Family, property, and a rebuilt village

Alexis de Tocqueville had thoughts on how to build an "esprit de famille"

Alexis de Tocqueville. Credit: Théodore Chassériau

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A week ago, I had a piece in the Deseret News on how the real estate landscape has evolved lately. The piece explores some specific ideas that I won’t get into here, but my thesis borrowed from the work of 19th century French writer Alexis de Tocqueville and argued that property ownership is a fundamental feature of American life¹.

I first read de Tocqueville years ago as a grad student, but while writing the Deseret News piece I cracked open his 1835 book Democracy in America to brush up on his ideas. And I was very quickly reminded that he also argued that property ownership is an essential part of family as well. Basically, his point is that family estates create a sense of group cohesion and encourage people to think about, and care for, kin across multiple generations. But when family and property become decoupled, family identity and intergenerational obligation soon wither away as well.

I think he’s right, and his point offers useful insights into how families can become closer and rebuild an intergenerational “village” (“it takes a village…”) that takes care of its members across time.

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De Tocqueville begins his discussion about family and property by focusing on inheritance law. He contrasts the old idea of primogeniture, where the oldest son typically inherits the entire estate, with the “law of equal division,” which is common today and which sees a person’s estate divided equally among heirs. And he points out that in societies practicing primogeniture, “landed estates often pass from generation to generation without undergoing division, the consequence of which is that family feeling is to a certain degree incorporated with the estate.”

He continues: “The family represents the estate, the estate the family; whose name, together with its origin, its glory, its power, and its virtues, is thus perpetuated in an imperishable memorial of the past and a sure pledge of the future”².

In other words, if you have an ancient ancestral home, that home becomes a kind of symbol for the family itself. For us modern Americans, the best pop culture example I can think of that embodies this idea is Downton Abbey, where the idea of family and estate are intricately connected.

On the other hand, de Tocqueville argues that when property is divided equally among heirs, it gets cut up again and again until it’s “completely dispersed.” And he says the result is that “the intimate connection is destroyed between family feeling and the preservation of the paternal estate.”

For Americans like myself, this may not sound like a big deal³.

But the problem, according to de Tocqueville, is that when a family loses its connection to an estate, it becomes a conceptually vague and ultimately selfish institution. Here’s de Tocqueville:

Where the esprit de famille ceases to act individual selfishness comes into play. When the idea of family becomes vague, indeterminate, and uncertain, a man thinks of his present convenience; he provides for the establishment of his succeeding generation, and no more. Either a man gives up the idea of perpetuating his family, or at any rate he seeks to accomplish it by other means than that of a landed estate. Thus not only does the law of partible inheritance render it difficult for families to preserve their ancestral domains entire, but it deprives them of the inclination to attempt it, and compels them in some measure to co-operate with the law in their own extinction.

In other words de Tocqueville is saying that the connection between family and property is a hedge against selfishness. Having something of value that belongs as much to your descendants as it does to you fosters a unique mindset. It requires making a “pledge” to the future. But when that link between that thing of value and the family is broken, selfishness abounds and family identities go extinct.

That strikes me as an incredibly prescient observation that applies as much to the present as it did to de Tocqueville’s time. One of the most common forms of pushback I get when writing about intergenerational family is people basically saying “who cares about what happens two or three or seven generations down the road.” I think the default for most Americans is to not care, and it strikes many as weird that anyone would⁴.

But either way, de Tocqueville’s description of a world in which there is no default connection between family and property, and where that has resulted in a self-oriented focus on the present, is a pretty accurate characterization of the environment we find ourselves in today. And while we can debate the merits of different inheritance laws, it’s a shame that the general “esprit de famille” has diminished today to the point that people lack adequate support when they have kids, get old, need a job, or reach other milestones that family traditionally would have helped with.

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Obviously, we’re not returning to the idea of primogeniture with regard to property.

But de Tocqueville’s point is still a useful one because it highlights the fact that family has traditionally been more than a collection of people with biological and emotional ties. Historically, the concept of family was also about the management and distribution of resources. For example, historian Stephanie Coontz has written about how marriage used to operate using a “work mate” model in which couples saw themselves as economic partners, but then gradually transitioned to a “soul mate” model in which couples were primarily bound by weaker emotional ties.

This also brings to mind WEIRD psychology, which is a concept that describes the dismantling of tribal family structures in medieval Europe in favor of the more individualistic world view most westerners have today. Part of that transition happened as resources were diverted away from families, and as communal-family ownership of assets gave way to individual ownership.

