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Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
An investigation of the roots of the alliance between free-market neoliberals and social conservatives.
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.
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.
416 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 2019
39 people are currently reading
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About the author
Melinda Cooper
23 books28 followersMelinda Cooper is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
October 14, 2020
Kind of like reading The Handmaid's Tale in non-fiction.
An incredibly well written book developing an informative perspective on U.S. politics and its ongoing foundation of systemic bigotry.
An incredibly well written book developing an informative perspective on U.S. politics and its ongoing foundation of systemic bigotry.
March 15, 2024
Cooper with another banger. Main thesis is fairly easy to summarize by just giving Thatcher's full TINA quote: "There is no such thing as society; there are individual men, individual women, *and there are families*". While most sociological talk on neoliberalism stresses the individualisation of society, Cooper shows how neoliberals formed an intellectual bond with neoconservatives on the centrality of family in American society. While neoconservatives wanted to preserve the family, neoliberals wanted the family to take the place of the state to provide in welfare. Rather than destroying the family, neoliberal politics have instead tried desperately to strenghten the role of families for reproduction.
How did this organic band come about? Cooper argues they found each other in the crisis of the Fordist welfare state of the 60s and 70s. This system of production was sociologically challenged by the '68 movement, who criticised the inherent oppression of women, queer and racialised people. Most of these criticisms arose from the welfare state itself: democratising education and welfare gave people the means to see their own bondage. The '68 movement scared the neoconservatives, who were not necessarily against the welfare state, but wanted to restructure it to make sure the traditional way of life wasn't lost.
At the same time, US democrats and republicans (reluctantly) went about to expand the Fordist welfare state to incorporate new groups in the system: racialised minorities, women etc. Greath Society-style. But this was impossible as the crisis of the '70s hit: the welfare state had to be disciplined, and neoliberals saw an opportunity to blame the further expansion as the root of all evil. In their common agenda of seeing the 'exagerated' expansion of the welfare state as the cause of the '70s crisis, neoliberals and neoconservatives learned from each other and forged a common ideology. Neoliberals began to reason that families had a "natural place" in the free market, while neoconservatives proclaimed that individual liberty was only found in a traditional family. Their answer: the state shouldn't be providing what families could do for each other!
From this quite innovative point of view, Cooper takes you on a trip down US policies, from disciplining mothers to make the (absent) fathers pay for their children, to the rising asset economy (she rightly points out that a novelty of neoliberal policies is that your housing depends on your family providing a starters' capital), the privatization of education (your education is also dependent on family income again!), the AIDS crisis, and the surge of religious welfare. Making families the locus of policies is central to neoliberalism, from Reagan, to Clinton and Obama.
Along the way, she formulates some fierce criticisms to some leftists as well. First on the list are Polanyians who think "the family" is part of the countermovement, a network that should be valued as an anti-capitalist bond. An anonymous Polanyi scholar (yes it's you Louis) has informed me that she didn't do a very thorough reading of Polanyi, but it's true that some have interpreted him as such. Second, she argues that the same-sex marriage policies are embedded in neoliberal policies. They just had to keep pushing that they would be good families too. Also, the expanding credit economy and financialisation made minorities push for access to credit, which was granted to them by both finance and politics, and made them excessively reliant on private credit for basic welfare that the state refused to give them before the 70s. Next, "Self-care" was a concept introduced by Reagan to make families and networks do voluntary work because the state shouldn't be dealing with all that. At last, the symbolic protests on university is a sign of "leftist infatilism".
This last paragraph is somewhat unfair because I'm piling up all the criticisms she gave sporadically in a 300 page book. In fact, I think this is a great example of intersectional analysis, where economics mediate a society split in different hierarchies with a plethora of particular consequences. It's really good.
The only thing I'm still grapling with is this: all statistics show that the family has indeed diminished since the '70s. More singles, less core-families in the US, but also in Europe. So, even though this book shows in great detail that neoliberalism and neoconservatism work well together both ideologically and in policies to strenghten the family, it doesn't seem like they've succeeded! It's an important observation that she completely ignores.
How did this organic band come about? Cooper argues they found each other in the crisis of the Fordist welfare state of the 60s and 70s. This system of production was sociologically challenged by the '68 movement, who criticised the inherent oppression of women, queer and racialised people. Most of these criticisms arose from the welfare state itself: democratising education and welfare gave people the means to see their own bondage. The '68 movement scared the neoconservatives, who were not necessarily against the welfare state, but wanted to restructure it to make sure the traditional way of life wasn't lost.
At the same time, US democrats and republicans (reluctantly) went about to expand the Fordist welfare state to incorporate new groups in the system: racialised minorities, women etc. Greath Society-style. But this was impossible as the crisis of the '70s hit: the welfare state had to be disciplined, and neoliberals saw an opportunity to blame the further expansion as the root of all evil. In their common agenda of seeing the 'exagerated' expansion of the welfare state as the cause of the '70s crisis, neoliberals and neoconservatives learned from each other and forged a common ideology. Neoliberals began to reason that families had a "natural place" in the free market, while neoconservatives proclaimed that individual liberty was only found in a traditional family. Their answer: the state shouldn't be providing what families could do for each other!
From this quite innovative point of view, Cooper takes you on a trip down US policies, from disciplining mothers to make the (absent) fathers pay for their children, to the rising asset economy (she rightly points out that a novelty of neoliberal policies is that your housing depends on your family providing a starters' capital), the privatization of education (your education is also dependent on family income again!), the AIDS crisis, and the surge of religious welfare. Making families the locus of policies is central to neoliberalism, from Reagan, to Clinton and Obama.
Along the way, she formulates some fierce criticisms to some leftists as well. First on the list are Polanyians who think "the family" is part of the countermovement, a network that should be valued as an anti-capitalist bond. An anonymous Polanyi scholar (yes it's you Louis) has informed me that she didn't do a very thorough reading of Polanyi, but it's true that some have interpreted him as such. Second, she argues that the same-sex marriage policies are embedded in neoliberal policies. They just had to keep pushing that they would be good families too. Also, the expanding credit economy and financialisation made minorities push for access to credit, which was granted to them by both finance and politics, and made them excessively reliant on private credit for basic welfare that the state refused to give them before the 70s. Next, "Self-care" was a concept introduced by Reagan to make families and networks do voluntary work because the state shouldn't be dealing with all that. At last, the symbolic protests on university is a sign of "leftist infatilism".
This last paragraph is somewhat unfair because I'm piling up all the criticisms she gave sporadically in a 300 page book. In fact, I think this is a great example of intersectional analysis, where economics mediate a society split in different hierarchies with a plethora of particular consequences. It's really good.
The only thing I'm still grapling with is this: all statistics show that the family has indeed diminished since the '70s. More singles, less core-families in the US, but also in Europe. So, even though this book shows in great detail that neoliberalism and neoconservatism work well together both ideologically and in policies to strenghten the family, it doesn't seem like they've succeeded! It's an important observation that she completely ignores.
December 28, 2022
Melinda Cooper’s Family Values is a stunning and revelatory work of political, social and economic history. Shattering the widely held view that (American) liberal politics has always revolved around the individual, Cooper charts out, in meticulous detail, the many ways in which the family unit has served to undergird and secure the ‘freedom of the individual’ so commonly touted as liberalism's central philosophical plank. Picking up from roughly around the time of Lyndon B. Johnston's ‘Great Society’ reforms of the mid 1960s, Cooper plots the way in which liberal policies slowly but surely began to array themselves against the perceived excesses of the welfare state, displacing mechanisms of state support ever more upon the family unit, themselves increasingly cast as the first and - in the last analysis - only extra-market bastion of societal support and care.
