Possessive Familialism and the Scholarship of the Neoliberal Politics of Care

What connects the neoliberal politics of care and our democratic ills? Neoliberal antagonism to democratic politics is theorized by various scholars. Harvey (Reference Harvey2005) tells a story of a global elite bent on clearing the way for capitalist accumulation. Slobodian (Reference Slobodian2018; Reference Slobodian2023) provides a chilling account of “market radicals”—“united by the belief that capitalism ha[s] to be protected from democracy” (Slobodian Reference Slobodian2023, 20)—who, over the course of the last 35 years, have turned a “dream of a world without democracy” into an increasingly concrete reality by “perforating” the nation-state with “zones” that are free of the constraints that politics produces. Such analyses are illuminating, but they say nothing about the politics of social reproduction. Among care theorists, with few exceptions—to be discussed below—democracy is rarely a central concern. Many in the Marxist feminist tradition emphasize the cannibalistic drives of capitalism—“a societal order that empowers a profit-driven economy to prey on the extra-economic supports it needs to function” (Fraser Reference Fraser2023, xiv)—to account for our “democratic crisis” (115). Others argue that relentless extraction from the “hidden abode” of social reproduction links crises of care and democracy (e.g., Bhattacharya Reference Bhattacharya2017; Fraser Reference Fraser2017; Reference Fraser2023; Nadasen Reference Nadasen2023).

Possessive familialism builds on these critiques and provides an account of the specifically American version of the liberal and now neoliberal political rationality operating under the cover of “the family” as one of its key instruments of deployment. By laying bare the full scope of the political vision that lies behind the possessive family, our account of possessive familialism explains why it is so difficult to get to where many of these theorists want to be. It thus enhances our ability to explain why and how, in the name of freedom and equality, citizens endorse policies that support and enhance such extraction that leaves them bereft of what they need to live in a democratic society.

Possessive familialism is one piece of a wider political rationality that has dominated the West, and particularly the US, for the last 50-plus years. To understand why the demos appears to be freely choosing its own precarity and political powerlessness, Brown (Reference Brown2015; Reference Brown2019) argues that we must account not only for the overwhelming drives of capitalism, the material interests of capitalist classes, or the rhetorical strategies of political actors, but also for a dominant political rationality. More fundamental than mere ideology (which suggests a tool of class interest), one might call it a “governing rationality” to indicate its disciplinary power;Footnote ⁷ “not itself an instrument of governing,” this rationality constitutes the very “condition of possibility and legitimacy of its instrument.” It orients the state and “subjects themselves and every institution on the landscape” (Brown Reference Brown2015, 121), leaving “nothing … untouched” (Brown Reference Brown2019, 8). Possessive familialism adds an essential element to Brown’s account and thus helps to explain the emergence of a politics of family values that starves actual families and individuals of the material and social resources they need to thrive. It helps to explain why citizens of one of the world’s oldest and most robust liberal democracies actively endorse actors, actions, and policies that undo their political power (Levitzky and Ziblatt Reference Levitsky and Ziblatt2023), as well as the popular embrace of attacks on the basic institutions and commitments of the US constitutional democracy (Slobodian Reference Slobodian2023).

On Brown’s (Reference Brown2019, 97) telling, neoliberal political rationality prepares the ground for the demos “undoing” itself by negating the social, “dethroning the political,” and proffering a vision of freedom in which the state is to serve in the very limited role of securing the rule of law and protecting markets, contracts, and an expanded personal sphere. Steeped in a desiccated—even threatening—view of the state, society, and democratic politics, subjects of this worldview willingly turn against all three. For Brown, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s (Reference Thatcher1987) famous claim captures key features of this thinking: “There are individual men and women and there are families. … There is no such thing as society” (emphasis added). This rhetorical move simultaneously swept out of sight and denigrated the vast network of social supports upon which actual families depend. Both the attack on society and the curious, even contradictory, endorsement of the “group project” of the family in a paean to the individual, Brown (Reference Brown2015, 104) argues, should be read as more than mere rhetoric. Rather, nodding to Tronto and other theorists of neoliberalism and care, she claims that they are essential to the neoliberal project and suggests that they are connected.

