Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone / Near Futures) Hardcover – February 24, 2017

As a novice to neoliberalism and neo-conservatism and government policies reflecting those world views, excellent book for me. Occasional leaning to the left, but seems to provide the different perspectives fairly with quotes. Extensively researched based on the large footnote section.

The author's meticulous blend of social and political history lends weight to her devastating analysis.

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 it's 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 it's 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.