There were real differences between neoliberals and conservatives on the family. Although they converged around the idea of family responsibility, there were different motivations and different inflections to this convergence. Social conservatives saw the family and its moral order as foundational to any social and economic order. Even when they became converts to the free market, as was the case with Irving Kristol, they saw the family as the necessary foundation on which market freedom needed to rest. They were also more often than not invested in a particular vision of the family – patriarchal, heteronormative, monogamous. Ideas about responsible fatherhood and the need to reinstate the place of men within the family come from this conservative tradition.
Neoliberals had a more minimalist understanding of family responsibility. For them, family responsibility meant that the family or the couple should be the primary source of economic security and in this way function as a substitute to the welfare state. They were in general much less normative about the particular form of these relationships and as I detail in my analysis of the neoliberal response to the AIDS crisis, were some of the first advocates of same-sex marriage, which they understood as a kind of mutual insurance contract. Alternative kinship relations were not a problem for them as long as these relationships could successfully internalize the health and welfare costs of partners and children. When people failed to internalize these costs, the neoliberals thought that kinship relations should be legally enforced in the form of family responsibility rules. Foucault was half right: neoliberals were not at all attached to the normative disciplines that grew up around the 20thcentury welfare state, the sciences of deviance and perversion that informed everything from eugenics to psychology and criminology. They were variously in favour of decriminalizing prostitution, sodomy and recreational drugs. But Foucault misses the big proviso that goes along with all of this. All social costs (the costs of raising children, the economic fallout from divorce, health care costs, STIs) need to be internalized by the parties to the sexual contract – kinship relations, marriage and parenthood, are the legal means through which the state can enforce these costs. What Foucault called “care of the self” is a central imperative of neoliberalism, but it would be better defined as “care of kin.”
author of Family Values: Neoliberalism and New Social Conservatism
Comments