Capitalism has always been a revolutionary force and when traditional institutions of various sorts have gotten in its way, they have rarely been spared.

What Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter termed capitalism's "creative destruction" produces a kind of constant upheaval which has never stayed neatly circumscribed in some sealed-off economic realm; there have always been casualties. Structures embedded in old cultural habits or religious belief (such as monogamous, heterosexual marriage) are not necessarily targeted but they are dispensable (if not dangerous) if they somehow threaten the dominant modern narrative of the unencumbered, self-defined, individual consumer with insatiable appetites.

Among the many changes brought by the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, for instance, a separation of the home from the workplace. Many began to work outside the home in factories, and economic self-sufficiency became rarer as most people eventually became dependent wage earners. Factory work was characterized by new controls and regimentation, and the values of the marketplace--especially those of fierce competition and individual advantage--became more prevalent in public life.

One of the ways that conservatives of various sorts sought to deal with these new realities in the nineteenth century was to promote the home as a sort of oasis in an increasingly "dog-eat-dog" outside world. Social historians sometimes refer to this response as "the cult of domesticity." In a 1990 essay titled "The Invasion of the Family by the Market," cultural historian Christopher Lasch explained that, "acquisitive enterprise and bureaucratic rationality ruled the public world, but love and affection ruled the family." Although only middle and upper class families could realistically hope to achieve this goal in the 1800s, this ideal of the nuclear family cocooned within its "haven from a heartless world" was a powerful one throughout the larger culture.

But, as Lasch and others have pointed out, the market has a tendency to universalize itself. The hyper-individualistic, even cut-throat habits rewarded in the expanding marketplace eventually infused the culture at large, including inside that cozy cottage surrounded by the white picket fence. The emerging economic order celebrated the idea of the autonomous individual who made choices based solely on individual advantage, or (as stressed increasingly by the twentieth century) personal fulfillment. As these basic assumptions became more widely accepted, institutions such as the traditional family were increasingly viewed as repressive and inhibiting the realization of individual aspirations. As the new order "came to be identified," in Lasch's words, "with immediate gratification and planned obsolescence, the more relentlessly it wore away the moral foundations of family life. The rising divorce rate, already a source of anxious concern in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, seemed to reflect a growing impatience with the constraints imposed by long-term responsibilities and commitments."

The new system promoted cosmopolitan values less tied to traditional beliefs and less anchored to a particular place. One essential feature of this robust free enterprise system was its view of labor as a commodity that needed to be mobile in a national (and, eventually, international) market. Accordingly, young people looking for jobs were less likely to settle close to their parents, and the market also promoted a segmentation along age lines that divided families internally. So, music and movies aimed at adolescents displaced less commercial, local folk customs appreciated by the entire family. Furthermore, to be successful, advertisers needed to address wives and children directly; the latter thus became consumers in their own right with their own disposable incomes. Hence, by the 1950s, the market and it values became a greater influence upon many children (communicated through influential peer groups) than were their parents.

By the 1970s, stagnant middle-class incomes meant that many wives and moms felt compelled to work outside the home in order to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. In some respects, the idea of the "family wage" (long supported by most American Catholics) represented a last-ditch effort to preserve the traditional family; however, less than half of American jobs paid enough to comfortably sustain a family by 1976. In any event, the larger culture had by this time adopted a very negative picture of unpaid "house-work" as intrinsically unfulfilling.

Well before these trends came to full flower in the 1960s, G.K. Chesterton understood the root of the problem: "What has broken up households and encouraged divorces, and treated the old domestic virtues with more and more open contempt, is the epoch and Power of Capitalism." The modern economic order, argued Chesterton, "has forced a moral feud and a commercial competition between the sexes; that has destroyed the influence of the parent in favour of the influence of the employer; that has driven men from their homes to look for jobs; that has forced them to live near their factories or their firms instead of near their families; and, above all, that has encouraged, for commercial reasons, a parade of publicity and garish novelty, which is in its nature the death of all that was called dignity and modesty by our mothers and fathers." Chesterton concluded that, ironically, it was "not the Bolshevist [and he was a strong critic of socialism] but the Boss, the publicity man, the salesman and the commercial advertiser who have, like a rush and riot of barbarians, thrown down and trampled under foot" family values.

The Industrial Revolution brought many significant material improvements for which families can be grateful. It raised the standard of living for millions and helped promote mass literacy. In many cases, market mechanisms are indeed the most efficient way to allocate scarce resources. But some conservatives operate as though we still live in the small-scale proprietary capitalism of the nineteenth century when there were far more family-run businesses on a far more human scale. Private property can help promote virtues that Christians celebrate, but the newer forms of corporate property that have prevailed since the late nineteenth century often whistle a different tune. Financial speculation with little connection to actual production has assumed a powerful place in our larger economy. Ownership is diffused among hundreds or thousands of stockholders, and there is little loyalty to a particular family, community, or place. In light of the above, we should hardly expect huge concentrations of corporate capital to defend time-hallowed traditions.

Since the post-World War II era, movement conservatives have focused so much on an intrusive state that they have overlooked the other side of the coin. Early twentieth-century Catholic thinkers such as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc clearly recognized the danger to mediating institutions such as the church and the family posed by the intrusions of both the state and vast impersonal corporations. The great Papal social encyclicals (especially those penned by Leo XIII and Pius XI) have also highlighted these twin threats. Perhaps this latest installment of the culture wars will prompt social conservatives to correct their myopic vision and find more suitable allies in defense of the traditional family.

Gillis Harp is the author of (most recently) Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). Dr. Harp earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia in 1986. He is a practicing Anglican.