U.S. Demography, Family Planning, and the Origins of Neoliberalism

Savina Balasubramanian, Loyola University Chicago

Neoliberalism is generally understood as an intellectual and political project to retool regulation to protect capital. Consequently, scholars of neoliberalism have traced its progenitors and principles to the disciplines of economics and law. But recent scholarship suggests that neoliberalism is not only a philosophy of government and markets but also a philosophy of care—one that upholds the private family (in lieu of the state) as the ultimate provider and underwriter of care. Seen in this light, an alternative history of proto-neoliberal ideas reveals itself among a corpus of social scientists whose work has gone unremarked in the historiography of those ideas: demographers. This paper illustrates how postwar U.S. demography was a crucible in which the neoliberal ideal of “family responsibility” for human welfare was first forged, and global “family planning” as a major technoscientific project through which that principle was first instantiated.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 137. Classifying States, Gender, and the Creation of the Deserving and Undeserving