We agree. This insight of Brown’s, which she identifies but does not develop, is one of the sparks to our own argument. By elaborating what possessive familialism is and how it operates, we fill in a crucial gap in Brown’s analysis. Whereas she focuses her attention on the dismantling of society, the dethroning of politics, the expansion of the protected personal sphere, and the implications for democratic politics, we expand the notion of familialism and show how possessive familialism is a shape-shifting resource that is in a mirror dance with the shifts in capitalism that Fraser (Reference Fraser2023) details. Possessive familialism is at the very heart of the liberal and neoliberal vision of politics in the US; it fuels the attack on society and contributes to democracy’s demise. First, we expand the concept: with possessive familialism we capture the full, extensive powers and functions served by “the family” that possesses private property and inheritable wealth, its members, and even its racial and national status. Most importantly, it possesses the responsibility to “care for its own,” as Tronto (Reference Tronto2013, 41) puts it. Possessive familialism does more than simply hide the real costs of care in gender and family; it contains, coordinates, and obscures structures of material and political inequality of all sorts—property and wealth, citizenship, gender, race, sex, nationality—that are essential if disavowed “externalities” of the neoliberal political vision. We thereby strengthen and expand the claim that familialism is essential to neoliberal political rationality. Second, we show how possessive familialism is essential to neoliberalism’s decimation of society, and thus, as Brown rightly argues, is a threat to democratic politics. The rationality of neoliberalism is more than just marketizing things like healthcare and education, and claiming that social problems are a matter of personal responsibility. Possessive familialism ties those two imperatives to the denial of society as a common good to which all have reason to contribute. In the immediate sense, possessive familialism is the doctrine through which costs, benefits, burdens, and responsibilities of care are located, firmly and alone, in the family. Identifying and naming this maneuver, possessive familialism helps us to see more clearly how the obsession with the personal sphere, its hostility to the idea of “society,” and the attempt to divorce the social sphere from the political realm work and unfold. It thus provides a novel and more robust understanding of neoliberal political rationality and its corrosive effects on democracy. Possessive familialism has been taken up and deployed by different iterations of liberalism, ranging from the rampant growth of free-market capitalism in the Gilded Age that Cooper (Reference Cooper2017) details to the twentieth-century emergence of the US welfare state following the creation of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and welfare programs like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families—all programs that aim to meet inevitable vulnerability through the family via the idea of individual workers, their children, and their elderly relatives (Klosko Reference Klosko2017; Skocpol Reference Skocpol1995).Footnote ⁸ But across these various periods, and particularly in the current period that concerns us, possessive familialism serves five closely related functions.

First, possessive familialism is founded on marriage: conjugal vows transform private ties into the publicly recognized, fundamental unit of property and care. Marriage demarcates the “right kind” of familial membership and distributes (and limits) its benefits and burdens. As many have shown, what counts as family, who gets to form families, the roles within families, and how, if at all, government should support families all funnel through the fantasy of monogamous marriage and intersect with regimes of gender, race, nation, and the hierarchies they produce (Collins Reference Collins1998; Cott Reference Cott2002; Hartman Reference Hartman2019; Hunter Reference Hunter2017). Thus, individuals, practices, and social structures that fall outside the bounds of this family form—for example, Indigenous kinship practices, unmarried parents, polyamorous intimates, singletons—are unrecognized and penalized (Brake Reference Brake2012; Clardy Reference Clardy2023; Metz Reference Metz, Novkov and Nackenoff2020; Simpson Reference Simpson2025; Tallbear Reference Tallbear, Clarke and Haraway2018; Reference Tallbear2019).

Second, possessive familialism designates this state-recognized marital family as responsible for care and prescribes specific modes for its provision. Contrary to the mythos of liberal individualism, all humans need others to survive and thrive; we are all always interdependent, in different ways at different times. Care, as we use it here, is the activity of meeting the basic material and social needs of human beings (Bhattacharya Reference Bhattacharya2017; Engster Reference Engster2007; Held Reference Held2005; Tronto Reference Tronto1993). As a subset of social reproductive labor—“the forms of provisioning, caregiving, and interaction that produce … capitalism’s human subjects, sustaining them as embodied natural beings, while also constituting them as social beings” (Fraser Reference Fraser2023, 9)Footnote ⁹—care is a nested activity (Tronto Reference Tronto2013). Human interdependence involves an uneven, changing, and unpredictable flow of diverse resources through individuals, institutions, and the planet. What Martha Fineman (Reference Fineman2004) calls “derivative dependency” means that resources expended while caring for others—not just very young children or very old, disabled parents, but also purportedly self-sufficient adults who need food, clothing, housing, health, sanitation, education, leisure, and recreation—must be made up by other sources such as other individuals, networks, and institutions. The same is true of these sources and those who support them and are supported in turn, in a continuous trail of dependency on outside resources. Call these the facts of care.

As Tronto (Reference Tronto2013) notes, the way a society responds to these facts is defining. Democracy, she argues, must put questions of care at its center if it is to live up to its commitment to an equal voice for all. Neoliberalism rejects the ontological and ethical-political core of this claim: privatization within the family to “care for its own” (41) is its theory of care. Hidden in the folds of family, in the structures of gender, race, and class, in the histories of slavery and colonial dispossession, and in the changing forms of capitalist extraction, possessive familialism makes and marks some as responsible for the undervalued work of care, and others with “privileged irresponsibility” that allows them to shunt the work onto less privileged groups of persons (chap. 3). The imperative to care for one’s own fuels the fantasy that such a thing is even possible. By effacing the facts of care and our deep, unavoidable interdependence, Tronto argues, the notion of care for one’s own family and the neoliberal vision it supports threaten care at all levels, and thereby democracy itself. Possessive familialism captures and expands these insights: it ties “care for one’s own” to the insistence that there is “no such thing as society.” It also provides a fuller account of the connection between this rationality and the capitalist forces theorized by Fraser and other feminists in the Marxist tradition.

