【１】民族と国家の違いをはっきりとしておく必要があります。日本では、指導的な政治家で「日本は単一民族国家だから……」ということをいまだに何度でも言う人がいますけれども、これは事実に反します。他国と比べて一つの民族が占めている割合が圧倒的に大きいことは確かです。【２】しかし、九七年の札幌地裁の判決は、アイヌの人々を少数民族集団として法的に認定しました。いわゆる二風谷（にぶだに）裁判です。それから同じ年に「アイヌ新法」と俗称される長い名前の法律「アイヌ文化の振興並びにアイヌの伝統等に関する知識の普及及び啓発に関する法律」ができました。
　【３】つまり立法府や裁判所は、日本が単一民族国家でないということをはっきり法的に確認しているのです。そのほか私たちの身近なところに、外国出自の日本国籍所有者の人々も――日本国籍を持っていない外国人の処遇の問題は、また別の問題ですが――たくさんいるのです。
　【４】近代国家をつくっているのは民族ではなくて国民なのだということを、国家と個人の関係を考える場合の大前提にしなければいけないのです。その辺の筋目があいまいなままの議論が多いのではないだろうか、と日ごろ感じています。
　【５】その上で国家と個人それぞれにとって、最近、国境の敷居が低くなってきている。プラスとマイナスの両方含めてです。独裁者も、国境の壁に守られて安閑としていられなくなっています。アジアの独裁者があっという間に権力を失うという例が続きました。
　【６】しかし、国境の壁が低くなれば、批判の自由が入ってくると同時に、他方で経済万能の力が入ってくるということにもなります。これまで、それぞれ国民国家単位でいろいろな試行錯誤を経てつくり上げてきた生活のための条件が大波に洗われる。【７】雇用の条件、社会保障の水準、年金制度、こういうものが「経済のグローバリゼーションの中で立ち行くためには、そんなぜいたくなことは言っていられないぞ」という形で押し流されはじめます。∵
　そういう理由で国家というものの影がだんだん薄くなってくる。【８】国家の影が薄くなると、お金とか宗教とか民族とかこういうナマの力が、公共社会をそれだけ強くつかまえることになります。考えてみれば近代国家は、まず宗教から国民を解放しました。次に、一九世紀以降、とりわけ二〇世紀に入ってきますと、お金の力を相対化させるために、生存権とか労働基本権とかをつくる。【９】特に複数の民族が共存しているようなところでは、それがぶつかり合わないために、たとえば連邦制というようなものを工夫してきました。
　宗教とかお金とか民族は、それぞれはもちろん価値のあるものです。【０】しかし、それとしては価値のあるものだけれども、民族とか宗教とかお金とかが丸ごと公共社会を乗っ取ってしまってはいけないでしょう。
　スイスのある学者は、「国家を民族の人質にしてはならない」という言い方で、問題を鋭く指摘しています。その傾向に対してどういう歯どめをかけるか。言うまでもないことですけれども、今世界中で悲劇のもとになっている宗教の争い、あるいは民族紛争というのは、国家が強過ぎるからではなくて国家が弱いからです。場合によっては、国家がそういう宗教とか民族にハイジャックされ、その意のままに動かされている。
　それに対して、本来ホッブズ以来の社会契約の論理が私たちに説明してくれたような国家を復権させる。最近の論壇では国家は非常に評判が悪く、国家の相対化は非常に評判がいいのですけれども、今言ったような側面を踏まえた議論でないとおかしなことになります。
　国家が出てくるべきところで出てこないで、本来は出るべきでないところに出しゃばる。これが前に触れた一九九九年の「国旗・国歌法」の立法過程で問題にされたことです。
　国民経済をグローバルスタンダードの荒波から守る場面では「国家は、もう何もしないよ。みんな自助努力でやりなさい」と言いつつ、「日の丸・君が代は、ちゃんとやらなくちゃだめだよ」という取り合わせになっています。本来はその逆でなくてはいけないのではないかということです。（以下省略）
　
　（樋口陽一『個人と国家』）

There are some sociologists who claim that a strict division of household tasks between husband and wife is breaking down in western society. It is argued that the family structure is developing in such a way that women's and men's roles are becoming more 'symmetrical'. More women are working outside the home in addition to performing their traditional family roles, and men are increasing their involvement in the family, while maintaining their work commitments. This symmetrical family form is regarded as the most usual mode of family organization for the future. It implies a movement towards a balance between the involvement of husband and wife in the two spheres of domestic and paid work.
Such a view is now the common one in the current picture of family life as shown in the mass media. This picture is based on an interpretation of two particular socio-economic trends. Firstly, it is said that, since the number of women doing paid work has increased greatly, some sharing of household tasks is now quite common. Secondly, the growth in household technology is thought to have removed the dull labour from female domestic work, saved a great deal of time in its performance and rendered most tasks so simple that they can be undertaken by any household member. Such an account also appears to set the conditions for a symmetrical family form and the gradual breakdown of a domestic division of labour based on sex.
But although this view has been widely accepted, a vast amount of concrete evidence suggests otherwise. This evidence is of two kinds: American time-budget surveys, and sociological surveys and studies of housework and the housewife which are mainly British in origin.
