'"Transformations of Patriarchy in the West" wrestles with issues as basic as the historical construction of the Western personality and its connections with how Western societies have organized the state, the economy, the family, and intimate everyday life. The incorporation of gender relations into the overall scheme of historical transformation is especially impressive. It is a work of impressive geographical and chronological scope that will inform and provoke discussion in a wide range of fields' - MaryJo Maynes, University of Minnesota.This wide-ranging study of familial, political, and economic change in the West between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries is organized around two themes. The first deals with the rise and fall of a patriarchalist social order and its replacement by fraternal forms of governance. The second theme concerns attempts by various reformers to instill self-mastery, originally expected of monks and masters, into subject populations, and the frequently unforeseen effects of this process.By linking schooling, state-building, and transformations of patriarchal forms of governance, the book also reopens the debate about the social forces which produced state school systems and about the ways schools affected people and institutions. In skillful narrative that draws on several traditions of historical writing about the key changes in Western society, Pavla Miller reinterprets the history of the ways states, economies, armies, households, and individuals were governed and governed themselves.Refusing any one orthodoxy, Miller draws on the strengths of feminist theory, Foucauldian accounts of governmentality, the work of Norbert Elias, and Marxist inspired historians. Using a wide range of historical evidence, Miller balances accounts of material constraint and individual action; chance, intention, and the ironies of history; the sociologist's theoretical curiosity with the social historian's distrust of generalization and concern with the logical the particular. Clear and accessible throughout, the book will be of interest to scholars and students in history, sociology, education, women's and gender studies, and cultural studies, and those interested in new approaches to historical analysis.