The modern spin on the ancient concept “paterfamilias” has nothing to do with love and everything to do with building intergenerational wealth

Guest essay from Egor Kotkin. Support Egor’s work on Substack and Patreon. Follow him on Twitter and YouTube.

Although family values are increasingly called “traditional family values” today, in truth, they are anything but traditional. Or, minding the origin of this term, traditional family values are as traditional as the “moral majority” was moral or the majority. This is a political neologism dressed up as old-fashioned wisdom, in ideological drag.

Although William Safire has produced multiple editions of his Dictionary of American Politics, the term does not appear until the 1995 edition, when Safire includes a quote from the 1976 Republican platform

Republican Party Platform of 1976:

As modern life brings changes in our society, it also puts stresses on families trying to adjust to new realities while maintaining cherished values. Economic uncertainty, unemployment, housing difficulties, women’s and men’s concerns with their changing and often conflicting roles, high divorce rates, threatened neighborhoods and schools, and public scandal all create a hostile atmosphere that erodes family structures and family values. Thus it is imperative that our government’s programs, actions, officials and social welfare institutions never be allowed to jeopardize the family. We fear the government may be powerful enough to destroy our families; we know that it is not powerful enough to replace them.

Because of our concern for family values, we affirm our beliefs, stated elsewhere in this Platform, in many elements that will make our country a more hospitable environment for family life—neighborhood schools; educational systems that include and are responsive to parents’ concerns; estate tax changes to establish more realistic exemptions which will minimize disruption of already bereaved families; a position on abortion that values human life; a welfare policy to encourage rather than discourage families to stay together and seek economic independence; a tax system that assists rather than penalizes families with elderly members, children in day care or children in college; economic and employment policies that stop the shrinkage of our dollars and stimulate the creation of jobs so that families can plan for their economic security.

But where does this love of family come from among conservatives? Why did family values ​​turn out to be a conservative rather than liberal value?

The Latin origin of the word “family” contains a clue:

Though patriarchy, of course, is a conspiracy theory invented by feminists in 2015 to make video games worse, and

99% of Americans who regularly pontificate on “family values,” I am sure, are unaware of their recent and rather man-made entry into the American political lexicon (not to mention the etymology of the term “family).” But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the family values enforcers and those who support legal prison slave labor, decriminalizing child labor, forced underage births, or are on Epstein’s list (or would like to be) just happen to be the same people.

Returning to the origins of the concept of family holds the key to unraveling the contemporary American conservative project—not how it presents itself, as in Project 2025, but its internal logic.

And at the same time, it also holds the key to the riddle of how the material reality of those who rebelled to preserve their property, including their human property, the slave owners, reconciles with the ideas of freedom with which they explained their struggle.

Introduction to “Paterfamilias”

In the third century AD, Gaius recognized the paterfamilias as an institution unique to Roman society. The eldest male in the family possessed this role which gave him potestas, or power, over the subsequent generations of his family; the paterfamilias was the only one who could own property, manage financial affairs, permit marriage, and perhaps most shockingly, he held the vitae necisque potestas, the power of life and death, over everyone under his manus. Theoretically, his power was complete and total until his death, at which point his sons would become the paterfamiliae of their own families.
Emma Johnson, “Patriarchal Power in the Roman Republic: Ideologies and Realites of the Paterfamilias”

And although, as Johnson continues, the practice of paterfamilia rarely if ever was so extreme: “Despite such legal extremes… the law of the paterfamilias was… sharply constrained by social and cultural barriers and… represents in effect, an ideology rather than a legally-enforced patriarchy,” it is precisely the ideological component that matters here: ideologically, the idea of ​​the family in Roman law was the embodiment of the Roman idea of ​​property rights.

