Volume 27, Number 7 · May 1, 1980
Our Hearts Belong to Daddy
By Richard Sennett
One of the most comforting images we have inherited from the nineteenth century is of authority: a sentimental picture of a kindly father, superimposed on the face of a boss or a political leader. This notion of authority was based on paternalism of a literal kind—the paternalism of fathers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were, in effect, the bosses of farms and businesses run as family enterprises. But in the more fragmented and disorderly families of the nineteenth century, few fathers had such secure control over either their children's work or their behavior. This did not change people's need to imagine fathers as benevolent authorities; nor did it prevent such desires from being converted into metaphors of the leader as a father, and the boss as a father. These new images, based more on longings than on the realities of social or economic life, concealed the fact that employers were anything but protective and loving in their relations with their employees.
Feature, 4464 words
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