While tracking alongside a story now well-told among political commentators - the rise and consolidation of neoliberal policy and government in the United States - distinguishing Cooper’s work is its attempt to tackle what ought to be a rather perplexing question: how is it that neoliberal approaches to family have so easily dovetailed right into the traditional remit of conservative social policy? That is: since when do neoliberals give a damn about the family, and indeed 'strong families', at all? Isn’t it all just a question of markets and economics? Well, ‘yes, but...’, is Cooper’s answer, insofar as it's been precisely on 'economic grounds' - or at least, a very specific set of economic grounds - that the neoliberal turn to the family has largely taken place. As the ever-rehearsed, thinly pitched argument goes, the less public involvement, the more 'efficient' the markets. To which one may append, in the wake of Cooper's painstaking research: and so much the worse for the family.
Thus, it's the story of the ever increasing social squeeze placed upon the family that makes up the bulk of this book, told in all its depressing detail. From its intellectual ferment among the halls of the neoliberal academe - think Milton and Rose Friedman, Gary Becker, Richard Posner, and others - all the way to its enshrinement in both court and law, Family Values tracks policy implementation, legal decisions, social movements, capital flows, and shifting public moods, all the better to relate the growing precarity of the family form. And what it captures in depth so too does it in breadth: from healthcare to housing, education to welfare, charity and inheritance, each - and more! - are taken up to demonstrate the sheer magnitude and scope of the ever-tightening social and economic screws now applied everywhere to the family in the name of both liberalism and conservatism (the left gets its own flack too, with Cooper taking to task writers like Wolfgang Streeck and Nancy Fraser for their own, particular, valorizations of family).
Finally, over and above the importance of the chronicle told within, are the methodological lessons this book coveys. As an internally differentiated social unit - by gender, age, and sexual orientation (at a minimum...) - Cooper shows how placing the family at the centre of social, economic, and historical analysis can pay off with radically vital results. Indeed it's simply the case that nobody, having read this, would ever be able to ignore the role of the family, not only in any account of the neoliberal condition, but of society as such. And this is to say nothing yet of the attention paid to class and race which similarly ranges across the topics dealt within. In the hands of anyone else, one imagines that juggling this mass of information and diagnosis would be a hapless task, but Family Values is a book as clear as it is trenchant. Oh, and did I mention unsurpassable for understanding the world we live in today? Because it's that too. Read, learn - weep.
While tracking alongside a story now well-told among political commentators - the rise and consolidation of neoliberal policy and government in the United States - distinguishing Cooper’s work is its attempt to tackle what ought to be a rather perplexing question: how is it that neoliberal approaches to family have so easily dovetailed right into the traditional remit of conservative social policy? That is: since when do neoliberals give a damn about the family, and indeed 'strong families', at all? Isn’t it all just a question of markets and economics? Well, ‘yes, but...’, is Cooper’s answer, insofar as it's been precisely on 'economic grounds' - or at least, a very specific set of economic grounds - that the neoliberal turn to the family has largely taken place. As the ever-rehearsed, thinly pitched argument goes, the less public involvement, the more 'efficient' the markets. To which one may append, in the wake of Cooper's painstaking research: and so much the worse for the family.
Thus, it's the story of the ever increasing social squeeze placed upon the family that makes up the bulk of this book, told in all its depressing detail. From its intellectual ferment among the halls of the neoliberal academe - think Milton and Rose Friedman, Gary Becker, Richard Posner, and others - all the way to its enshrinement in both court and law, Family Values tracks policy implementation, legal decisions, social movements, capital flows, and shifting public moods, all the better to relate the growing precarity of the family form. And what it captures in depth so too does it in breadth: from healthcare to housing, education to welfare, charity and inheritance, each - and more! - are taken up to demonstrate the sheer magnitude and scope of the ever-tightening social and economic screws now applied everywhere to the family in the name of both liberalism and conservatism (the left gets its own flack too, with Cooper taking to task writers like Wolfgang Streeck and Nancy Fraser for their own, particular, valorizations of family).
Finally, over and above the importance of the chronicle told within, are the methodological lessons this book coveys. As an internally differentiated social unit - by gender, age, and sexual orientation (at a minimum...) - Cooper shows how placing the family at the centre of social, economic, and historical analysis can pay off with radically vital results. Indeed it's simply the case that nobody, having read this, would ever be able to ignore the role of the family, not only in any account of the neoliberal condition, but of society as such. And this is to say nothing yet of the attention paid to class and race which similarly ranges across the topics dealt within. In the hands of anyone else, one imagines that juggling this mass of information and diagnosis would be a hapless task, but Family Values is a book as clear as it is trenchant. Oh, and did I mention unsurpassable for understanding the world we live in today? Because it's that too. Read, learn - weep.
February 22, 2022
hands down one of the most important historical books i’ve read on american capitalism in the 20th century. it’s been incredibly helpful for me in understanding the relationship between the material and the ideological in our contemporary moment. cooper is a genius and i will be gifting (i.e. indoctrinating) this book to many people in the future.
June 20, 2017
Absolutely tremendous: an intellectual history that is genuinely ground-breaking. Future histories or analyses of neoliberalism which fail to reckon with the book's central argument about the fundamental importance of the family–and not just the individual–to neoliberalism will be seriously hampered in understanding the last fifty years of history.
February 9, 2025
Es un trabajo importante para entender el papel que la preservación de la familia y sus valores tradicionales han jugado como elementos de unión entre el neoliberalismo y el neoconservadurismo.
Es una revisión de las políticas económicas que desde los años sesenta se van implementando como respuesta a la revolución social y por los derechos civiles que tiene lugar en Estados Unidos.
Desde Nixon, pero sobre todo con Reagan y Clinton hasta Obama, se va consolidando dicha alianza para desmantelar el Estado del Bienestar y configurar un modelo de asistencia social basado en la responsabilidad familiar y en la fe religiosa. Impactante el papel de Clinton en ese proceso de drástica reforma del sistema federal de bienestar.
Es un trabajo de investigación riguroso y documentado. En este sentido es impecable y didáctico; quizás algo denso y repetitivo a momentos y estrictamente orientado a demostrar su tesis, pero muy bueno.
Es una revisión de las políticas económicas que desde los años sesenta se van implementando como respuesta a la revolución social y por los derechos civiles que tiene lugar en Estados Unidos.
Desde Nixon, pero sobre todo con Reagan y Clinton hasta Obama, se va consolidando dicha alianza para desmantelar el Estado del Bienestar y configurar un modelo de asistencia social basado en la responsabilidad familiar y en la fe religiosa. Impactante el papel de Clinton en ese proceso de drástica reforma del sistema federal de bienestar.
Es un trabajo de investigación riguroso y documentado. En este sentido es impecable y didáctico; quizás algo denso y repetitivo a momentos y estrictamente orientado a demostrar su tesis, pero muy bueno.
December 31, 2021
Complete banger. A complicated, convincing narrative based on queer and feminist readings of history that weaves together several intellectual fields.