At the same time, as David Graeber pointed out, the Roman idea of ​​property rights also formed the basis of the Western concept of freedom as the right to deny access to whatever constitutes property. This is in contrast to the historical understanding of freedom as a social condition opposed to slavery, which, as the anthropologist Graeber observed, was socially equivalent to being a living dead:

In most societies a slave is essentially like the living dead: as a social person they’ve been killed. The idea is that they are someone who was captured in battle, their captive decided not to kill them (which he would have had every right to do), so essentially their previous life is gone and all they have left is a relation of total subordination to the person who was within his rights to kill them
David Graeber, “Debt, Slavery and our Idea of Freedom”

To be included in social relations, to be socially alive, means to have the ability to establish and maintain moral relations, relations of moral duty, such as friendship:

Originally freedom meant ‘not being a slave’, and so referred to people who had social relations. In fact the word ‘free’ in English traces back to the same root as ‘friend’ – free people are, as noted before, people who can make commitments and promises to others, which of course slaves cannot do.
David Graeber, “Debt, Slavery and our Idea of Freedom”

The freedom to make promises and take on obligations that Graeber describes is freedom of will in its true, not vulgarly naturalistic (promoted by Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris, for example) sense. A free person can make such decisions independently and personally guarantee their implementation, but a slave is denied free will because he is a conduit for the master’s will, and thus cannot break his word because he cannot give it in the first place.

But this is not at all how freedom is understood in the West. The Western concept of freedom stems from Roman law and is understood as the right to property:

in natural rights theory, as in Roman property law, freedom is your ability to do anything you like within your domain of private ownership… “freedom” is essentially property rights, and if the entire world is seen in terms of property rights… C. B. MacPherson pointed this out long ago: all notions of natural rights and liberties begin with your own private property rights over yourself, your right to forbid others (even governments) to “trespass” upon your person, your house, your possessions
David Graeber, “Debt, Slavery and our Idea of Freedom”

In other words, in the Roman idea of “property rights” we see the convergence of the Western concept of family and the Western concept of freedom—including precisely the understanding of freedom embraced by the “founding fathers” of the United States.

The idea of ​​freedom as the ability to dispose of property, beginning with one’s own body, establishes the idea of ​​the body as property. And the absolute right of ownership implies the right to alienate ownership of one’s own body and, accordingly, to acquire ownership of someone else’s—the very same “freedom to sell oneself into slavery” in the libertarian unlimited freedom of contract. The paradox, noted by Graeber:

But if human rights are founded on your property rights over yourself, and property rights are modeled on slavery, that means you are both master and slave at the same time.
David Graeber, “Debt, Slavery and our Idea of Freedom”

Taking the definition of freedom as the freedom to establish social relationships (social freedom, for short), we get a system in which personal freedoms do not conflict with, but rather are strengthened by, the expansion of the freedoms of others—since you are as free to establish relationships with someone as that person is free to establish relationships with you.

Such freedom cannot come at the expense of others, since external restrictions on people’s freedom to enter into relationships limit the extent of their moral responsibility for them. For example, relationships people enter into at work are dictated by the terms of the employment contract, rather than by moral obligations, and are not supported by anything outside the work context. Thus, work relationships between colleagues or between an employee and a client cannot replace social connections—even if the work consists of imitating them.

Thus, the idea of ​​freedom as social freedom (the freedom to establish social relationships) includes protection against the abuse of others’ social freedom and the protection of the universality of this freedom. One’s social freedom cannot be increased by limiting another’s social freedom, and one’s social freedom cannot be increased by removing the social freedom of others: the less free the people around you are to establish social connections, the more limited your freedom to socialize with them is. Maximizing your social freedom is achieved by maximizing the social freedom of others—it’s a positive feedback system. Social freedom is a freedom that cannot be stolen, accumulated, withheld unilaterally: it can be only shared. Limitations and expansions of social freedom are necessarily mutual.

Whereas freedom as property lacks a mechanism to guarantee its universality and reciprocity. If the absolute right of ownership of one’s body implies the right to alienate it, then as long as the moment of alienation is formally justified, for example, by entering into marriage, a deed of sale of oneself into slavery, or an agreement with the winner to exchange the freedom of the vanquished for their lives (by concluding which the vanquished transfers his freedom to enter into such transactions to the winner, which can then be sold, and so on along the chain of transfer of ownership)—then freedom as a right of ownership is preserved, and such actions as escape from slavery or no-fault divorce becomes a violation of property-based freedom.

