Family, equality, and public and private distribution: a review essay of Melinda Cooper’s family values

According to Melinda Cooper’s Family Values, neoliberal and socially conservative policies have come together throughout the 20th century to support the normative family as the primary tool to internalize the costs of individual behavior and to privatize distribution. Despite a wealth of research and detailed policy analysis, Cooper’s work suffers from both ideological blinders and an overly narrow vision of the family itself. Cooper’s work ultimately fails to take the family seriously as an emergent and self-reproducing institution that is unlikely to be replaced fully in any sense by government policies, however well framed. Her analysis also fails to provide a good-faith analysis of the neoliberal and socially conservative scholars she discusses. At the same time, Cooper’s analysis is a useful one for classical liberal and libertarian thinkers who have, in the past, struggled to know what to do with the family as an institution and how to balance concerns about state coercion against concerns about coercion in the private sphere. It therefore provides a call for classical liberal and libertarian scholars to think more seriously about the family and how a narrow focus on freedom from government might ignore real and serious threats to human freedom in other areas.