Family: limit or expansion of freedom?

Abstract

In this work, based on the anthropology of the Spanish philosopher Leonardo Polo, it is discussed
whether to safeguard the family it is necessary that personal freedom be subject to certain rules, or if the family is precisely the appropriate field for the deployment of personal freedom. In our society there has been a transfer in the use of language from the term ‘family’ to the term ‘families’, meaning
with this plural all the different types, or models, of family socially admitted today. Thus, on one hand, it is wished not to privilege the old sense of family:
the one based on the marriage of one with one forever. On the other hand, it is intended to encompass with such a plural term all the imaginable ways of living together, and the possible mutual combinations that the vital itinerary of its members choose. Such a cultural panorama raises freedom as a new conquest over the family, proclaiming that this way of thinking open up new avenues for so many
citizens for a free experience of the family, without the constraints of the past. I will not try to make a moral, historical or cultural assessment of this notion of families. I simply take this significant change in the use of language to ask from Leonardo Polo’s anthropological philosophy about what the person is and what their freedom and family are.