Cooper explores the manner in which neoliberalism (the influential intellectual school of thought, not the mindless slur hurled by the Chapo/Red Scare crowd) and social conservatism fed into one another and shaped public policy over the course of the 20th and into the 21st century. Manages to converse with intellectual history like Quinn Slobodian's Globalists, economic history like Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, urban histories like Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's Race for Profit, and policy books like Suzanne Mettler's The Submerged State in a cohesive, compelling way.
Cooper makes a really fascinating connection between the libertarian obsession with freedom of contract and it's dependence upon deeply racialized and heteronormative (and oppressive) family structures (a man need not contract out to the market the washing of his dishes or his clothes, after all!) These heteronormative family structures are by their nature meant to be shielded from interference in the market. This shielding is meant to absolve the state from any responsibility in fostering human freedom or achieving equitable outcomes, while satisfying the ideological aims of both libertarians and social conservatives. It is this confluence that has made the alliance so potent and the policy flowing from it into fields like housing, welfare, wealth and student loans so destructive over the last 40 years.
If I had a few minor quibbles, it's that I wish Cooper was better versed in disability theory and history. She takes as a given that community-based care is a neoliberal and conservative scam rather than a better (if grossly underfunded) solution to keeping people in institutions. I also wish the book was longer and took more time to further elucidate certain gaps or fill in connections between poor laws in the Gilded era, the pre-war Progressive era and the New Deal.
Minor quibbles. In all, a rather breathtaking account.
Cooper explores the manner in which neoliberalism (the influential intellectual school of thought, not the mindless slur hurled by the Chapo/Red Scare crowd) and social conservatism fed into one another and shaped public policy over the course of the 20th and into the 21st century. Manages to converse with intellectual history like Quinn Slobodian's Globalists, economic history like Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, urban histories like Kenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's Race for Profit, and policy books like Suzanne Mettler's The Submerged State in a cohesive, compelling way.
Cooper makes a really fascinating connection between the libertarian obsession with freedom of contract and it's dependence upon deeply racialized and heteronormative (and oppressive) family structures (a man need not contract out to the market the washing of his dishes or his clothes, after all!) These heteronormative family structures are by their nature meant to be shielded from interference in the market. This shielding is meant to absolve the state from any responsibility in fostering human freedom or achieving equitable outcomes, while satisfying the ideological aims of both libertarians and social conservatives. It is this confluence that has made the alliance so potent and the policy flowing from it into fields like housing, welfare, wealth and student loans so destructive over the last 40 years.
If I had a few minor quibbles, it's that I wish Cooper was better versed in disability theory and history. She takes as a given that community-based care is a neoliberal and conservative scam rather than a better (if grossly underfunded) solution to keeping people in institutions. I also wish the book was longer and took more time to further elucidate certain gaps or fill in connections between poor laws in the Gilded era, the pre-war Progressive era and the New Deal.
Minor quibbles. In all, a rather breathtaking account.
October 2, 2020
This is easily one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read. It took me a long time to get through it because I couldn’t stand to give it anything less than my full attention. No matter your background, this book will teach you 1) something you’re surprised you didn’t know 2) something you’d rather you now not know 3) something you thought you already understood but only really knew what you’d heard from others. If you’ve ever wondered what in the world is a neoliberal or neoconservative, and you have the spoons, then this is the book for you.
January 11, 2022
very, very good and thorough on the alignments of the 60s-2000s that linked religion, conservatism, and neoliberal/neoconservative social and economic policies into their present and unshakeable form.
August 18, 2025
Picked this back up after abandoning it for a while and I’m so glad that I did. Brilliant analysis, both in terms of altering how I see radical politics/economic history and for what it contributes to my thinking about liberalism and individuals/collectives. I can already tell I’ll be coming back to this one a lot.
July 8, 2018
The book is primarily an intellectual history, synthesizing connections between neoliberalism, neo-conservatism and the idea of traditional families.
That's right. The central thesis of the book is that neoliberalism should be understood as seeing the "traditional" family as the necessary and proper fundamental unit of a well functioning community.
Not the atomized, narcissistic and solitary individual homo economicus it's supposed to fetishize. Hot-take indeed.
Quoting Gary Becker:
[Becker] argues that the familial incentive toward altruism is as central to the constitution of the free market as the utilitarian incentive of self-interested exchange.
The nature of the family altruism in some sense represents an internal exception to the free market, an immanent order of noncontractual obligations and inalienable services without which the world of contract would cease to function.
This premise is so constitutive of economic liberalism, both classical and neoliberal, that it is rarely articulated as such.
Yet it explains why, in Wendy Brown’s words, private family values constitute the secret underside of liberal contractualism.
we can see the connection between neoliberalism and neoconservatism:
Neo-liberals are particularly concerned about the enormous social costs that derive from the breakdown of the stable Fordist family: the costs that have been incurred, for example, by women who opt for no-fault divorce, women who have children out of wedlock or those who engage in unprotected sex without private insurance; and the fact that these costs accrue to the government and taxpayer rather than the private family.
Although they are much more prepared than are social conservatives to accommodate changes in the nature and form of relationships within the family, neoliberal economists and legal theorists wish to reestablish the private family as the primary source of economic security and a comprehensive alternative to the welfare state.
If American welfare reform has been singularly focused on the question of marriage promotion and responsible family formation in the past few decades, it is thanks to the ongoing collaboration between neoliberals and social conservatives on this point in particular.
And related:
German political economist Wolfgang Streeck, whose recent work reflects at length on what he sees as the causal relationship between the flexible employment contract and the “flexible family.”
Streeck is concerned here with the dismantling of the standard postwar employment relationship and its correlate, the so-called Fordist family consisting of a male worker, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and two or more children.
As he notes, the economic security of the postwar era was premised on a tightly enforced sexual division of labor that relegated women to lower-paid, precarious forms of employment and indexed the wage of the Fordist worker to the costs of maintaining a wife and children at home.
How and why did this particular architecture of economic security crumble so rapidly in the 1970s, Streeck asks, and why did its decline provoke so little opposition from those who benefited so much from it?
Searching for an answer to this question, he notes that “the social and family structure that the standard employment relationship had once underwritten has itself dissolved in a process of truly revolutionary change.
In fact, it appears that the Fordist family was replaced by a flexible family in much the same way as Fordist employment was replaced by flexible employment, during the same period and also all across the Western world.”
The destabilization of the long-term marital contract, Streeck wants to argue, occurred a short but significant time before the dismantling of the Fordist employment relationship and can be seen as having provoked the decline of the latter.
The revolution in family law and intimate relationships that occurred in the 1960s—from the introduction of no-fault divorce to the growing acceptance of cohabitation—destroyed the very raison d’étre of the Fordist family wage and thereby led to its gradual phasing out over the following years.
If women were no longer tied to men in long-term relation- ships of economic dependence, and if men were no longer obliged to look after a wife and children for life, then who would be left to defend that great Fordist institution of economic security, the family wage?
Even more,
Emphatically, what prompted their reaction was not the New Deal welfare state itself (although neoliberals certainly had a long tradition of critique on this front) but rather the panoply of liberation movements that emerged out of and in excess of the postwar Keynesian order toward the end of the 1960s.
At various moments between the 1960s and 1980s, poverty activists, welfare militants, feminists, AIDS activists, and public-interest lawyers articulated a novel politics of redistribution that delinked risk protection from the sexual division of labor and social insurance from sexual normativity.