In recent years a number of time-budget studies have measured time spent on housework and other activities such as paid work and leisure. Such research generally involves either asking those interviewed to record their activities for particular time intervals over a number of days, or having them keep diaries recording the number and nature of tasks performed and the amount of time spent on each. The findings are remarkably consistent.
One study, for example, completed in the late 1960's, shows that women who have no employment outside the home work an average of fifty-seven hours per week on such activities as preparing and clearing up after meals, washing, cleaning and tidying the house, taking care of children and other family members and shopping. More recent research shows women spending similar amounts of time on domestic tasks, to the extent that if it was paid employment it would certainly be regarded as full-time work.
For women employed outside the home, it appears that the more waged work they do, the fewer hours they spend on housework but the longer their overall work week. It has been reported that women who are in paid employment for more than thirty hours per week work a total of seventy-six hours in all, including an average of thirty-three hours spent on housework. Yet those husbands whose wives have the longest work weeks, have the shortest work weeks themselves. It appears that the husbands of wives in waged work do not spend any more time on housework than those with full-time housewives. This apparent lack of interest on the part of husbands in women's waged work is confirmed by other research, including a study of 3,500 couples in the United States. Wives employed outside the home worked many more hours every day than either their husbands or full-time housewives. They also spent about double their weekday time for housework doing domestic jobs on their days off, whereas husbands, and even full-time housewives, had the weekend for increased leisure.
This burden increases very much when there are very young children, or many children, in the family. In either case the wife's work week expands to meet the needs of the family. Research shows that in families with a child under one year old, the wife fully devoted to her housework spends nearly seventy hours a week in housework; nearly thirty hours of this is spent in child care. The typical husband spends five hours a week on this task, but reduces his time spent on other work around the house, such as home repairs, decorating and cleaning the outside of windows, so that his total domestic commitment does not increase. When the wife is employed outside the home for fifteen or more hours a week, the average husband spends two hours more per week on child care, increasing his total household labour to twenty hours. His wife spends over fifty hours on housework, indicating that the amount of time spent on housework by the employed woman increases greatly with the presence of young children.
In addition, researchers do not appear to regard the housework or childcare activities of husbands as particularly significant. They point out that men are more likely to be occupied ill this way after dinner. At this time child care typically consists of playing with and talking to children, which is not particularly hard. Moreover, while husbands are occupied in this way, their wives are tied up with the less-than-exciting after-dinner jobs. When men are involved with other domestic tasks it is frequently because their wives have to leave for employment after dinner and so are not themselves available to perform them.
Thus the activities of husbands are a form of back-up, or reserve labour, for a series of tasks which remain mainly the women's responsibility. Most married women still spend a considerable part of every day performing the necessary and most time-consuming work in the household. It is also noteworthy that the work week of domestic labourers is longer than that of the average person in the labour-force. Thus, it is clearly demonstrated that although waged women do less housework than unwaged women, this has little effect on the distribution of particular tasks within the home. Domestic labour is still very strictly separated along sex lines and this division appears to be constant across regions and nations. Time-budget data indicate that there has been no significant change in the sexual division of labour within the household.
One significant finding suggests that in the nineteenth century there was an alteration in the content, although not in the amount, of housework performed. Although technological changes were slower in reaching the home than the work-place, they did begin to enter the richer homes towards the end of the nineteenth century. However, major technological developments did not affect the households of most of the population until shortly after World War I. The significance of these developments cannot be neglected. As a certain sociologist says, 'Three things dramatically reduced dirty, heavy work for the housewife: gas and electricity for cooking, heating, and lighting; indoor running water; and the washing machine.' The use of household technology as seen in refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and freezers, and also convenience foods have also made activities such as cooking and cleaning easier. This has led one researcher to suggest that technological changes in the home have been equal to, and as important as, those of the Industrial Revolution.
Thus in the 1920's a large proportion of a housewife's time would have been spent in heavy routine and boring jobs such as fetching, hand-washing and cleaning. Today, time is more likely to be spent in arranging activities, particularly child care and planning shopping expeditions. The continuing emphasis on the physical, moral and emotional stability of childhood as a significant part of mothering has obviously influenced the amount of time women spend on the bringing up of children. But despite the increased availability of household technology, the purchase of household equipment does not necessarily make woman's domestic role easier. Rather, it is suggested that the more technology present in a household, the more time spent in getting it, and its use and maintenance. For example, food mixers encourage the preparation of more ambitious meals, and washing machines, together with better levels of tidiness, mean that more washing is carried out more often. Indeed, Parkinson's Law seems to operate, keeping women's housework at a constant level despite improvements in household technology. The situation appears to have changed very little over the last eighty years or so, since the amount of time devoted by full-time housewives to housework has remained remarkably stable during this time. Moreover, household technology has been developed on an individual and family basis, thus increasing the particular nature of the domestic work which women perform. Despite the many developments made in this area, housework remains unsystematic and is performed in isolated, relatively inefficient units. For all these reasons it has been argued that instead of challenging the sexual division of labour within the home, modern technology has tended to support, and even strengthen, the traditional distribution of domestic roles.
symmetrical対称の time-budget生活時間の配分 work week週労働時間
Parkinson's Law イギリスの政治・経済学者パーキンソンが「仕事は使える時間いっぱいまでのびる」という前提から諷刺的に導いた経験則