ABSTRACT
For some time now scholars across the academic disciplines have been preoccupied with questions relating to the nature of modern society, its career, and its future. Today most analysts agree with Alexis de Tocqueville that the rise of the modern world is a consequence of peculiar institutional developments which found their clearest expression in the capitalist economy, political democracy, and individual liberty. In present-day analyses it is taken for granted that these institutions constitutive of modern society are "functionally" interrelated and dependent upon each other. A formidable body of research available today definitively documents that what social demographers call the "proto-industrial" family served as the link between the feudal and the modern industrial world. In concluding, the bourgeois family is essential for the formation as well as the survival of democratic capitalism, it is also important to understand that this family and its peculiar ethos is not the exclusive property of the countries of the West.