These movements were historically unique in that they continued to fight for greater wealth and income redistribution while refusing the normative constraints of the Fordist family wage.
While neoliberals and neoconservatives were sur- prisingly sympathetic to efforts to democratize the New Deal welfare state—most notably when it came to the inclusion of African American men within the family wage system—they balked when the Fordist family itself came into question.
In short, it was only when the liberation movements of the 1960s began to challenge the sexual normativity of the family wage as the linchpin and foundation of welfare capitalism that the neoliberal-new social conservative alliance came into being.
What they proposed in response to this “crisis” was not a return to the Fordist family wage (this particular nostalgia would be the hallmark of the left), but rather the strategic reinvention of a much older, poor-law tradition of private family responsibility, using the combined instruments of welfare reform, changes to taxation, and monetary policy.
Under their influence, welfare has been transformed from a redistributive program into an immense federal apparatus for policing the private family responsibilities…
Which makes the recent acceptance of ands laws for same sex marriage quite interesting:
The LGBT movement has subsequently moved in the opposite direction: Rather than challenge the limitations intrinsic to the public-private welfare state, it has instead fought for inclusion within an already exclusive system of private, work-based health insurance.
At a point in time when access to healthcare coverage through full-time, secure employment (and by extension) marriage, has become an increasingly rare proposition, the LGBT movement has devoted much of its energies to attaining this shrinking privilege.
The notion that same-sex marriage would ensure access to private healthcare insurance has thus become a key plank in the reform agenda of LGBT rights advocates.
Similar arguments have been made with respect to Social Security, which in the event of premature death provides survivor’s benefits for widowed spouses and children.
At a time of shrinking political horizons, same-sex marriage proponents look to the surviving remnants of the family wage–social insurance benefits premised on marital and familial status–to argue that they too should be included in this last vestige of Fordist normativity.
The call to recognize same-sex marriage thus becomes a demand for inclusion within a family wage system that is itself in terminal decline.
But beyond this, many of the same voices in the same-sex marriage debate simultaneously adopt the neoliberal argument that legal recognition of their unions will ultimately allow same-sex couples to take care of themselves and thus renounce their rights to state welfare altogether.
In this optic, the campaign for same-sex marriage no longer entails a demand for inclusion in the family wage system of social insurance but rather an affirmation of one’s ability to live independently of the state. By allowing lesbians and gay men to enter into legally enforceable and long-term obligations of care and mutual support, it is suggested, the recognition of gay marriage will induct same-sex couples into a neoliberal ethic of family responsibility.
and
By any standard, the terrain traversed by queer politics over the
last three decades has been extreme, moving as it has from the radio
cal antinormativity of ACT UP and Queer Nation to the reproductive
legitimacy of the same-sex marriage campaign. We live in an era where
normativity itself no longer appears to play the overwhelmingly exclusionary—and hence central—role it once did in the regulation of sexuality in the mid- to late twentieth century, despite its prominence as a concept in contemporary queer studies.
The fact of non-normative sexuality is no longer defined as criminal or pathological by the social sciences; nor is it likely to trigger a whole series of medical and psychiatric
interventions on the part of the welfare state and its allied institutions
(although these older forms of social stigmatization are now being rapidly replaced by new kinds of religiously inflected moral exclusion).
We live at a time where the public affirmation of one's status as a homosexual will no longer automatically exclude a person from employment, credit, or housing (which is not to say that homophobia no longer exists—far from it). In the spirit of Foucault's periodization of power, in fact, we might classify this period as postnormative—if we take normativity to refer to the precise forms of statistical exclusion that accompanied and shaped the Fordist family wage, along with their epistemological expression in the biological, psychological, and social sciences, where different kinds of sexuality were once overwhelmingly defined in terms of pathological deviance.
In this sense, perhaps, Foucault was right to see the advent of neoliberalism as marking the passage toward a postnormative formation of power
Some interesting stuff about education too. How are the UC's can no longer provide free higher education:
For their part, neoliberal economists such as Milton Friedman and James M. Buchanan also suspected some kind of causal connection between free public education and rising militantism of the student movement.
Drawing on the pragmatic insights of rational choice economics, which understands the most antisocial behavior as a rational response to market signals, they sought to show how the creation of free public goods such as education could act as a perverse incentive toward destructive anarchism and, conversely, how the pricing of these same goods could reverse such alarming trends.
The question of family was central to neoliberal arguments against public investment in education and key to their proposals for a new economic order powered by private investment and household debt.
Both Chicago school human capital theorists and the public choice economists of the Virginia school justified their opposition to public deficit spending by pointing to its role in inciting the anti-authoritarianism of the student movement. Although their arguments often meshed with the overtly moralizing rhetoric of neoconservatives such as Sameuel Huntington, the neoliberals offered a much more adaptive and flexible solution to what they perceived as a threat to inherited wealth and a decline in family responsibility.
Neoconservatives would spend the next few decades railing against affirmative action and fighting a cultural war against the new minority disciplines of black, ethnic, and women's studies.
Neoliberal economists also opposed affirmative action as a distortion of the allocative virtues of the free market.
But unlike the neoconservatives, they were more interested in the positive task of developing an entirely new model of education funding—one that would replace public with private deficit spending and in so doing reinstate the economic obligations of family.
Origins for the rise of student debt?
"…critical to policy debates around human capital funding: First, how
much public investment is needed? Second, should the returns from
public investment accrue to the individuals in whose training the
investment was made?" Without offering an explicit response to
the first question, Friedman and Kuznets suggested that in an ideal
world, existing inequalities in education and wages could be resolved
entirely through the private capital markets: With a few changes to
corporate law, students could be persuaded to sell "stock" in them.
selves and obligated to pay a portion of their future wages as "dividends" to their public of stockholders.
In this remarkable passage, Friedman and Kuznets see students not so much as investors in their
own human capital as corporations selling a stake in their human capital to outside investors–a vision that has now in large part been realized, albeit in the form of debt- rather than equity-based finance, and crucially without the usual corporate protections of limited liability or bankruptcy laws.
In their 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Rose and Milton Friedman came out even more decisively in favor of private investment
in human capital, Here they argued that the returns to investment in education accrued entirely to the individual student and that any ostensible social benefits were merely the summation of private wage gains.
The individual student should therefore be held responsible for the costs of his education.
The Friedmans concurred with Schultz that there had been massive underinvestment in higher education, but unlike Schultz, they believed that this failure could best be remedied through the liberalization of credit.
The fact that low-income students were unable to pay for a degree and thus discriminated against in the labor market could be attributed to "imperfections in the capital market."
There's a lot of interesting stuff and the book is very thorough.
Kinda reminds me of Chomsky's Understanding Power: "cite everything back and forth twenty ways to Tuesday".
But similarly, the book still reads a little biased, and I am no historian to tell whether there are alternative interpretations and what the author omits.
On the other hand it does clarify one thing–the postwar years were interesting–and something unlikely we'll see again.
Parts also reminded me of Eric Hoffer's prescient criticism of mass movements in how often they fail to achieve what they want.