Herein lies the key to the paradox of the US founding: the freedom that the oppressed talk about—freedom from slavery, freedom to divorce, freedom to have an abortion, freedom to get an education, freedom to work, freedom to vote and be elected, freedom to identify one’s gender, freedom to love openly and to engage in romantic and sexual relationships—that is, the very freedom to establish and maintain various social relationships that Graeber wrote about, the freedom of social existence—is not the freedom that the property-owning founders of the US talked about—freedom from any restrictions on property rights.

And suddenly, the right’s constant obsession with the Roman Empire seems not so innocent, when you keep in mind, that the man of the house, pater familias, holds exclusive rights over his wife, kids, slaves, things, land without distinction.

Roman paterfamilias in Republican “family values” of 1976

Reading Republican Party Platform of 1976 makes so much more sense after you fully understanding the concept of paterfamilias.

Though any politically conscious reader could recognize the dog-whistles behind each sentence even without this understanding, with paterfamilias in mind, a hard structure starts to take shape behind what otherwise looks like a regular list of conservative grievances and finger-pointing. That is the structure of Roman familia as a wealth-building and wealth-maintaining machine, built from three fundamental parts—slaves, wife, kids:

• slaves to build wealth for familia
• wife to give sons to continue familia
• kids to maintain familia (wealth in the family) as the next pater.

And the text of the 1976 Platform suddenly neatly breaks down along those three essential components. They begin with a couple of sentences about control over kids and the inheritance for them to keep:

educational systems that include and are responsive to parents’ concerns; estate tax changes to establish more realistic exemptions which will minimize disruption of already bereaved families”

Followed by a couple of sentences about control over a woman, how to force her to perform her role in paterfamilias—no abortion, no economic independence, thus ultimately no divorce^

a position on abortion that values human life; a welfare policy to encourage rather than discourage families to stay together and seek economic independence”

And the last two sentences of the platform—to perfectly close the triangle—are about taxation and labor, in other words— the concerns of wealth creation for familia:

a tax system that assists rather than penalizes families with elderly members, children in day care or children in college; economic and employment policies that stop the shrinkage of our dollars and stimulate the creation of jobs so that families can plan for their economic security.

This accuracy reflects the fundamental nature of those three components of building generational wealth: wealth itself (created by labor) and family, in the modern sense, as such (wife and kids). It’s not about Roman law per se—it doesn’t have to be, but Roman law was the first to translate the logic of generational wealth building into a legal structure—and thus provided a framework for understanding the modern conservative agenda.

And although the Roman family was in practice as far removed from the ideological maxim of paterfamilia as the conservative family of the Founding Fathers of the United States was from the Roman family, directionally Roman familia and Republican family values are on the same continuum towards the family as a unit of society, in which the head of the family exerts property rights over family members.

In modern language, paterfamilias means family as property.

And this is what conservative family values really mean: family as property.

How paterfamilia creates sexism and homophobia

Understanding marriage as a type of contract that transfers the property rights over a woman from one paterfamilias (father’s) to another (husband’s), one can finally understand how gay marriage could destroy marriage and the “traditional family.” Because if you begin from the paterfamilia worldview, it does: if we understand that the traditional family had nothing to do with romanticism, feelings, or even sexual attraction, but rather represented a legally formalized mechanism for transforming property rights into generational wealth, then it becomes clear that marriage in this structure is essentially a lifelong, exclusive contract of surrogacy. It formalizes that only the father of the family will be the father of her children, and only her children are the legal heirs.

