Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative
and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to
exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have
free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social
conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on
all other issues?
In this book,
Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges
atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual
freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the
American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal
responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family
responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations
recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market
liberals and social conservatives.
Neoliberalism, she
argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor
law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As
neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and
welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a
wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as
the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the
household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as
foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences,
neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds
of family needed to be encouraged -- and at the limit enforced -- as
a necessary counterpart to market freedom.
In a series of case
studies ranging from Clinton's welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic,
and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper
explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists
and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its
central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make
sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between
free-market economics and social conservatism.