Kinship and politics have always had very close relationships. In many societies, political relations are confused with kinship relations. One may consider the idea of a political society as a “big family.” A family, in this case, is seen as the basic cell of society. One could mention the view of a king as the “father of the kingdom”, which echoed the vision of the father of the family as the monarch of the family ; or, in another political context, the concept of “republican fraternity”, the “mother country”, citizens as “brothers in arms”.
In Western societies, the relations between kinship and politics have entered into a new phase : it is no longer politics that relies on kinship to legitimize the social and political order, but it is the vision kinship that becomes political. The text in question seeks to explain the reasons for this reversal by describing the process of “secularization” of kinship and the way it is addressed by liberal society.

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