Third, possessive familialism legitimizes the funneling of wealth into the private family. As Marxists have long argued, the private family is where private property accumulates—or fails to accumulate—and congeals into inherited wealth inequalities (Karamcheva Reference Karamcheva2024; Piketty Reference Piketty and Goldhammer2014).Footnote ¹⁰ Feminists have shown how gender organizes the distribution of money and power within families that coheres with the division of care labor (e.g., Barrett and McIntosh Reference Barrett and McIntosh2015; Hartmann Reference Hartmann1979; Okin Reference Okin1989; Schouten Reference Schouten2019). Possessive familialism structures resources among families by justifying robust familial inheritance regimes that pass on economic, social, and political inequality to subsequent generations.Footnote ¹¹ Contemporary statistics reflect, for instance, how possessive familialism has interacted with histories of native dispossession and slavery and their afterlives in education, housing, and the employment markets (Kids Count Data Center 2002; see also Collins Reference Collins1998; Moreton-Robinson Reference Moreton-Robinson2015; Taylor Reference Taylor2021). Data reflecting the relative economic and social disadvantage of singletons—uncoupled, with or without dependents—provide more evidence of the influence of possessive familialism on economic patterns in the contemporary US context (Fry and Parker Reference Fry and Parker2021).

Fourth, possessive familialism links this wealth-funneling function to the responsibility to care for “one’s own” and fuels a fantasy of self-sufficiency. Motivation and means to care are connected in the possessive family, portrayed as self-contained and self-sufficient, and properly protected from intrusion. Obscured by this story are the myriad ways that all families—as well as individuals not possessed by one—must necessarily draw on resources outside themselves to meet the demands of care. And thus also hidden from view are the structures of inequality and extraction that Marxist feminists have long argued are endemic to social reproduction in capitalist social formations. As Black feminists and others argue, these structures are in turn sustained by intersecting matrices of raced, classed, and gendered domination (Collins Reference Collins1990; Davis Reference Davis1981; Stanley Reference Stanley1998). In the neoliberal context, the global reach is particularly significant: the wealthier Global North turns to the Global South to meet the care gap created by the movement of women—especially white and middle-class women—into its paid labor force. At its core, the low pay and low status associated with direct-care labor not only mark and make those who provide it exploitable, but they also mean that these individuals are least able to live up to the fantasy of securing care for their own. For these reasons, Fraser (Reference Fraser2017; Reference Fraser2023; Fraser and Jaeggi Reference Fraser, Jaeggi and Milstein2018), Nadasen (Reference Nadasen2023), and others (Bhattacharya Reference Bhattacharya2017; Hochschild Reference Hochschild, Engster and Metz2013; Parreñas Reference Parreñas2015) argue care and social reproductive labor lie at the core of neoliberal capitalism’s extractive empire. Again, we maintain that it is possessive familialism that brings these forces together, as wealth and structural inequalities tied to the basic necessity of care congeal under the guise of choice and responsibility through the possessive family.

Fifth and finally, possessive familialism cloaks all of these structures—of care provision, property, inequality, and extraction—in a veil of sentiment, choice, and responsibility, as Okin (Reference Okin1982) first noted and subsequent feminists from varied frameworks have elaborated (e.g., Lewis Reference Lewis2022; Metz Reference Metz2010; Weeks Reference Weeks2021).Footnote ¹² Wrapped in its mantle of autonomy, independence, and personal responsibility, neoliberal subjects readily embrace social and political arrangements that destabilize and ultimately exhaust the structures upon which we in fact depend to sustain democratic social life. Thus it is that possessive familialism functions as the linchpin of neoliberal political rationality. Melinda Cooper’s Family Values (Reference Cooper2017) offers a gripping illustration: it is under the rhetoric of “family values” that over the last half-century Americans have chosen a politics of precarity and democratic powerlessness without realizing it. To understand this period of politics in the US, Cooper (Reference Cooper2017) argues, we must grasp how intellectuals, policy makers, activists, and politicians from across the political spectrum, “neoconservative” and “neoliberal” alike, converged on the figure of the solo, self-sufficient family, responsible to care for its own and in the process advance what we call neoliberal politics more broadly.Footnote ¹³ But reading her account through our lens explains why this effort was so successful: with possessive familialism at the core of liberal political logic, the US was already primed for “family values” to unite actors from across the political spectrum. Cooper tells us what this looks like in everyday politics. We show what undergirds that politics: a vision of life held together by possessive familialism.

Consider her account of the “tax revolt” of the 1970s. She shows how political activists tapped into and fed a vision of the solo, self-sufficient family to build a middle-class movement against taxes on the wealthy, under the war cry of the “death tax” (Cooper Reference Cooper2017, chap. 4). Despite the fact that inheritance tax affected only a minority even of wealthy Americans, once such taxes were cast as an affront to the responsible family, a wide middle class whose “estates” consisted primarily in the value of their houses joined “an open assault on estate taxes, in what was to prove a long-term victory for the super-rich” (131). It simultaneously created an equally long-term loss for the vast majority who depend on government for goods as fundamental as roads and public schools. Thus Cooper demonstrates the power of the rhetoric of family values—in this case, the distinct emotional resonance of home ownership—to unify actors, “big men,” and common citizens from across the political spectrum in a project of dismantling the welfare state and its care-supporting structures such as healthcare, education, and Social Security.