Read
September 20, 2024Las mujeres cedemos antes a la presión social que los hombres. Nuestra mayor dependencia del entorno logra que, como masa, seamos menos férreas en nuestras convicciones, lo cual dé lugar a gran parte del pensamiento misógino más puro. Esto no justifica ni agresiones ni la mayor parte del odio que se dirige hacia nosotras. Pero tal vez explique que podamos salir invictas de muchas situaciones traumáticas que los hombres vayan a llevar peor.
También explica que recibamos favores con más alegría y tranquilidad o que construyamos una identidad relacional más fuerte. En esto profundizaré más adelante. Lo que he aprendido leyendo este libro es que una parte súper importante de la feminidad se ha construído sobre la idea de familia y no se me ocurre del todo cómo separarla de ella. A pesar del entorno tóxico y dañino en que se puede convertir.
También explica que recibamos favores con más alegría y tranquilidad o que construyamos una identidad relacional más fuerte. En esto profundizaré más adelante. Lo que he aprendido leyendo este libro es que una parte súper importante de la feminidad se ha construído sobre la idea de familia y no se me ocurre del todo cómo separarla de ella. A pesar del entorno tóxico y dañino en que se puede convertir.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 31, 2020
Have a lot of quibbles with this one, but undeniably brilliant and essential.
February 11, 2023
Essential
March 11, 2018
This is a really unique take on contemporary cultural politics and macroeconomics, because Cooper locates a conservative role for the nuclear family unit as the key ideological plank/assumption of both neoliberal political economy and new social conservatism (a loose alliance of neoconservatives, Evangelicals, and others on the post-New Deal right). She argues that the belief in the family as a moral and economic unit underpins both philosophies--albeit in different ways--and that this united assumption allows the two ideological strands to work together toward shared goals.
The new social conservative obsession with family values is much more obvious, as their pro-fatherhood, anti-gay, anti-permissive society role in the culture wars is well known. Out of a moral sense of tradition and a conservative fear that the old values (nostalgically viewed through rose tinted glasses) which brought ethical order were being undone, especially during the 1960s. The neoliberal investment in the family is more subtle, but no less pervasive. Cooper argues that the neoliberal focus on family is grounded not in moral values, but in economic ones, because the state can offload the costs of social welfare onto families--eliminating or reducing, for instance, social security and thereby forcing families to support the elderly and to save for individual retirement as opposed to relying on the state, or introducing a credit based system for higher education rather than the Great Society era grants system. Unfortunately, as Cooper explains, these systems did not do anything near what neoliberal economists had promised (i.e., decease inequality, preserve social stability, and save the state money), but they did disproportionately affect the poor, people whose income was based on wages rather than capital gains, women, queers, and racial minorities. As David Harvey said in A Short History of Neoliberalism, neoliberalism is ultimately premised on the restoration of class power--and Cooper's book shows how the ideological tool of family values and family reliance was used skillfully to restore class power for the wealthy at the expense of those who had benefited the most from social progress under the New Deal, Great Society, Civil Rights, and Women's Liberation. By offloading the costs of running society from the government (i.e., from society at large) onto private families, those families most able to sustain themselves (i.e., the wealthy and secure) were relatively unharmed, while those most vulnerable saw their security undermined and replaced with false promises and paternalistic moralizing.
The new social conservative obsession with family values is much more obvious, as their pro-fatherhood, anti-gay, anti-permissive society role in the culture wars is well known. Out of a moral sense of tradition and a conservative fear that the old values (nostalgically viewed through rose tinted glasses) which brought ethical order were being undone, especially during the 1960s. The neoliberal investment in the family is more subtle, but no less pervasive. Cooper argues that the neoliberal focus on family is grounded not in moral values, but in economic ones, because the state can offload the costs of social welfare onto families--eliminating or reducing, for instance, social security and thereby forcing families to support the elderly and to save for individual retirement as opposed to relying on the state, or introducing a credit based system for higher education rather than the Great Society era grants system. Unfortunately, as Cooper explains, these systems did not do anything near what neoliberal economists had promised (i.e., decease inequality, preserve social stability, and save the state money), but they did disproportionately affect the poor, people whose income was based on wages rather than capital gains, women, queers, and racial minorities. As David Harvey said in A Short History of Neoliberalism, neoliberalism is ultimately premised on the restoration of class power--and Cooper's book shows how the ideological tool of family values and family reliance was used skillfully to restore class power for the wealthy at the expense of those who had benefited the most from social progress under the New Deal, Great Society, Civil Rights, and Women's Liberation. By offloading the costs of running society from the government (i.e., from society at large) onto private families, those families most able to sustain themselves (i.e., the wealthy and secure) were relatively unharmed, while those most vulnerable saw their security undermined and replaced with false promises and paternalistic moralizing.
March 9, 2019
Cooper has written an important, impressive history of how the family sutured neoliberalism and neoconservatism in US politics. It’s an important corrective to, and at times a damning critique of, a kind of left analysis that describes struggles over gender and sexuality as ancillary distractions from struggles over the means of production, and its powerfully and clearly written and well-argues. I found the chapters on the inheritance tax, AIDS, and student debt particularly useful.
January 4, 2025
One of those books I'll think about for a long time, and not a bad way to cap off (possibly) the worst year on record! Yay, neoliberalism
This was a much-needed polemic challenging certain segments of the left that continue to insist upon the separation of "culture" from economic conditions. Cooper shows that we are ceding crucial ground to the right when we dismiss culture war rhetoric as mere fodder incidental to the central material regressions of our age: the expansion of private capital, aided and abetted by the state, and precarization of labor. In fact, the capital-labor paradigm by itself stops short as an explanation for this shift initiated post-Volcker shock. This is as much a story of white male reaction to the relative successes of national socioeconomic redistribution schemes in the '60s and '70s, and the elite neoconservative-neoliberal alliance that spawned a counterrevolution.
Contradictions abound. How could access to credit markets and government-subsidized homeownership breed fear and resentment, namely of the specter of the racialized freeloader? How do we countenance the apparent modernity of a "property owning democracy" and the neoliberal state's promises of inclusion with the resurgence of conservatism and calls for the full restoration of the patriarchal Fordist family? Cooper's answer lies in the schematic of the "double movement" of capital's generative adaptation and expansion on the one hand, and its drive to restrict and control the distribution of wealth through the reinstatement of the traditional family on the other.
The mystifications of capitalism, which the left is equally vulnerable to, present neoliberalism as the tendency toward ever-freer markets and atomized individuals--a society of asset owners and their private, speculative fortunes. A more accurate image would be that of the single-family home, where wealth accumulates and encloses itself through the reassertion of the restrictive institutions of race, gender, and family. The result of capital's regressive-progressive dynamic is a broadly increasing reliance on family transfers of wealth, which unravels in an upward chain of accumulation that haunts all of our political horizons.
This was a much-needed polemic challenging certain segments of the left that continue to insist upon the separation of "culture" from economic conditions. Cooper shows that we are ceding crucial ground to the right when we dismiss culture war rhetoric as mere fodder incidental to the central material regressions of our age: the expansion of private capital, aided and abetted by the state, and precarization of labor. In fact, the capital-labor paradigm by itself stops short as an explanation for this shift initiated post-Volcker shock. This is as much a story of white male reaction to the relative successes of national socioeconomic redistribution schemes in the '60s and '70s, and the elite neoconservative-neoliberal alliance that spawned a counterrevolution.
