Speaker: Associate Professor Melinda Cooper
(University of Sydney)
Location: Jean Martin Room, Beryl Rawson Building (#13)
In this paper, I discuss the problematic of my forthcoming book, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone 2017) which develops a number of novel insights into the question of familial politics in the era following the Reagan revolution. The book contends that the regulation and promotion of family was as central to the formation of a post-Keynesian economic order as it was to welfare state capitalism. However, while the welfare state era involved the normative regulation of gender, sexuality and race through the mechanism of the Fordist family wage and its attendant redistributive functions, the post-Keynesian era has seen a reinvigoration of the poor law principle of family responsibility which identifies the family as the prime locus of economic security. In the American legal system (as opposed to Australia), this principle was fully operative in state welfare policies up until the early 20th century and was only briefly and partially displaced by the social insurance principles of the New Deal. I argue that the principle of "family responsibility" is key to understanding the contribution of neoliberal scholars such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, and significantly overlooked in Foucault's reading of human capital theory. I further argue that the ethic of family responsibility has been reinvigorated in novel ways in the post-Keynesian era, notably via the expansion of household debt. A focus on the familial dimension of neoliberal human capital theory makes it easier to understand how neoliberals so consistently collaborated with social conservatives throughout this era.