Cooper’s story makes perfect sense from the perspective of possessive familialism. Where she shows how neoliberal and neoconservative actors met on the rhetoric of family values to build widespread support for a politics that disadvantages most people, possessive familialism explains why this was so successful. Possessive familialism is the foundational element of the liberal infrastructure that neoconservative and neoliberal political actors share. Her account of late twentieth-century US politics, invocation of the Gilded Age, and analysis of the tax revolt confirm our claim that possessive familialism is central to the liberal tradition and now the neoliberal imagination. The possessive family is not only the private, parochial, and patriarchal site of intimate care or social reproductive labor—as feminist critics of liberalism argue—nor simply the site of private property and wealth accumulation and the expropriation of female labor, as Marxist feminist critics of capitalism show. And while it is also a vital source of the racial nation and national race, as critical race and postcolonial theorists argue, it is in fact all those things together and at once: a vision and a structure in the world that captures, coordinates, and sells as free an arrangement that requires but occludes structures of exploitation and pervasive inequality and undermines ways of thinking, speaking, and being that are essential to democratic life.

The lens of possessive familialism highlights the constitutive place of and connections between the marital family and private property, and the violations, exclusions, and disavowals they contain and foster. As we will argue, possessive familialism is thus a cornerstone of the neoliberal destruction of democratic society, making it appear inessential, if not irrelevant, to the people—and families—neoliberal politics proclaims to serve and protect. It succeeds because the possessive family—the paragon of choice, sentiment, and responsibility—never left the stage of the long liberal tradition so central to US politics. It is so foundational to the public political “philosophy” of the US that it remains a defining force even as some argue the neoliberal order has fallen (Brown Reference Brown2019; Fraser Reference Fraser2017; Gerstle Reference Gerstle2022).Footnote ¹⁴ Recall the opening gambit of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership that names “the well-being of the American family” as “the true priority of politics” (Dans and Groves Reference Dans and Groves2023, 4). We can call this a kind of radical neoliberal moment, or even a post-neoliberal moment, but the fantasy of possessive familialism still reigns.

The Liberal Roots of Our Neoliberal Present: Locke’s Possessive Familialism

This brings us to a possibly surprising turn, John Locke. While Locke is hardly the most important source of today’s US political culture, we argue that his conception of the possessive family is at the core of the liberal roots of our neoliberal present. Although Macpherson developed his idea of possessive individualism through the work of several theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington and movements such as the Levellers, Locke’s version of it has long provided theoretical justification and ideological resources for liberals and capitalists in Western democracies, particularly the US (Kramnick Reference Kramnick1990; Smith Reference Smith1985). Theorists such as Arneil (Reference Arneil1996), Ashcraft (Reference Ashcraft1986), and Tully (Reference Tully1980) have documented Locke’s importance in the shift from state-centered mercantilism to liberal capitalism, including its conception of property. Locke’s conception of the family, however, and the role it plays in constructing society, its government, and social relations around the centrality of property is our focus. Moreover, his influence over early neoliberal thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Gary Becker make it particularly relevant to a genealogical tracing of today’s political rationality.Footnote ¹⁵

As all students of political theory are taught, Two Treatises of Government offers a vision of a world inhabited by individuals endowed with inalienable rights and natural equality. His individualism is expressed in the idea of “property in his Own Person” (Locke [Reference Locke and Laslett1960] 1988, 2:26), or the “ownership” of one’s own labor that each person (or at least each man; women are a more ambiguous category) can use to turn things in nature into things they own privately: their “property.” Macpherson (Reference Macpherson1962, 3) calls these beings “possessive individuals,” who are “essentially the proprietor of [their] own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them.” Such an individual, a commodity to himself, is self-contained and solitary in the state of nature until he establishes contracts—for exchanges of goods, services, and sociability; with women to form families; and with governments to guarantee the execution of these contracts and to protect its subjects from outside invaders. He also, through his labor, magnifies the produce of the land so that there is always enough for others (Locke [Reference Locke and Laslett1960] 1988, 2:27). The God-given imperative of productivity—tied as it is to rationality—makes it rational to accumulate as much as one can use before it spoils. But once “[men] had agreed, that a little piece of yellow Metal,” would serve as a standard durable good, the natural limits of the state of nature imposed by spoilage and the need to leave enough for others are overcome, and one is able to produce more than one can use (2:37; emphasis in original). From here—conveniently skipping over feudalism and mercantilism, at the least—acquisition and ultimately accumulation of property is the modus vivendi of each individual, as long as they leave “enough, and as good, for others.” This is what led Macpherson to coin his term “possessive individualism,” because the rational individual seeks to possess and accumulate private property to himself—and, of course, to his family. Just as the purpose of the social contract that creates government is the protection and preservation of property, the purpose of the family is to provide care to its members, including most notably passing on that property through inheritance.