Contradictions abound. How could access to credit markets and government-subsidized homeownership breed fear and resentment, namely of the specter of the racialized freeloader? How do we countenance the apparent modernity of a "property owning democracy" and the neoliberal state's promises of inclusion with the resurgence of conservatism and calls for the full restoration of the patriarchal Fordist family? Cooper's answer lies in the schematic of the "double movement" of capital's generative adaptation and expansion on the one hand, and its drive to restrict and control the distribution of wealth through the reinstatement of the traditional family on the other.
The mystifications of capitalism, which the left is equally vulnerable to, present neoliberalism as the tendency toward ever-freer markets and atomized individuals--a society of asset owners and their private, speculative fortunes. A more accurate image would be that of the single-family home, where wealth accumulates and encloses itself through the reassertion of the restrictive institutions of race, gender, and family. The result of capital's regressive-progressive dynamic is a broadly increasing reliance on family transfers of wealth, which unravels in an upward chain of accumulation that haunts all of our political horizons.
December 22, 2025
This book investigates the familial politics of neoliberalism in the US, how neoliberal thinkers (from both the Chicago and Virginia schools) conceptualised the private family and the working alliance they developed with neoconservatives in order to reassert its role as the foundation of economic security. She shows us how this uneasy but powerful coalition sought to reinvent the poor law tradition of family responsibility and how they capitalised on growing discontent with the expansion of social welfare programs to black single mothers in the late Fordist era to do so.
The book is exemplary in drawing out the racial and sexual politics of the fordist family wage and explicitly rejects the romanticisation of post war social democracy found amongst some left feminist political economists. Having just read about the black women for wages for housework campaign in Emily Callaci’s recent book, her analysis of the racist attacks on Aid for Dependent Children programs spelled out the terrain in which those groups were fighting and makes me evermore convinced of Cooper’s argument that the neoliberal counterrevolution specifically sought to dismantle the material concessions racialised communities, women and queer people had battled for, not just social welfare in general.
The analysis of the sexual politics of neoliberalism - both the Chicago school’s response to the AIDS crisis and how the expansion of consumer credit under Clinton dovetailed with the emergence of gay assimilationalist politics - was also really compelling and made me realise how surface level a lot of discussions of homonormativity are. The homonormativity discussion is not a focus of the book but is helping me think about how homonormativity emerged in a particular historic juncture with a specific material basis in the 90s and 00s US economy which helps explain why it doesn’t feel as salient a concept now without reworking.
There’s so much to this book and it’s so wide ranging - hard to even touch the surface of its contributions!! I found some of the student debt stuff less interesting but it is important to understand lol. I took time going through it in depth, taking notes as I went, which was definitely worth it as it’s a bit dense at times.
Overall a banger
The book is exemplary in drawing out the racial and sexual politics of the fordist family wage and explicitly rejects the romanticisation of post war social democracy found amongst some left feminist political economists. Having just read about the black women for wages for housework campaign in Emily Callaci’s recent book, her analysis of the racist attacks on Aid for Dependent Children programs spelled out the terrain in which those groups were fighting and makes me evermore convinced of Cooper’s argument that the neoliberal counterrevolution specifically sought to dismantle the material concessions racialised communities, women and queer people had battled for, not just social welfare in general.
The analysis of the sexual politics of neoliberalism - both the Chicago school’s response to the AIDS crisis and how the expansion of consumer credit under Clinton dovetailed with the emergence of gay assimilationalist politics - was also really compelling and made me realise how surface level a lot of discussions of homonormativity are. The homonormativity discussion is not a focus of the book but is helping me think about how homonormativity emerged in a particular historic juncture with a specific material basis in the 90s and 00s US economy which helps explain why it doesn’t feel as salient a concept now without reworking.
There’s so much to this book and it’s so wide ranging - hard to even touch the surface of its contributions!! I found some of the student debt stuff less interesting but it is important to understand lol. I took time going through it in depth, taking notes as I went, which was definitely worth it as it’s a bit dense at times.
Overall a banger
December 31, 2025
Highly recommend this book for anyone interested in political economy. I have a hard time understanding macroeconomics; I did have to furrow my brow and reread paragraphs of this text. But this book rewards attention: Cooper helped me understand the stakes and provided a clear analysis of economic policy in the U.S. from the 1970s to 2010s.
For the past two weeks I've been talking to everyone I can about the following insights:
-The ruling class deliberately chose to deflate the value of wages and welfare and inflate the value of assets (with the Volker shock, Clinton's welfare reform, Greenspan's time at the Fed, etc.).
-Those policies killed social mobility and entrenched inherited wealth.
-Welfare was replaced by democratization of credit. Instead of giving people aid, you could give them a loan to buy a house so they could join the owning class -- ending in the mortgage crisis of 2008.
-Or you could give people student loans, until an entire generation is crushed by debt. At the same time, you can demonize those students as somehow frivolous and upper class in order to win the votes of the white working class. (Reagan became governor of California through this move)
-Action to address racism and misogyny at universities has been narrowed to a 'personal injury' litigation framework that holds no real political promise and at best creates patronizing HR rules.
-Welfare has been transferred over to evangelizing religious organizations, which bully people into standard gender roles and nuclear families. To quote Cooper: "What we are witnessing here is not a return to private charity as it existed before the New Deal, but rather the implementation of a form of structural charity -- structural in the sense that it is fully aided and abetted by the state, but charitable in the sense that it retains the discretionary, unpredictable and ad-hoc nature of private philanthropy."
For the past two weeks I've been talking to everyone I can about the following insights:
-The ruling class deliberately chose to deflate the value of wages and welfare and inflate the value of assets (with the Volker shock, Clinton's welfare reform, Greenspan's time at the Fed, etc.).
-Those policies killed social mobility and entrenched inherited wealth.
-Welfare was replaced by democratization of credit. Instead of giving people aid, you could give them a loan to buy a house so they could join the owning class -- ending in the mortgage crisis of 2008.
-Or you could give people student loans, until an entire generation is crushed by debt. At the same time, you can demonize those students as somehow frivolous and upper class in order to win the votes of the white working class. (Reagan became governor of California through this move)
-Action to address racism and misogyny at universities has been narrowed to a 'personal injury' litigation framework that holds no real political promise and at best creates patronizing HR rules.
-Welfare has been transferred over to evangelizing religious organizations, which bully people into standard gender roles and nuclear families. To quote Cooper: "What we are witnessing here is not a return to private charity as it existed before the New Deal, but rather the implementation of a form of structural charity -- structural in the sense that it is fully aided and abetted by the state, but charitable in the sense that it retains the discretionary, unpredictable and ad-hoc nature of private philanthropy."
August 27, 2024
This book is in the same company as Caliban and the Witch in terms of pulling back the curtain on the motivations and ideologies underlying legal and political history. Cooper is interested in understanding the alliance between neoconservatives and neoliberals, who seem opposed in many respects. By mining the writings and political moves of actors in both camps, she reveals the family as a foundational commonality in both ideologies. For neoconservatives, the family, with its breadwinning father, subservient housewife, and dependent children, represented the ideal patriarchal form of society. For neoliberals, the family represents the ideal unit to absorb harmful externalities of free-market capitalism and the foundation of economic agency with its surplus of unpaid labor.