Work mate marriages, WEIRD psychology, and de Tocqueville’s point about estates all intersect with the same general idea that families have historically had a resource component⁵. That’s the norm across cultures, time periods, and locations — even if it isn’t any longer in the modern US. And what I like about de Tocqueville’s take in particular is how he runs with this idea and calls out the selfishness that takes hold when the esprit de famille wanes.

So how does one avoid that waning in a modern world? How does this information help rebuild the traditional village idea that people in the past relied on for support?

The simplest answer I can think of is that people wanting to cultivate an esprit de famille among their kin need something of significant value to pass down from one generation to another. Land is an obvious candidate, and while we can’t all have aristocratic estates a la European nobles, one positive thing about the US is that a majority of people do at least have a large asset in the form of their homes⁶. A pro-homeownership agenda is ultimately a pro-family agenda.

Of course, holding land also isn’t the only option. I’m reminded here of the Hanna family that I previously wrote about, and which has been running the same real estate company since 1957. What keeps the Hannas going is the business, which is a family asset that transcends one generation after another. One challenge with a business is that in order to accommodate more people over time, it has to expand in some way — which is something the company’s president explicitly mentioned to me during our conversation. But even so, a business strikes me as maybe the closest thing in our world that would have the intergenerational benefits de Tocqueville described.

In other cases, families have a particular skill set and professional network. I’m thinking here of dynastic tribes in particular industries, such as the Coppelas in entertainment or the Udall-Hunt-Lee family (my very distant relatives) in politics. These families are certainly well off financially, but their esprit de famille comes from a particular industry rather than a specific asset. That's something that has been happening for a long time; while some aristocrats like de Tocqueville take their names from places, others such as the Medici of Renaissance Florence or the Scala of late medieval Verona have names referencing professions⁷.

I can’t ultimately make an exhaustive list of all the things of value a family might pass down from one generation to another in a quest to engender de Tocqueville’s esprit de famille. But I do know that I’d like to fortify my relationships with my kids, and the relationships they have with their kids, and so on down the line. I want them to have as much material success as possible, sure. But even more than that I hope they inherit a sense of who they are, how their predecessors positively contributed to their circumstances, and how they have an obligation to do the same for their own descendants.

If nothing else, I think life is richer when understood as a middle chapter in a long and colorful story about a village that outlasts any one person. And while fostering that understanding is a lifelong endeavor, I think de Tocqueville was right when he observed that property — or, more practically in our world, something of great value — that transcends generations is an essential part of building that “imperishable memorial of the past” and “sure pledge of the future.”

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Headlines to check out this week:

Do Your Political Beliefs Affect Your Parenting?

“Parenting researchers have consistently found that the best parents—the parents whose kids are most likely to thrive as adults—are parents who are authoritative, meaning parents who are both strict and loving. They are not Too Hard or Too Soft; they are Just Right. But in the eight years since I wrote the book, I’ve noticed something new. For the first time, I am seeing a political dimension to parenting. It is now much less common to find left-of-center parents who are both strict and loving. Loving, yes, but not strict. I’m seeing a growing number of parents like the mom I just described—parents who truly believe that it's virtuous to let the kid be in charge, even when the kid is a six 6-year-old with a fever who is refusing to let the doctor look at her throat.”

1. De Tocqueville, who toured early America, felt that widespread property ownership in the early U.S. set it apart from other nations.

2. This quote and all subsequent ones in this post come from de Tocqueville’s book Democracy in America, Chapter III: Social Conditions Of The Anglo-Americans. I have the Kindle version and I’m not sure if the page numbers line up with other versions, but you can read the free Project Gutenberg version (which lacks page numbers) here.

3. De Tocqueville was a French aristocrat, so the idea of primogeniture probably made a lot of sense to him. But to modern American ears, it comes off as unfair and old fashioned.

4. In many cases, people actively oppose the kind of “esprit de famille” that de Tocqueville is writing about because they want their kids to bootstrap it on their own. A good recent example is Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis revealing they won’t give any of their substantial fortune to their kids.

5. Most people are probably generally aware of how this worked at the aristocratic level. But Coontz and others have written about how even peasants used to strive for advantageous marriages, among other things. The point being that every family, regardless of social status, was jockeying for better intergenerational prospects.

6. As of the end of 2022, the homeownership rate in the US was nearly 66 percent.

7. “Medici” is the plural for the Italian word for medical doctor. I’ve heard different theories on where this name comes from, but my understanding from visiting Medici-related sites in Florence is that a) we don’t exactly know why they had that name, but b) there may have been a medic among their ancestors. The Scala family’s name and coat of arms comes from their early business of making ladders.