Money also allows us to purchase the labor of others, including carework such as nannies, tutors, cleaners, and cooks. Feminists and others have long critiqued Locke’s family and have linked it to the ways that Locke masks coercion as consent (Hirschmann Reference Hirschmann1992; Reference Hirschmann2008; Pateman Reference Pateman1988; Shanley Reference Shanley1979). But the focus of this critique on gender inequality at times obscures another harm that the possessive family produces, that of extraction, expropriation, and exploitation (Stevens Reference Stevens1999). Some have noted the considerable differences between the propertied and bourgeois families of his Some Thoughts Concerning Education and the indigent families of his “Essay on the Poor Law” (Ashcraft Reference Ashcraft, Brewer and Staves1994; Hirschmann Reference Hirschmann2008; Mehta Reference Mehta1992). Others have analyzed how the enslaved and their heirs, Indigenous and colonized people, and the poor are also excluded, and demonstrate that the vision he offers depends upon exploitation and expropriation sustained by this exclusion (Fraser Reference Fraser2023; Fraser and Jaeggi Reference Fraser, Jaeggi and Milstein2018; Mills Reference Mills1997; Pateman and Mills Reference Pateman and Mills2007; Shanley Reference Shanley1989). Possessive familialism is the framework that weaves these strands together. Locke not only naturalizes and legitimizes capitalist labor relations and the extraction they entail, private property, the marital family, and gender inequality, he also unites a system for making the essential, unavoidable demands of care the responsibility of the possessive family as a precondition for and justification of the social contract. His possessive family delimits membership, assigns responsibility for care, and secures accumulated property.Footnote ¹⁶ If in the state of nature the invention of money makes unlimited accumulation acceptable, the marital family—also grounded in nature, but constituted by consent—provides an interconnected set of mechanisms and justifications for that accumulation. But since, as we have said, care is unavoidably nested, this vision of family obscures even as it prescribes. Hidden behind the nature, sentiment, and consent that Locke says found the family are exclusions and extractions upon which unequal wealth and care are based. Possessive familialism services not only capital accumulation but also a politics of limits: that is, a politics of competition for resources hidden behind an illusion of unlimited opportunity, a politics of limited government focused on the protection of rights to property that assumes even as it ignores the realities of our deep interdependence, and a politics that not only fails to recognize but also actively obscures the ways in which we are interdependent and the ways in which essential care is distributed.

Contra Macpherson, we suggest that possessive individuals are not so individual in Locke’s story; they are embedded in families with concrete means and motivations to care for them. This care is what makes the fantasy of individualism possible, as other feminists have noted (Pateman Reference Pateman1988; Stevens Reference Stevens1996; Reference Stevens1999). Connecting care to inheritance bolsters the fantasy that the marital family can deliver this essential good on its own, and that such social organization is desirable, even natural, and logically consented to. Missing from this picture is the nest of resources—social, economic, material—upon which such families depend. The Lockean liberal politics of care offers no accounting for those who are not part of a marital family, and very little about those who perform the actual work. Norms of noblesse oblige notwithstanding (Pateman and Hirschmann Reference Pateman and Hirschmann1992; Richardson Reference Richardson2010), the silence about how the private family secures and delivers care obscures its dependence on the unpaid labor of women and the low-paid labor of servants and others who lack wealth and must sell the property in their person—those who wash the clothes, cook the meals, and clean the floors. This has been the subject of much twenty-first-century consideration. But read backward from this context, Locke’s silence about wide swaths of care, his discussion of servants and “America,” his ambiguity over the role and capacities of women, and the primacy of property and inheritance all alert us to resources built into the figure of the possessive family: expropriated land and exploited labor. These conditions of Lockean liberalism lay important groundwork for the contemporary neoliberal political rationality of possessive familialism.

Bringing Locke into this discussion helps to explain why many Americans today accept a politics that centers responsibility for care and accumulation so intensely on the marital family, and how neoliberal changes in American society have slipped by without recognizing their radical character: it just “makes sense.” By morphing out of the family form that was instantiated alongside the development of market capitalism and has been instrumental to capitalism’s endurance, the possessive family has taken on an inevitability. In the US, it has, on the one hand, co-opted alternative forms that might have otherwise challenged it—such as same-sex marriage, which ended up reinforcing the possessive family as we will shortly argue, or healthcare, which saw the abandonment of “Medicare for all” in favor of the market-driven Affordable Care Act—and, on the other hand, repudiated them, as illustrated by its persecution of transgender identity and unmarried women or by its characterization of the most modest of social programs as “socialism.”Footnote ¹⁷ Through all this turmoil, possessive familialism is the persistent through line even as actual possessive families, not to mention those outside the official form, suffer.