Both groups recognized the threat of government welfare to shatter the family as it had traditionally been composed and cast this threat in moral terms of personal responsibility. All of the major political moves by both neoliberals and neoconservatives to gut public services and welfare can be understood as moves to moralize and enforce an approach to poor laws and welfare that emphasizes personal responsibility for one's own actions within the context of a meritocracy that gives people what they deserve. For neoconservatives, this is just the proper moral order of things. For neoliberals the market must be free to operate and people must be free to play economics without any interference from the state, and in some cases, must be forced to play in order to survive.
The book is dense and complex, but well worth the effort. Cooper has done a great service here in her careful and complete analysis. Anyone who wants to understand the current political landscape in the US needs to understand the arguments in this book.
Both groups recognized the threat of government welfare to shatter the family as it had traditionally been composed and cast this threat in moral terms of personal responsibility. All of the major political moves by both neoliberals and neoconservatives to gut public services and welfare can be understood as moves to moralize and enforce an approach to poor laws and welfare that emphasizes personal responsibility for one's own actions within the context of a meritocracy that gives people what they deserve. For neoconservatives, this is just the proper moral order of things. For neoliberals the market must be free to operate and people must be free to play economics without any interference from the state, and in some cases, must be forced to play in order to survive.
The book is dense and complex, but well worth the effort. Cooper has done a great service here in her careful and complete analysis. Anyone who wants to understand the current political landscape in the US needs to understand the arguments in this book.
June 21, 2019
I thought that I knew a lot about neoliberalism, but Family Values transformed my understanding of it as an ideology and a political program. Each chapter covers a different aspect of social policy (welfare, health insurance, education), but if there is one theme that connects them all, it's the deep complementarity between neoliberal concerns about moral hazard (lax government policies creating incentives for risky or perverse behavior) and the desire of social conservatives to restore the authority of traditional institutions like the family and the church. Libertarian rhetoric about the market expanding the sphere of individual freedom to pursue a wide range of lifestyles definitely rings more hollow after reading this book.
If there's one quibble that I have with the book, it's that Cooper doesn't really talk about race very much, and therefore misses a great opportunity to connect neoliberalism and the new social conservatism to the war on crime and the expansion of the carceral state. In "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime," Elizabeth Hinton talks about how the perception that Great Society social programs undermined traditional gender roles -- which is a recurring motif in Family Values as a point of agreement between neoliberals and neoconservatives -- fueled the increasingly punitive approach to urban poverty and crime from the 1970s on. This would have been a profitable angle for Cooper to explore.
Nonetheless, this was a terrific book that has made me think differently about a lot of different policy issues, and about both neoliberalism as a political theory and the evolution of American conservatism.
If there's one quibble that I have with the book, it's that Cooper doesn't really talk about race very much, and therefore misses a great opportunity to connect neoliberalism and the new social conservatism to the war on crime and the expansion of the carceral state. In "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime," Elizabeth Hinton talks about how the perception that Great Society social programs undermined traditional gender roles -- which is a recurring motif in Family Values as a point of agreement between neoliberals and neoconservatives -- fueled the increasingly punitive approach to urban poverty and crime from the 1970s on. This would have been a profitable angle for Cooper to explore.
Nonetheless, this was a terrific book that has made me think differently about a lot of different policy issues, and about both neoliberalism as a political theory and the evolution of American conservatism.
September 11, 2017
I've recommended this book at least a dozen times while reading it, and can't speak highly enough of Cooper's argument—a landmark thesis that joins capital to culture, and shows how modern capitalist policies rely so heavily on reinforcing sex, gender, and race hierarchies. Love, love, love, discussion of family law and the eerie parallels between post-Reconstruction racism and Clinton's post-welfare policies. Fills in a lot of the cultural, domestic holes in Brenner's analysis of our midcentury golden era, as well as the motivations and fall-out from the Volcker shock.
If you're interested in sex and gender, BLM, healthcare, labor politics, queer politics, left politics ... pretty much anything to do with political changes of the past half century, this book is for you. This review in Dissent magazine does the book more justice:
If you're interested in sex and gender, BLM, healthcare, labor politics, queer politics, left politics ... pretty much anything to do with political changes of the past half century, this book is for you. This review in Dissent magazine does the book more justice:
She covers a vast number of themes: welfare reform, deindustrialization, the AIDS crisis, incarceration, spiraling inequality, the return of religion, and the role of securitized credit markets in mortgages and student debt. These discussions bring together intellectual, political, economic, and cultural history into a satisfying, and sometimes exhilarating, unity. These familiar stories, she shows, are bound up in one overarching narrative: the installation of the nuclear family, and not the state, as the privileged site of debt, wealth transfer, and care.
January 5, 2021
just God level stuff. The chapter on the California tax revolt is essential, more so paired with Mike Davis's "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn." Together they make the case that we can largely thank Prop 13 for the wildfires. Cooper's point is that Prop 13 synthesized fears about both racial and sexual degeneracy and entrenched the disproportionate political clout of California’s most affluent. Davis takes it from there, speaking to how this allowed the drawbridge to be pulled up, as it were, driving a growing population on the edge of precarity into fire-prone areas.
Bringing this mentality full circle, in late 2020, California revisited the foundational principles underlying Prop 13 and the 1970’s tax revolt through two ballot measures, Propositions 15 and 22. Collectively, these initiatives gave residents an opportunity to reconsider the state’s stance on dismantling social insurance.
Sadly, residents again rallied in opposition to the prospect of redistributive welfare, voting against raising taxes on the wealthy, and voting in favor of pushing gig workers into serfdom. In the aftermath of Prop 15 and 22, the downwardly mobile will be an endless source of kindling for the wildfires, and it's hard to think of a more apt visual metaphor for Cooper's epic genealogy of moral hazards, institutional and otherwise.
Bringing this mentality full circle, in late 2020, California revisited the foundational principles underlying Prop 13 and the 1970’s tax revolt through two ballot measures, Propositions 15 and 22. Collectively, these initiatives gave residents an opportunity to reconsider the state’s stance on dismantling social insurance.
Sadly, residents again rallied in opposition to the prospect of redistributive welfare, voting against raising taxes on the wealthy, and voting in favor of pushing gig workers into serfdom. In the aftermath of Prop 15 and 22, the downwardly mobile will be an endless source of kindling for the wildfires, and it's hard to think of a more apt visual metaphor for Cooper's epic genealogy of moral hazards, institutional and otherwise.
August 28, 2024
Cooper contextualizes the policies of the modern Democratic Party that may otherwise seem perplexing. The text revealed that neoliberals and new social conservatives are allied on promoting the nuclear family because it protects the wealth and power of the upper class. When the neoliberals did not effectively attempt to stop the appeal of Roe v. Wade, I had assumed that it was because they supported the births of more capitalist workers, since many millennials are refusing to have children. Cooper helped me realize that neoliberals promote the nuclear family because, like the English Poor Laws of the 16th century, it forces people to rely on the family for material, emotional, and physical support rather than the state and it’s welfare programs. Feminist and Queer liberation efforts challenge the legitimacy of the nuclear family, and thus the neoliberal capitalist order. The overclass/exploiter class (to which neoliberals and new social conservative belong) have chastised the dissolution of the nuclear family, blaming “welfare queens” and unreliable fathers for a manufactured inflation crisis; therefore justifying cuts to the social safety net and reserving wealth for the upper class. Cooper provides extensive evidence for their claims. I wish that they had devoted more of the book to describing the policies championed by the new social conservatives.
