The Policing of Families

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by Jacques Donzelot,

Foreword by Gilles Deleuze,

Translated by Robert Hurley

Johns Hopkins University Press

Due/Published May 1997, 242 pages, paper

ISBN 0801856493

This book just might show you why you shouldn't trust your mother. It offers an account of public intervention in family affairs since the eighteenth century, changing the structure of what traditionally been a private domain. Author Jacques Donzelot examines the role of philanthropy, social work, compulsory mass education, and psychiatry in the control of family life; and he describes the transformation of mothers into agents of the state. . . . Pretty creepy, huh? Sounds like one for the X-Files.