Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism

"Melinda Cooper also focuses on the micro level, as do Foucault and Brown. But for her the most important institution at the micro level is not the individual but the family. She shows how neoliberals identified the family as a critically important institution, necessary in a neoliberal world to provide the kind of regulation that government would no longer supply itself. The supporters of neoliberalism wanted to create, on the one hand, free markets in which people were free to buy and sell as they wished and without external restraint; on the other hand, they also understood the dangers of market excess. Once you free people from constraint, you face the problem that people will not be able to restrain themselves. They might be tempted by the allure of markets to go into debt, to spend more money than they possessed. They might indulge too much a desire for alcohol, drugs, and sex. They might lose their jobs. They might cease to function as responsible citizens. If neoliberals wanted to shrink the state and eliminate it as force for regulation, economic or moral, what moral regulatory force did they imagine might take its place? The answer they gave was the family. Family responsibilities would constrain men unable otherwise to properly constrain themselves. Wives would discipline husbands. Mothers would teach their children the ways of the world, inculcating the values and morality necessary to flourish in a world of market freedom. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . In her book, Cooper analyses two groups who were thinking about the role of families in a neoliberal world. Neoconservatives believed that only patriarchal families of the traditional sort could provide the necessary market and moral discipline. These were families in which the man was the breadwinner and the woman was the homemaker, raising children. The woman’s primary responsibility was twofold: first, to put food on the table every night to take care of her man and get him ready for the next day of toil; and second, to bear children and inculcate in them proper moral values. All the better if these families had faith and followed in the ways of the divine. Love of country also would spring from these patriarchal, God-fearing families. The kind of micro society nurtured in such families would serve the macro world of free market economies well. This was the orientation of neo-Victorian thinkers such as Gertrude Himmelfarb and religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell. Another group thinking about the family in the neoliberal era were not committed to the patriarchal, heterosexual family model. Families, they argued, could come in all shapes and sizes. Cooper is particularly interested in how many gay men and women came to prioritise marriage and family life in the 1990s and 2000s, moving away from the queer politics that had dominated their movements in the 1980s. One might see this development as a natural response to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. But Cooper helps us to see that the move toward marriage and family life also facilitated a process through which gay men and women accommodated themselves to the neoliberal order. Their families were very different than the ones that Jerry Falwell celebrated. But their existence spread further the conviction that families were the critical moral and disciplining force in a world given over the market freedom. This move toward family life both legitimated gay life in ways that had previously proved elusive and strengthened the hegemony of the neoliberal order. Though Cooper’s book is very different from David Harvey’s, it raises once again the issue of consent: how such diverse groups of people came to believe that neoliberalism should guide the present and future of American society. Von Mises and Hayek did not write much about families. Wilhelm Röpke (a German ordoliberal of the 1940s,), however, devoted a great deal of thought to the broader issue that the family question raises: namely, which peoples of the world were capable of developing the virtue and discipline necessary to flourish in market societies? And Röpke’s answer was: those peoples who were European and raised in Christian traditions. By the 1960s, he had come to doubt the ability of non-Europeans and non-Christians to thrive in free market economies, which helps to explain why Röpke became a supporter of Apartheid in South Africa. Neoliberals in America were generally more optimistic, believing that strong families could flourish in every group, regardless of that group’s race, ethnicity, or religion. But one can also detect a Röpkian-style pessimism (and racism) in the broad acceptance in America of mass incarceration during neoliberalism’s heyday. Mass incarceration, after all, had the effect of stripping millions of individuals, disproportionately African American and Latino, of the opportunity to participate in America’s market economy."