Fatherhood
A History of Love and Power
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- 14,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
“Superbly intelligent…[a] rewarding Sapiens-style big history.” —The Times (London)
A bold and original history of the invention and transformation of masculinity’s most important institution, from the Bronze Age to the contemporary “crisis of men”, told through a collective portrait of emblematic fathers who have helped to define our fundamental ideas of familial love, political power, and what it means to be a man.
What makes a father? At least since the beginning of the written historical record five thousand years ago, ideas of paternity have shaped basic human understanding of who we are, where we come from, and what we are capable of—identity and inheritance in all its forms. Yet we know little about where and why the concept of fatherhood arose in the first place, or how it has changed over time.
In this acclaimed book, prizewinning historian Augustine Sedgewick, celebrated for his “literary gifts and prodigious research” (The Atlantic), traces for the first time the origins and evolution of fatherhood in Western culture, from the Bronze Age to the contemporary “crisis of men”. With intimate detail, Sedgewick reconstructs the lives of some of history’s most famous fathers—Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Henry VIII, Thomas Jefferson, Darwin, Freud, Bob Dylan, and more—to show how, in moments of historic crisis and conflict, men developed new ideals of fatherhood that helped sustain their power and authority within the family and beyond.
Yet the history of fatherhood is not just the story of patriarchy, arguably the oldest and most widespread form of social inequality. Nor is it simply the story of paternal care and affection. Instead, it is the story of how these twin strands became so entangled that they are often indistinguishable. Fatherhood takes us on a journey across hundreds of generations to uncover the roots of modern masculinity and help us see one of the most meaningful parts of our lives in a new light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fathers' role in upholding the social order and their struggles with unruly sons are probed in this winsome and erudite study of patriarchy. CUNY historian Sedgwick (Coffeeland) offers biographical sketches of famous dads and their children, from an ancient Sumerian named Shuruppag, who wrote a querulous, plaintive advice-tablet to his son—"The instructions of an old man are precious: you should comply with them!"—to Bob Dylan, who stoked rebellion in young people yet himself became, Sedgwick notes, a doting, apolitical paterfamilias rather like his own middle-class father. Along the way Sedgwick explores Aristotle's belief that the state rested on a foundation of fathers ruling over households, Thoreau's longing to escape from his father's Massachusetts pencil factory, and Charles Darwin's rapt study of his 10 children for insights on how they inherited traits from him. Sedgwick teases out the contradictions between patriarchy as a doctrine of benevolent control and its reality as a form of constraint and domination that often breeds resistance. He plays on these ironies in elegant, evocative prose, as in his analysis of Sigmund Freud's Oedipal complex ("From a child's perspective, Sigmund Freud's theories made it natural, even healthy, to despise your father. From a father's perspective, Freud made it normal, even good, to be hated"). It's a fresh and insightful meditation on the paternal dilemma.