April 2, 2025
So incredible. I will make sure to read at least 3 more Melinda Cooper books after this because her scholarship style is so unique; she combines knowledge from macroeconomics/Federal Reserve policy, legal literature, sociology/social theory, social/intellectual history, etc. together while still crafting an integrated narrative.
Because of this the book ends up being super dense but extremely interesting, and the narrative presented is divided into huge chapters which are divided into many 6-10 page sections that give super detailed mini-histories and expositions about many different subjects; you'll get a section on the AIDS breakout and how lawyers from the Chicago School of Economics responded, on the evolution of family law/morality from 19th-century America through the New Deal, on the welfare movements of the 60s and 70s, on the privatization and outsourcing of welfare to religious institutions (and the political evolution of those institutions from the 60s), on how a good chunk of the Reagan revolution came about from the unification of neoconservatives--who were appalled at women liberating themselves from the family unit--with neoliberals like Milton Friedman, etc etc.
These mini-histories aren't presented chronologically and do cover a lot of ground, but the story presented about the evolving ethics of debt, welfare, and familial structures and obligations is still super concise and fascinating.
Because of this the book ends up being super dense but extremely interesting, and the narrative presented is divided into huge chapters which are divided into many 6-10 page sections that give super detailed mini-histories and expositions about many different subjects; you'll get a section on the AIDS breakout and how lawyers from the Chicago School of Economics responded, on the evolution of family law/morality from 19th-century America through the New Deal, on the welfare movements of the 60s and 70s, on the privatization and outsourcing of welfare to religious institutions (and the political evolution of those institutions from the 60s), on how a good chunk of the Reagan revolution came about from the unification of neoconservatives--who were appalled at women liberating themselves from the family unit--with neoliberals like Milton Friedman, etc etc.
These mini-histories aren't presented chronologically and do cover a lot of ground, but the story presented about the evolving ethics of debt, welfare, and familial structures and obligations is still super concise and fascinating.
January 16, 2020
I was truly amazed by this book. I wanted to know more about this curious phenomenon that I have observed in the States of right libertarians who have embraced very conservative social politics, like Tea Partiers who go in for free market cheerleading and anti-abortion stances. This book is such a good exposition of current politics on the much of the right. I am a physicist, not a sociologist, and I found it to be very clearly written and easy to understand, with a minimum of social science terminology that sometimes makes those writings difficult. I actually found it to be as compelling as a good murder mystery or sci fi novel in that it drew me in and made me curious about what was coming next. I've never experienced that with a book of this type. It read like top-notch investigative journalism and less like an academic monograph. At the same time, it is packed with a tremendous amount of good information, historical insight, and loads of sources. After reading this book I have a much deeper and realistic understanding of the last 40 years of U.S. history, not to mention the current state of affairs here. This book is essential if you want to understand the political climate of today and the emergence of Donald Trump. I would give it 6 stars if I could.
August 17, 2025
This was a very good read and it helped me put a lot of new puzzle pieces together. There were definitely parts that went a little over my head, and the language was difficult at times.
Two parts i found particularly interesting:
1) I have thought a lot about the push for same sex marriage and how it forces queerness into a heteronormative framework that often doesn’t feel like it fits, rather than legally, economically, socially de-privileging the institution of marriage. And have also thought about same sex marriage benefitting capitalism in that people are more likely to have kids aka produce future labor. But this was a totally new dimension for me to think about it in the context of welfare and how encouraging the formation of a traditional family means creating a private social safety net. so i felt kinda surprised i had never thought of that before… but i like that I was able to fit it into a web of previous thoughts
2) I have also obviously thought a lot about deinstitutionalization, and thought the connection about putting the role of care back onto the family was really interesting, and how the division of labor is going to fall on racialized/gendered lines. Ultimately there must be a way to have actually good state-sponsored care outside of institutions.
Two parts i found particularly interesting:
1) I have thought a lot about the push for same sex marriage and how it forces queerness into a heteronormative framework that often doesn’t feel like it fits, rather than legally, economically, socially de-privileging the institution of marriage. And have also thought about same sex marriage benefitting capitalism in that people are more likely to have kids aka produce future labor. But this was a totally new dimension for me to think about it in the context of welfare and how encouraging the formation of a traditional family means creating a private social safety net. so i felt kinda surprised i had never thought of that before… but i like that I was able to fit it into a web of previous thoughts
2) I have also obviously thought a lot about deinstitutionalization, and thought the connection about putting the role of care back onto the family was really interesting, and how the division of labor is going to fall on racialized/gendered lines. Ultimately there must be a way to have actually good state-sponsored care outside of institutions.
June 29, 2023
wow.
highly rated by academic inflation, but has no idea wtf she is talking about.
case in point:
"While neoliberals called for an ongoing reduction in budget allocations dedicated to welfare — intent on undercutting any possibility that the social wage might compete with the free-market wage — neoconservatives endorsed an expanding role for the state in the regulation of sexuality. Despite their differences, however, neoliberals and neoconservatives converged on the
necessity of reinstating the family as the foundation of social and economic order. Their alliance would profoundly shape the direction of social policy over the following decades, culminating in Clinton’s radical welfare reform of 1996."
absolute non-understanding of what neoliberalism is.
absolutely amazing how this gets published.
search tinyurl.com/antipsychology for a complete analysis.
absolutely amazing example of complete terrible work.
"peer review" is dead.
a phd is the new high school degree.
highly rated by academic inflation, but has no idea wtf she is talking about.
case in point:
"While neoliberals called for an ongoing reduction in budget allocations dedicated to welfare — intent on undercutting any possibility that the social wage might compete with the free-market wage — neoconservatives endorsed an expanding role for the state in the regulation of sexuality. Despite their differences, however, neoliberals and neoconservatives converged on the
necessity of reinstating the family as the foundation of social and economic order. Their alliance would profoundly shape the direction of social policy over the following decades, culminating in Clinton’s radical welfare reform of 1996."
absolute non-understanding of what neoliberalism is.
absolutely amazing how this gets published.
search tinyurl.com/antipsychology for a complete analysis.
absolutely amazing example of complete terrible work.
"peer review" is dead.
a phd is the new high school degree.
May 20, 2024
A brilliant look into how the neoliberal project fundamentally relies on the private family and all of its attendant responsibilities- despite how often it proclaims itself to be focused solely on individual freedom. I myself have been guilty of misunderstanding this point- I uncritically bought what the neoliberals were selling on face value. Cooper shows how the reinstitution of the family in the US as a social unit was carried out in a variety of contexts, ranging from juridical battles, the welfare system, public health systems, and higher education. We are shown how neoliberals and neoconservatives actually have a confluence of interests centered around the family and the role it should play in public life, and how their working partnership starting around the 1970's is less inexplicable than it might initially seem. Particularly interesting to me were the sections on debt, the "democratization of credit" in the 90's, and how advances in neoliberal tort law leads to "grievance politics" as the only acceptable external expression of social justice in the modern age.
January 30, 2020
by far the best explication of the modern alliance of neoliberalism & neoconservatism i've read... starts by pointing out that when neoliberals say "individual" they mean "family" and goes from there into, among other things, welfare reform (outsourcing of services to faith-based orgs), the successes and failures of the new left, the aids crisis, the volcker shock & the reorientation of the economy away from labour towards asset appreciation as moments in the long march of this frankensteinian conservatism.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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