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.
In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status.
Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right chronicles how the family values agenda became so powerful in American political life and why it appealed to conservative evangelical Christians.
This rerelease of the popular original edition continues to speak to parents in a society where "family values" no longer seem to exist.
This volume will be of interest to readers in the fields of women's studies, feminist theory, philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural studies.
How Important Are Family Values?
Tie into one of the biggest movies of the holiday season, Addams Family 2 (starring Raul Julie, Angelica Huston, and Christopher Lloyd), with this sensational book for young readers.
This book which has been created in the framework of the EU-funded COST Action INTERFASOL brings together researchers from 22 INTERFASOL countries, who frame intergenerational family solidarity in the specific historical, cultural, social ...
From the author of "Zen and the Art of Fatherhood" comes a collection of 52 essays arranged alphabetically by topic, which celebrates the triumph of the contemporary family.
A beautifully written memoir of the author's fight to legally co-parent her lesbian lover's child--an inspiring story of love, liberation, and family values. Set against the background of the San...
A Better World for Children is Dr. Spock's prescription for what ails society, offering advice on the problems of the 1990s, ranging from education to discipline, from violent video games to the perils of Beavis and Butt-head.