In short, Locke is not simply a radical individualist, or even simply a patriarchal capitalist individualist. These labels miss the pivotal role of possessive familialism in linking and obscuring structures of interdependence and inequality—particularly class, race, and gender—that make and mark some as exploitable and expropriable, and upon which the myths of the autonomous individual and (his) self-sufficient family depend. Though in his remarks on rebellion Locke suggests that the contract with government presupposes a contract with other citizens—a “civil society”—its purpose is not to build community and robust social supports that sustain citizenship for all, but merely to reinstitute a new government that will adhere more faithfully to the protection of property and contracts—including the marriage, labor, and slave “contracts,” as Pateman (Reference Pateman1988) argues—and sustain political and economic hierarchy. Solo and self-sufficient, the possessive family produces individuals who arrive in the public sphere of civil society fully formed, prepared to participate in “free” markets. The possessive family relies on government to protect property and the markets it relies on and works with; the polity depends on these families to produce its citizens. Purportedly unaided and unhindered by ties outside itself, the possessive family makes possible a politics of neoliberal freedom where citizens’ highest obligation is to follow the law and where “the state’s role is to protect the market … mainta[in] inner and outer security, the protection of private property, and sanctity of contract” (Slobodian Reference Slobodian2023, 20). This much remains unchanged; possessive familialism is the value and framework that gives neoliberalism its purchase and power.

The Politics of Possessive Familialism

If Joan Tronto (Reference Tronto2013) is correct that every society has a theory of care, we maintain that in the contemporary US that theory is possessive familialism. A full account has yet to be written. But illustrations abound; we offer four that demonstrate the centrality of possessive familialism to contemporary US democracy. For instance, much has been written about neoliberal feminism’s framing of the core challenge facing women and families today as a work–life balance problem. Commentators have rightly criticized the narrow individualist focus of a dominant strain of feminist analysis. What is less often noted is the extent to which the focus is also possessive familialist.Footnote ¹⁸ In their best-selling books, both Sheryl Sandberg (Reference Sandberg2013) and Anne-Marie Slaughter (Reference Slaughter2012; Reference Slaughter2015), offer feminist visions that depend on and deploy possessive familialism. Amid the rhetoric of corporations embracing flexible work arrangements—as opposed to, say, the 30-hour work week and economic redistribution for nonelite women (Nedelsky and Malleson Reference Nedelsky and Malleson2023)—both authors accept the terms of high-stakes capitalism and maintain that marriage is an essential tool for individual women to create the “balance” that would allow them to “lean in” and succeed in the marketplace and as parents and partners at home. In her commencement address at Barnard College, Sandberg (Reference Sandberg2011) told graduates that “[t]he most important career decision you’re going to make is whether you have a life partner and who that partner is.” And even as she works up a disagreement with Sandberg, Slaughter (Reference Slaughter2012) concurs on this point: “I could never have had the career I have had without my husband.” Leaving aside whether sexism inflects this advice, we point to the underlying assumption that the private marital family is responsible—with its own means—for securing care of its own. Workers need partners “at home” who can and will aid in the project of garnering and deploying the means to secure care for each other and any dependents. And although both Slaughter and Sandberg acknowledge the paid caregivers—nannies, house cleaners, teachers—on whom they and their families’ balance relies, they leave unremarked how these caregivers might achieve their own work–life balance. Possessive familialism elides the question, for acknowledging it would compromise the “solution” of a global care chain, often depending on immigrant labor from the Global South in a veritable social reproduction Ponzi scheme that leaves those at the bottom with care that is neither enough nor as good as that required by those above them (Bernstein and Jakobsen Reference Bernstein and Jakobsen2022; Fraser Reference Fraser2023; Nadasen Reference Nadasen2023). In short, what goes unnoticed is how the responsible feminist family depends on global structures of inequality and exploitation (Boris and Parreñas Reference Boris and Parreñas2010; Denbow Reference Denbow2024; Rottenberg Reference Rottenberg2018).

The same figure of the possessive family dominated the same-sex marriage debates in the US (Metz Reference Metz, Novkov and Nackenoff2020). Indeed, in the end, it was the argument that every responsible citizen needs a possessive family that won gay and lesbian people the right to same-sex marriage. These battles that crescendoed in the landmark Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges,Footnote ¹⁹ traded in a vision of marriage that put a sentimentalized responsibility to care at its core. As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his opinion affirming the right to marriage for same- and opposite-sex couples, “[m]arriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there. It offers the hope of companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other.”Footnote ²⁰ Simultaneously sentimental and instrumental, the right to marriage is a right to choose a commitment to mutual care. A perfect helpmeet to a politics that “responsibilize[s] freedom” (Scott Reference Scott1999, 87), marriage provides the language and means to promote an ethic of personal responsibility to care for one’s own, solidifying what Jacob Hacker (Reference Hacker2006) calls “the great risk shift” of the costs and risks of healthcare, childcare, education, and retirement onto individuals and families. Thus, the winning argument for gay marriage cannot, as some have argued, be reduced to a conservative defense of traditional institutions and sexual norms (Duggan Reference Duggan2003; Franke Reference Franke2015; Warner Reference Warner1999). It is also fueled by the common sense of possessive familialism that links sentiment, consent, and private responsibility for care. Not surprisingly, therefore, one line of defense was that same-sex marriage would be good for business: indeed, some of the earliest converts to the cause were corporations and neoliberal legal scholars such as Richard Posner (see Baskin v. Bogan Footnote ²¹). And while the ruling was celebrated by many in the queer community and beyond, others warned that marriage is a normalizing, naturalizing, and exclusive institution, and that these detrimental effects would extend well beyond those who opted into the institution (Franke Reference Franke2015; Ghosh Reference Ghosh2018; Murray Reference Murray2016; Paul Reference Paul2018). As a civil rights agenda and now as a right, the establishment of same-sex marriage strengthened what the establishment of opposite-sex marriage already accomplished: reifying the place of the marital family at the heart of public policy and imagination to the detriment of those who fall outside its borders. Indeed, while Obergefell may dethrone compulsory heterosexuality, it rests heavily on the possessive family.

