ABSTRACT
In classical political theory the family tended to occupy a uniquely privileged position as the one social unit that preexisted the state. The family thus was figured as the pre-eminently “natural” social unit in contrast to the state, an artificial and later social creation. As opposed to the relation between husband and wife, which depended on an act of will and a verbal contract, the relation between parent and child appeared both the most “natural” of all possible human relationships and, as Blackstone put it, “the most universal relation in nature.” 1 Blackstone, citing Pufendorf, derived the duty of parents to provide for their children from natural law: “an obligation … laid on them not only by nature herself, but by their own proper act, in bringing them into the world: for they would be in the highest manner injurious to their issue, if they only gave the children life, that they might afterwards see them perish.” 2
