Melinda Cooper is Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.
Cooper's book leaves us with a bleakly realistic account of the
(often Christian) rightwing patriarchal forces whose resoundingly
angry response to feminist and pro-welfare activism has sought to
stifle the impact of the women's movement from the 1960s onwards,
especially in regard to economic, racial and reproductive freedoms.
One might assume that similar ideas are at work in the Trump
administration today. Under the weight of such antagonism the
tenacity of feminism is nothing short of miraculous, and Cooper's
sombre analysis serves to remind the pro-feminist left and the
women's movement of how few in number we are, and have been.
-openDemocracy
Magisterial...[Cooper] brilliantly shows how enmeshed we are, as
political and economic agents, into the family form, and how
necessary this is to the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism.
-Dissent
In an academic world flush with and made into silos by specialized
topics, research articles, and books, Melinda Cooper's
interdisciplinary integration is a most welcome map of the
historical and contemporary forces that created political alliances
between neoliberalism and neoconservatism. This book promises to be
a classic study of the role that the family played in fomenting
alliances between neoconservatives and neoliberals. Many academic
disciplines beyond cultural studies may find particular chapters
helpful in the classroom as well. -Lateral
If there's one lesson to be drawn from Melinda Cooper's masterful
new study of capitalism and the American right, it's that this
supposed opposition between neoliberalism and social conservatism
is a caricature... The two movements were hardly mere allies of
convenience, let alone mortal enemies. On the contrary, Family
Values reveals how their close conceptual and practical
collaboration helped to build the foundations of the contemporary
social world. -Jacobin
Brilliant and original. -London Review of Books
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 pro vides such a detailed and comprehensive
argument, one so astutely staged on multiple levels of mediation
from policy to theory to possibilities and limita tions of
commodification itself, that it will certainly become a conceptual
index for those interested in understanding the American school of
neoliberalism. -Theory & Event
Cooper offers invaluable insights into how US neoliberals through
their focus on the family created the potential for claims to
morality that social conservatives of all ilks could find
palatable. I plan to include this book on the syllabus the next
time I teach a graduate course on neoliberalism, and hope that
others, who may be befuddled or fascinated by the contradictions of
neoliberalism when it is put into practice, will read this book.
-Somatosphere
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