While there’s a permanent crisis of the family, there’s also a permanent opportunity for capitalism to re-assert its power via the reconstruction of the family.

Throughout the book, Cooper traces the ways in which neoliberal and neoconservative forces have united to essentially move the responsibility for social reproduction from public or state responsibility to private and market responsibility.

But Cooper is also keen to point out that left-wing responses to the crisis of the Fordist family wage have often ended up falling into a conservative trap of actually reifying the family as a singular transhistorical construction.

Melinda Cooper’s book: Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism