On Defending the Family/individual: On the Crisis of Liberalism (VI)

Despite their very real differences, then, [social conservative] communitarian and neoliberal legal scholars are united in their aversion to sexual rights discourse. Both are convinced some limit must be  imposed on sexual freedom, differing only on the question of whether these limits should be exceptional (the neoliberals) or foundational (the [social conservative] communitarians).

It is this convergence, no doubt, that explains...why one of the most libertarian of Chicago legal scholars, Richard A. Epstein, is also the most radical in his commitment to the nonnegotiatable nature of family obligations. What Epstein recognizes perhaps more lucidly than any other law and economics scholar is that freedom of contract cannot exist without the ostensibly natural, noncontractual obligations of family. The rules of social welfare should therefore "follow the basic pattern of natural obligation as it is perceived to arrive within families." The task of neoliberal welfare reform is "to transform [this] inclination into duty" and thus to "derive an 'is' from an 'ought'" -- a precise translation of the poor law philosophy of natural charity within the family.--Melinda Cooper (2017) Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, p. 116-117.

Regular readers know (recall) that I believe the second wave of liberalism has ended and that it may not survive the present darkness. (In brief: first long wave: 1776-1914; second wave: 1945-2009. Some readers will say, good riddance, and to you I say, I hope you do better.) This is the sixth post (recall here (I);  here (II); here (III); here (IV); here (V); ) in an open-ended series (see also here, here, here, and here) on the crisis of liberalism in which I step back from headline politics and scholarship.

Today's post start from the thought that the half-century alliance between neoliberals and social conservatives has led the liberal tradition into an intellectual cul-de-sac (about which below). The political alliance with social conservatives also left the liberal tradition compromised in being slow to recognize the dangers to fundamental liberal values from the authoritarian right. Before one can undo the damage it may be useful to reflect on the intellectual attraction of social conservatives to neoliberalism.  

One natural way, especially if you are a Marxist, to understand the alliance of American neo-liberalism (by which I include, for the sake of shorthand, folks adhering to variants of Chicago economics, law & economics, public choice theory, Austrian economics, and libertarians) with social conservatives during the last half century is (not just as a tactical one) but as a strategic defense of capital. While this is by no means silly (liberals have no suspicion of property and wealth), it misses the thoroughgoing attack on rent-seeking that practically everybody in neo-liberalism shares.  The defense of markets is self-consciously aimed at inherited privilege.

Even so, it is notable that during the last half-century some forms of unearned income -- inheritance, even monopoly rents -- have received a pass from neoliberals due to an evolution of views about estate taxes and antitrust law. So, the Marxist view is not silly. I view the growth of, say, Bleeding Heart Libertarianism as a welcome corrective to the unmistakable tendency of some neoliberals to favor capital as such.  So much for the Marxist analysis.  

The turn to the social conservative right occurred during the 1960s. This was the age of the expansion of the welfare state (Great Society), the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, the vast expansion of higher education, and the sexual revolution. Some critics have tried hard to link neoliberalism with the racist elements within the Republican coalition developed by Nixon and Reagan. This connection undoubtedly existed (see, e.g., Jacob Levy's excellent pieces here and here), but in so far as any American thought can escape the taint of racism, it is also not characteristic of neoliberalism as a whole. (Unfortunately, we still await clear-headed scholarship on this vexed issue.) Much of the defense of markets by neoliberals is intended as a contrast to Jim Crow (and the ways unions elsewhere excluded African-Americans). In addition, much neoliberal thought was critical of the Vietnam war; in fact, part of Milton Friedman's popularity on college campuses was due to his outspoken criticism of the draft. (His argument also explicitly attacks the racist concerns over a professional army.)

One reason why Family Values (partially quoted above) by Melinda Cooper* is so welcome is that she helps explain why social conservatives and neoliberals were, despite profound differences, able to agree so much on policy. In particular, she shows that the attack on the welfare state and the sexual revolution (and by implication emancipation) amounted to the same thing. A key argument  in her book is the following:

The problem with social welfare, from [the neoliberal] perspective, is that undermines the natural incentive to family altruism and this deprives the poor of their primary support system. Even as they celebrate the freedom of contract in the public marketplace of love and money, neoliberals such as [Gary] Becker just as insistently affirm the necessity of noncontractual obligation in the family and are more than willing to invoke the full power of the state to enforce it. It is here after all that they locate the proper locus of economic security and the ideal alternative to the social welfare state. (p. 107)

To put Cooper's point in terms of a slogan: while social conservatives thought that the family must be protected from the market, neoliberals thought that a proper functioning market both presupposed families and, if the incentives (workfare, familial obligations, etc.) were properly aligned, families could help facilitate market society. The contrast here is (to quote Epstein again) between "the zone of voluntary market exchange" and "the non-price, non-exchange economy of the family." (p. 356 note 93). This helps explain the neoliberal fondness for policies that quite frankly are coercive in nature.

In her very well written book, Cooper makes her argument by taking a careful look at welfare reform, debates over inheritance, the aids crisis, access to credit, and human capital policy.* One fascinating feature of her argument is her diagnosis of the structural equivocation between 'individual' and 'family' in neoliberal arguments.+ Once alerted, one finds such equivocation in many places. For example, here is a passage from Stigler and Becker's famous (1977) "De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum:" "The power of stable preferences and utility maximization in explaining a wide range of behavior has been significantly enhanced by a recent reformulation of consumer theory. This reformulation transforms the family from a passive maximizer of the utility from market purchases into an active maximizer also engaged in extensive production and investment activities." (77) Consumer theory is presented in terms of the utility maximization of (active) families not individuals. (In fact, individuals are not mentioned in the piece, except once in context of the discussion of the role of information.) 

In our imperfect world, when the coercive powers of the state are called upon to fortify the family, to be urged into the private domain, this is usually a call to support patriarchy and to police minority bodies. As regular readers know, (recall) I had become distinctly reserved about the state's privileging of marriage (for more detailed argument see Clare Chambers). Cooper's book helps me see that the liberal tradition needs to recover a more thoroughgoing, emancipatory individualism and needs to be cured from its tendency to wish to police other people's bodies. That's (theoretically) the easy part. The more challenging bit is to confront the idea that markets presupposes families and the exploitation of unpaid labor in it. 

*Her treatment of complex material is excellent. She is, for example, very good on the differences between different kinds of human capital theory (including the contrast between Schultz and Becker).

+Of course, as feminists have (correctly) argued, (recall this piece on Pateman) the equivocation between individual and head of the family is co-extensive with liberal thought.

Comments

[Steve davies]

AS you say there's a longstanding tendency within much political thought (not just liberal) to make families and individuals the same - like you I think Carole Pateman is quite right about Locke, whose individuals are clearly conceived of as male heads of households. However not all thinkers are like that. Hobbes clearly is not - I disagree completely with her there. If you look at the intellectual history there is a minority tendency within historical liberal thought that applies consistent individualist thinking to the family and, if you will, deconstructs it. This is very prominent in late nineteenth century individualist thinking, most notably in people like the Harmans, and Wordsworth Donisthorpe who had several extensive pieces about this (as did Auberon Herbert). It's associated with classical liberal feminism and with the so-called free love movement. I think what you say is true about what you call neoliberalism (the remnant aspect of classical liberal thinking between the later 1930s and now). I think the reason has to do with personalities (the simple fact that most of the exponents were from a particular class background and despite their self-image not intellectually marginalised in the way that nineteenth and early twentieth century individualists were). The other big factor is the historically specific conjuncture of welfare reform and its politics in the United States in particular (to a lesser extent the UK) in the period from the 1960s to the 1990s. It's also worth pointing out that the radical libertarian fringe of neoliberalism took a much more consistently radical and contractualist view of the family, maybe because so many of them were gay men. Putting my historian's hat on, one way to think about this from a liberal perspective is that in the pre-modern world true individualism was almost impossible, even for the wealthy. You simply could not survive on your own for any length of time. That meant the fundamental unit of society was not the individual man or woman but the household, which was internally a domain not of choice but of authority (of course most people then thought that was true of the larger world as well). In the modern world this becomes ever less true and you get a steady move towards greater individualism. The big limitation on this is and always has been the rearing of children, which is very difficult to do on a one person basis. However that is also gradually being transformed by the effects of modernity. So from a liberal point of view this is all about the gradual unfolding of autonomy and agency in modernity. (This was Donisthorpe's view). I've argued myself that the family is the ultimate source of authority and unchosen relations.