Behind Every Successful Entrepreneur of Himself is His Wife: Cooper’s Family Values

After a decade of critical-theory oriented books that approached neoliberalism broadly as a historical period (see David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism) or as a dominant ideology (see Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution), scholars are now raising more discrete and exacting questions: what did self-proclaimed neoliberals do and how did they do it? Nancy MacLean’s, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for American (2017), examines the work of neoliberal James M. Buchanan in the context of racial desegregation in Virginia after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018) traces the rise of the neoliberals in the context of decolonization and growing interstate economic cooperation. Policy might be one word for this kind of inquiry, but it’s not one expansive enough. Somewhere between intellectual history and genealogy, these books promise to tighten our conceptual grasp of neoliberalism as well as help us to decide whether the term should continue to be endowed with the capacious meaning it now has. In some academic circles, over-arching narratives of neoliberal insistence on privatization, individualism and anti-regulation have achieved the status of common sense. Now, some of these narratives have started to be, and will continue to be, both refined if not ultimately rejected.

Enter Melinda Cooper’s new book, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, which reorients the unit of social analysis of the neoliberal critique from homo oeconomicus to familia oeconomica, from man to the family, that bastion of liberal progress and possibility that constituted and sustained man all along. Cooper’s book will change our conversation. It provides such a detailed and comprehensive argument, one so astutely staged on multiple levels of mediation from policy to theory to possibilities and limitations of commodification itself, that it will certainly become a conceptual index for those interested in understanding the American school of neoliberalism.

And perhaps the book will free both neoliberals and contemporary readers from the long shadow of Foucault. Cooper’s work turns away from the path Foucault charted through the logic, language, assumptions of neoliberal epistemology.¹ Indeed, one wonders if critics following his lead have attended too closely to the coherences and contradictions of neoliberals’ texts. Here is the problem: neoliberal economic philosophy follows in the long neoclassical economic tradition of tautology and casuistry, on the one hand, and an indifference to its own internal structure, on the other. To go ever deeper is to risk not an unveiling, but rather a mirroring. This is why it has come to seem less interesting to ask what the neoliberals thought and more interesting to follow what they did.

A refusal of the pleasures of hermeneutics, on the one hand, and a refusal of a moralizing dirge, on the other, is what makes Cooper’s book so unique. This book may be, in fact, the first critical cultural history of neoliberalism. Instead of seeking out ever-deeper levels of contradiction within their arguments, Cooper resituates the neoliberals as they are forced to respond to the social demands of 1960s–1980s including feminism, African American civil rights, the rise of the gay rights movement but also of the AIDS crisis, and, of course, the dramatic changes in global and national economic structure ushered by the Federal Reserve and the Carter administration in the late 1970s. We may never know the precise causes for that decade’s inflation, but, as Cooper suggests, it is more productive to trace its ramifications into the socio-cultural field where inflation was nothing less than a “moral crisis” that demanded the undoing of all sorts of welfare-state provisions.

Under pressure of social agitating and organization, there was a real constituency of Republicans and Democrats who were ready, at the end of the 1960s, to expand the...