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Why do men fight for freedom only in specific historical times? Stimulated by psychoanalytic research into the origins of attitudes toward authority, Weinstein and Platt apply Talcott Parsons' concept of “increasing differentiation” to an investigation of the connections between historical changes in family structure, personality, and political attitudes during the past 300 years.
Their main thesis is that in traditional families, the mother's and father's roles were not differentiated, so that the child internalized a collective mother-father image, and did not have a differentiated superego strong enough to enable him to criticize authority. With the coming of industrial society, the nurturant (maternal, emotional) and the instrumental (paternal, abstract) roles became differentiated, because the father was more away from home at work, paralleling the differentiation of religion from politics. Only when the father's role became differentiated did it become susceptible to rational criticism, just as critical political attitudes became possible only after politics and religion were differentiated. The social side of this process is traced in detail in 18th century France. The theory that criticism of the father can only become conscious after he is non-nurturant is then extended to explain how Freud could discover the Oedipus complex, how Kafka could obtain insight into man's relations with authority, why Freud