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Rating: 
Summary: A MAJOR PIECE OF SCHOLARLY WRITING
Review: This book addresses two principal issues: how people were governed (and perhaps increasingly come to govern themselves); and, within that context, how we might understand schools (where they came from, how and why they arose when, where and in the form they did, and their significance). It explores patriarchy (understood as rule of both father and husband, and as constituting both age and gender relations) as a mode of government within families, workplaces, and the institutions of state. It is an ambitious book. It draws on an impressively wide range of scholarly literature, from religious, family, demographic, economic, social, political and military history. It ranges widely over Western European societies and their colonial offshoots from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries (and beyond). It examines the complex impacts of demographic, economic, political, institutional and 'cultural' changes on patriarchal organisation, and the ways in which patriarchal understandings and practices mediated and shaped those changes, in institutions, and in everyday life. It keeps a sharp eye out for similar tendencies across different situations and circumstances, for the unevenness of the developments it traces, and for the connections between between different aspects of social life, and between the different social and regional conditions which constitute 'uneven development'. At the centre of its analysis are the sheer materiality of human existence and the ways in which the production of material life is conducted. But it is theoretically subtle and sophisticated, grafting onto its marxist heritage a qualified theoretical eclecticism and a concern with such things as the formation of particular personality characteristics in particular socio-political regimes. It is roughly chronological in its overall organisation, but rather than a chronological narrative, it proceeds as what the author calls a 'patchwork' of 'case studies' to map important developments, to explore both what they have in common with what was happening elsewhere and their particularities and contingencies, and to note the diversity of conditions and practices across western societies. At the same time, it concerned to identify causes, and to make connections between seemingly disparate aspects and levels of social life. The book is clearly written and well organised. I'd rate it as a useful book and important book. It is impressively scholarly. While it attempts synthesis it avoids any sort of singular, homogenising ('that's it in a nutshell') formula. And, third, because contemporary academic politics offers substantial inducements to turn out small, self-contained, 'do-able' bits - they get the publication points for a minimum of time and effort. But academic life needs, somewhere, works which assemble a breadth of knowledge and attempt the large-scale synthesis which that makes possible.
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