Such a disciplinary structure was similarly evident in the welfare reform measures that Bill Clinton undertook along with Republicans who followed Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” in the 1990s. Single mothers on public assistance were forced into the labor force, much like indigents under Locke’s ([Reference Locke and Goldie1697] 1997) recommendations for the Poor Law, and were penalized for having additional children while receiving benefits. Single mothers were punished not only for being Black (even though most welfare recipients are white) and poor (which stingy public assistance assured), but also for being unmarried, even when women were escaping domestic violence (Mink Reference Mink1998). States were accordingly required to strengthen paternity identification and orders for child support, with debt accumulating even to incarcerated fathers. This reform had bipartisan support, echoing wide public excoriation of welfare recipients as “cheats” that could be traced back to the days of Ronald Reagan (Bunch Reference Bunch2009). Indeed, Cooper (Reference Cooper2017, 68–69) suggests that Clinton achieved what Reagan failed to accomplish: “Under the sign of family responsibility, Clinton’s welfare reform sealed an effective institutional alliance between neoliberal and new social conservative perspectives on the family. … Both agreed … however, that the private family (rather than the state) should serve as the primary source of economic security.” This move continued well into the twenty-first century, with George W. Bush allocating millions of dollars for “marriage education,” and Barack Obama resurrecting the reputation of Daniel Moynihan’s (Reference Moynihan1965) critique of “the Negro family” as “crumbling” with his own criticism of “missing” Black fathers, “acting like children instead of men,” who failed their families, thereby contributing to crime and poverty in Black communities (Bosman Reference Bosman2008).Footnote ²² Certainly, one could argue that “welfare” has always entailed various kinds of punishments for unmarried mothers, from war widows to alleged “welfare queens,” whether under the guise of pity or animosity (Gordon Reference Gordon1994; Mink Reference Mink1998). But the popularity among voters of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program and the significantly named Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act made this even more explicit.

It is against this backdrop that the US response to COVID-19 provides the most vivid illustration of the dominance of possessive familialism and its structural injustices. Whereas the previous examples were fueled by broad public support for the “traditional” two-parent nuclear possessive family, however, COVID-19 policies were more unpopular for taking away extrafamilial resources. “Lockdown” not only revealed the universality of vulnerability, as supply chains for items as basic as toilet paper and milk were destabilized (Yaffe-Bellany and Corkery Reference Yaffe-Bellany and Corkery2020), but also provided a natural experiment in the claims of possessive familialism. With monogamous marriage at its magnetic core, the solo, self-sufficient family was at the center of the national response to the global pandemic. Stay-at-home orders and school closures assumed that families, by themselves, could and should provide essential care to their members. As what Thatcher dismissed as “society” was put into cold storage, supports ranging from public schools to private food pantries, from cultural institutions to bowling leagues and soccer clubs, fell away. As paid caregivers stayed away and as teachers struggled to retain the attention of elementary and middle-school children online, lockdown made brutally clear what many already knew but had perhaps not seen so clearly: like the individuals beyond its walls, the supposedly solo, self-sufficient family depends on webs of resources outside itself. In the US in 2020, those resources ranged from the most public—such as public schools, on which close to 90% of the people with children between the ages of five and 17 depend—to the ostensibly private, such as in-home childcare and house cleaning; from unpaid, to underpaid, to well-paid (Fabina, Hernandez, and McElrath Reference Fabina, Hernandez and McElrath2023).Footnote ²³ The temporary elimination of those resources fell hardest on those whom the myth never served, including—not coincidentally—the low-paid workers who provided this care. They had always had to face the near impossibility of self-sufficiency and the knowledge that they had little to possess. But even for the economically secure who were able to continue working remotely and had greater cushioning than those who had to continue in-person work or had lost employment, wealth lost its easy power. And this may be what makes this example more powerful than “having it all,” marriage equality, or welfare reform: everyone, rich and poor alike, was—at least for a while, anyway—in the same boat, even if some had more comfortable seats. Without schools, playdates, nannies, home cleaning services, eldercare, and access to informal care networks such as neighbors, grandparents, and friends, most Americans struggled with the impacts of double and triple shifts at home, challenging the illusion of family self-sufficiency.

