ABSTRACT
It might be common knowledge by now that ‘the’ family is in many ways a powerful myth. It is not only a sociological myth, since there are many different kinds of family form and family practice, which shift over time and according to cultural context. It is also a political myth, since ‘the family’ is to a considerable extent constructed by state policies (family law, social policies) and by the idea systems of political institutions (political parties, advisory bodies, institutions of the welfare state). It matters how political theories conceptualise family, kinship and care and, at the heart of this complicated nexus, gender. As a contemporary illustration of the process by which a concept of ‘the family’ is implicated in political strategies, I will consider the contributions made by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens, especially in his book The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1998).
