Modern Family

It is still surprisingly common, in the critiques of neoliberalism that have glutted the progressive public sphere in recent years, to imagine that the withdrawal of the state leaves us atomized and alone. This blinkered view ignores the ways in which modern capitalism creates and reanimates certain forms of solidarity and love while pathologizing others. It is surely inadequate to presume the measure arbitrarily combined together these two policy shifts, but the precise relationship between them can be hard to ascertain. We need a theoretical model, and a historical narrative, that joins capital and culture, revealing how deregulated capitalism relies on reasserting hierarchies of gender and sexuality. This is the analysis Melinda Cooper provides in her magisterial Family Values, a sprawling book on the history of neoliberal capitalism and the family.