 2. Deliberative Democracy Beyond Process: Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. 3. Democratic Deliberation Within: Robert E. Goodin. 4. The Law of Group Polarization: Cass R. Sunstein. 5. Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy: Iris Marion Young. 6. Optimal Deliberation?: Ian Shapiro. 7. Deliberative Democracy, the Discursive Dilemma and Republican Theory: Philip Pettit. 8. Street-level Epistemology and Democratic Participation: Russell Hardin. 9. Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice: David Miller. 10. Deliberation Between Institutions: Jeffrey K. Tulis. 11. Environmental Ethics and the Obsolescence of Existing Political Institutions: Peter Laslett. Index.

Comparing Household Structure Over Time and Between Cultures

Because of the importance of the family and household in all societies and at all historical periods, it is essential to be able to make comparisons between varieties of domestic groups. If we wish to comment on the extent to which the household is affected by social change and especially by the process of modernization, industrialization, social mobilization, or whatever that vague but ubiquitous phenomenon is called, it must be clear what would consitute such change. This means knowing how domestic group structure differs from country to country as well as from period to period.

Family life and illicit love in earlier generations : essays in historical sociology

This is a book about the history of family life in several senses. The author puts forward a thesis about the European family in relation to the conspicuous differences between European economic and social development and that of the rest of the world. He discusses the numbers and functions of servants, the numbers and situation of orphans and the aged, and the difficult question of whether American slaves lived in families at all. There is an extended analysis of the extraordinary turnover in population in England and in Europe in pre-industrial times, and a full discussion of the figures for English illegitimacy since Shakespeares day. There is also a consideration of the elusive topic of the age of sexual maturity and its variations over time. The book represents some of the results of the first fifteen years of work in the newly instituted subject of historical sociology with particular reference to the family.

The Emergence of the Third Age

This article is based upon a chapter in a book to be called Britain! Be Your Age! It begins with a discussion of schemes for dividing the life-course, describes the fresh division to which the title the Third Age belongs and refers briefly to a general theory of the Third Age. It is claimed that the Third Age as thus defined did not emerge in Britain and other Western countries until the 1950s, nor did it become a settled feature of their social structures until the 1980s. Expectation of life in a number of countries, developed and developing, is contrasted, and a comparison is undertaken between life expectation in the contemporary Third World and that in England in the historical past, that is since the early 16th century. It is concluded that contemporary developing societies have much longer life expectation than that in the English past, but markedly fewer elderly people. The implications of this for the modernisation theory in relation to ageing are drawn out, and the concept of modernisation shown to be unacceptable to historical sociologists. A Third Age Indicator (3AI) is then suggested, expressing the probability of a person of 25 years attaining 70 years. The Third Age is defined demographically in a two-fold way, as a condition of a population in which the general expectation of living from 25 to 70 is 0.5 or over for men, and so more for women, and of 10% or more of the whole population being over age 65. 3AIs for a number of contemporary countries are then presented, along with those for England since the 1540s. A list of countries demographically qualified on the two counts is then drawn up, along with the appropriate dates of their attaining that status.

Characteristics of the Western Family Considered Over Time

Institutions and cultural complexes have to possess some persistence over time, some perdurance, if they are to be significant for the historian of social structure. The Western family pattern, like the European marriage pattern so brilliantly described over a decade ago by John Hajnal, must be shown to have been present over many generations in order to qualify as a characteristic trait of Westernness. This family pattern no longer singles out Western European culture as once it did – or did according to the view which I shall propound here. Indeed certain important features of it have ceased to exist altogether in the contemporary West, notably the servants, whose numbers used to be considerable. This is to be expected now that cultural and institutional convergence has become so conspicuous in high industrial society. It is in this way that a socialist Russia, a transformed Japan, and a country like Denmark may all finally come to resemble each other as they now are more than they resemble themselves as they previously were. Nevertheless, the data now coming into view suggest that there may have been a particular set of characteristics present in the Western familial setting at all periods for which we have information up to the point of original industrialization (whatever that may mean, or whenever it may be taken to have occurred).

Size and structure of the household in England over three centuries

Abstract Data giving sizes and structures of households have been rare for any country before the institution of the official census, and have to be gleaned from surviving documents containing listings of inhabitants. This article, the first of two, describes the collection of listings of inhabitants of English communities which is being assembled by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and the methods by which the hundred most informative of them have been submitted to analysis. When ranged alongside the information on mean household size derived from the official British census since its inception in 1801, the results of this analysis suggest the following. 1. Mean household size in England and Wales as a whole was relatively constant at 4·75 or a little below for the whole period from the sixteenth century until 19II, and has only fallen since that date. The reduction of about one-third starting in 1921 may therefore be the first of considerable magnitude ever to occur: it seems to have been particularly rapid between 1911 and 1931. 2. Mean household size in England and Wales has been surprisingly resistant to demographic fluctuation on the one hand and to the structural influences of industrialization on the other, until the last fifty or sixty years. 3. The traditional household in England has never been extended on any definition, at least since the sixteenth century. Mean household size varied with social status, and a majority lived in households of six or more members. But this distribution was due to the very large numbers of servants living in and not to the presence of resident kin, who seem to have been rare. 4. The relationship between fertility, mortality and mean household size is different from what has been supposed. This article ends by registering the paradox that proportion of children in a pre-industrial English community apparently seems to be negatively, not positively, related to its mean household size, and this theme will be taken up in the second article. These four points are illustrated by a series of tables drawn from the analysis of the one hundred communities.

Marriage and remarriage in populations of the past

This book contains the proceedings of the International Coloquium on Historical Demography organized by the International Committee on Historical Sciences and the International Union of the Scientific Study of Population and held in Kristiansand Norway September 7-9 1979. The colloquium focused on the theme of remarriage and its effects on fertility (SUMMARY IN ENG FRE) (ANNOTATION)

Long-term trends in bastardy in England; a study of the illegitimacy figures in the parish registers and in the reports of the Registrar General, 1561-1960.

Abstract The conception, parturition and registration of children out of wedlock is a peculiarly significant type of behaviour for the social scientist. It creates one of the perennial problems in social welfare. It is at one and the same time demographic and social, biological and ideological. Illegitimacy is baffling, however, as well as intriguing, which may in a certain sense increase its appeal to the researcher.

The Character of Familial History, Its Limitations and the Conditions for Its Proper Pursuit

This is a deliberately controversial piece, deriving the duties of the historian of the family from the ethical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It criticizes the following tendencies in the treatment of the subject: the tendency to read history backwards (the Whig interpretation of history), to see it in terms of the doctrine of modernization (disastrous for the history of the family), to fail to recognize that familial change goes forward at the pace of social structural change, the slowest of all paces of change. The notion of approaches (a demographic approach, afeminist approach and so on) is rejected and the subject is defined as one of those within historical sociology, the type of all social science. An appendix deals with misinterpretations of the introduc tion to Household and family in past time.

The Conversation Between the Generations

I choose this somewhat awkward title because it seems to me to be necessary to insist on the uncertainty, the lack of structure, in the connection between the generations. This is due to a large extent of course to the multiple character of the expression ‘generation’ itself; it is a word with such a tangle of related and overlapping meanings attached to it that it is surprising to find that it goes on being used without qualificatory adjectives. Let us look at a few of the notions which ‘generation’ covers.