“I would Cry Because of Happiness”

In this debate article the author tries to criticize Fáber Ágoston’s study referred in the title. The most important elements of this critics are the following: 1) It is controvertible how Fáber formulated the ideal types of premodernity and late modernity, while regarding to first modernity as just an interim period. What is more, Fáber’s preferred term to characterize the social order which ‘has determined’ the family structures is the ‘neoliberal (capitalism)’ which he uses for an illegitimately long period. 2) Fáber’s typology of families is arguable. He uses only two types: the ‘durability-orientated teleologic’ one, which dominated the premodern era, and the ‘happiness-orientated autotelic’ one, which has emerged in (late?) modernity. However, even the late modern ‘autotelic’ family can transform into the teleologic version by birth of the first child, which provokes tensions inside the families. 3) The distinction of the ‘ontological revolution’ versus ‘epistemological counter-revolutionary’ seems to be too normative and simultaneously theoretically over-simplifying. Two further implications are questionable. First, to label every attempt to resolve inner tensions of families as manifestations of ‘counter-revolutionary’ attitudes. Second, the assumption that every (radical) criticism of the social order is a sign of a benevolent, progressive attitude. 4) The social historic argumentation is too weak to support Fáber’s theoretical theses.