• In this sense, wasting a surrogacy contract on someone who can’t provide it makes no sense. This has nothing to do with the paterfamilias’s sexual life: no one forbids a respectable Roman from sleeping with whomever he pleases, and there’s no point in formalizing it (the idea that marriage is for love—for modern gays, ancient gays, observing the institution of marriage in its original, pre-romanticized form, would likely have been offended by the proposal of such a contract). “Marriage for children,” as conservatives say. I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s finally become clear what they mean, and why no one in the world of conservative, traditional families is bothered by a Republican harassing men in gay bars while having a wife and children at home. Our cognitive dissonance is our mistake in misunderstanding the role of marriage. For conservatives, there is no cognitive dissonance; they are still living in ancient Roman times.
• Lesbian marriage becomes a cheat code for women, providing the ability to opt out from patriarchy entirely.
• A marriage of two dudes provides no answer to who should be the slave and who the master. (Although, if they are not straight, this problem is solved with a checkbox for that in Grindr.)

That’s why the right feels gender needs to be strictly defined and unchangeable, and rooted in something else, be it religion or a misinformed understanding of biology: because for those arbitrary rules to last their arbitrary nature must be concealed. Tying gender and subservience to physical appearance, place of origin, skin tone allows them to obscure the arbitrary nature of their rules (gender is a fact!) and pretend that laws are just codifying things how they really are.

Although the excuse of “simply legislating biological reality” is still bullshit, because if dominance and subservience were natural, a function of genitalia or melanin levels, there would be no need to codify them as property rights, like there’s no need to codify property rights of cats over humans, because humans are already naturally predisposed to be looking for a cat to worship.

Today “family values” is one of the most toxic and insidious exports of American cultural hegemony, because under a pseudo-moral appearance they smuggle in something fundamentally anti-moral, that replaces the freedom of relations necessary for establishing moral relations, with strictly hierarchical, immoral relations built on the relations of slave and master, relations of dominance and submission.

The modern idea of ​​a family built on love demands complete freedom for participants in establishing relationships, free from any social constraints—gender, sexuality, class, race, etc.—except for their maturity and mental capacity. Only then do relationships, their form and emotional content, become a product of the moral space created between their participants. The format, composition, duration and other external parameters of such relationships are irrelevant compared to their emotional content.

The value of relationships based on love is the relationship itself. The format, composition, duration, and other external parameters of such relationships, and their definition as family, kinship, or friendship, etc., are a consequence of their emotional content and the decisions of the participants.

Whereas “family as property” family values are based on the desire to ensure unlimited property rights not only within space but also in time through inheritance. Family values ​​serve the purpose of building intergenerational wealth and therefore impose rigid, stable hierarchical relationships, consisting of a set of mandatory roles and intolerant of other formats that hinder the accumulation of wealth and/or the production of an heir—which is threatened, for example, by a woman’s right to abortion and divorce. Feelings such as love, sexual attraction, and gender identity are utilized for luring and keeping members in the family, and suppressed if they threaten the hierarchy within the family or the chain of inheritance.

“Family values” of this sort are not about building and maintaining human relations, they are about twisting human relations into unnatural, unhealthy, inherently violent structures for building and maintaining generational wealth.

P.S. I hope this analysis will not stay with the reader as a pointless “family debunked,” “family values destroyed,” or “explanation for the sake of explanation.”

Ideally, I aim at my words being actionable, explanations—actually useful for navigating policy choices, through a clearer understanding of what does what, how different policies shape certain outcomes.

Conservatives do the opposite: as this topic can illustrate, conservatives sell family values ​​as a shortcut to security and stability in life, especially for children and women, to lure people into relationships that deprive them of security and stability.

I’m breaking this down to show how misguided the belief in family values ​​actually is:

• that family values ​​are a poor substitute for moral values, an altruistic formulation for the promotion of selfish motives,
• that the priority of family takes away from society,
• that the strength and rigidity of family ties are at the expense of freedom, diversity, and the strength of social ties.

And so whenever family values ​​are invoked, altruism, community and social freedoms are actually what are being targeted. And they should be understood not through what family values ​​promise, but through what with they are meant to be paid for.

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