Across all classes, the burden fell particularly hard on women, as decades-long feminist arguments about capitalism’s dependency on women’s “reproductive labor” could have predicted. As one woman said, “I love my kids but … I don’t like being a mom in America because it’s just so much more clear that America hates women and hates families” (quoted in Grose Reference Grose2021). Another said, “I feel like I am failing at everything. I’m failing at work. I’m failing at my duties as a mom. I’m failing in every single way, because I think what we’re being asked to do is nearly impossible” (quoted in Thomas et al. Reference Thomas, Cooper, Cardazone, Urban, Bohrer, Long and Yee2020). As one observer noted, “[t]he child care crisis during the pandemic has revealed the extent to which mothers were barely hanging on in normal times” (Miller Reference Miller2021). A new term, “she-cession,” was coined to describe the significant numbers of women who left the labor force because of the impossibility of juggling their conflicting responsibilities, in contrast to “typical” recessions where men generally suffer greater job loss (Fabrizio, Gomes, and Tavares Reference Fabrizio, Diego and Tavares2021). By October 2020, around 1.5 million Americans left work because of school closings; the vast majority were mothers, and most were women of color (Moen, Pedtke, and Flood Reference Moen, Pedtke and Flood2020; Tedeschi Reference Tedeschi2020). Three months later, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that over 4.6 million jobs had been lost because of the pandemic, with losses for women far outweighing those for men (Dunn Reference Dunn2022, 1). Feyman, Fener, and Griffith (Reference Feyman, Fener and Griffith2021) found that “state-level childcare facility closures were associated with greater reductions in employment among women compared with men.” Women, more likely to be in the group of lower-paid “essential workers”—many of whom were women of color, immigrants, and poorer whites, and many of whom worked in the care sector—had to choose between income with greater risk of illness, and caring for their families with greater financial precarity.

Indeed, the category “essential worker” was expanded to include a wider range of workers in the food industry, from slaughterhouses to grocery stores, all of which employ high rates of people of color and immigrants at low pay and with low status. While this new classification might have made us more aware of how “care” is a broad and inclusive concept, it also made explicit the vast divide between those who receive care and those who provide it, with devastating consequences along lines of race and class: 22.7 deaths per 100,000 white Americans versus 54.6 deaths per 100,000 Black Americans alone, combined with 24.9 deaths per 100,000 in the Latino American population and 24.3 deaths per 100,000 among Asian Americans (Luck et al. Reference Luck, Elo, Preston, Paglino, Hempstead and Stokes2023). Yet the low status and pay of such work reveals an even crueler irony: these workers were risking their lives to help possessive familialism function, while the resources of the possessive family remained out of reach for them. We are again pulled back to the basic truism that possessive familialism requires deep and unacknowledged inequalities.

What was unique about the pandemic, however, and what sets it apart from our other examples, is that it laid bare the persistent lie at the heart of possessive familialism: ultimately, no family ever has cared, or ever could care, for its own without a considerable amount of help, particularly from government, from Thatcher’s maligned society, and most significantly, from “ever-longer global care chains” (Fraser Reference Fraser2013, 70). The illusion that it can do so depends on structures that make and mark some as exploitable and disposable, predictably along lines of class, race, gender, and migrant status. Yet demands for change did not emerge as the pandemic receded. Instead, possessive familialism persisted and even intensified.

Possessive Familialism and Democratic Crisis

Democracy in the US is in crisis. We are not alone in arguing that neoliberal ideas and structures are key causes or that our crises of care and democracy are related (Brown Reference Brown2019; Cooper Reference Cooper2017; Duggan Reference Duggan2003; Fraser Reference Fraser2023; Tronto Reference Tronto2013). What does possessive familialism add to the story? We have shown that the logic, values, and material structures of possessive familialism dominate our lives, but how is this related to our ailing democracy? Possessive familialism is a distinctly liberal legacy that causes intransigent problems for the democratic side of the “marriage of convenience” between liberalism and democracy (Shklar Reference Shklar and Rosenblum1989, 30): it undermines the material, cultural, and social resources democratic politics requires. It does so in three closely related ways.

The first is material: possessive familialism takes a full picture of the nature, costs, and benefits of care off the public register and ledger. By privatizing responsibility for our inevitable interdependence and obscuring the expanse and value of social reproduction broadly understood, the myth feeds commonplace acceptance and even endorsement of arrangements that drain the vast majority of us of the basic material resources—time, means, energy—required for even the most basic participation in democratic life. By obscuring the reality of inevitable interdependence, possessive familialism fuels and obscures the parasitic and unjust structures of care. But it does more: it saps our ability to think, talk, value, or do democratic politics. As Tronto argues, democracy, as a political form defined by a commitment to political equality, must make the realities of care central to public deliberation. Only with full, public acknowledgment that every human being is in need of care by others—and thus is unavoidably dependent on webs of care—is the possibility of a care that is structured to support political equality even imaginable. Possessive familialism does just the opposite. By casting individual families as responsible for and capable of providing care of their own, possessive familialism tells us that care is not a matter of shared concern. For one poignant example, consider the following. When the pandemic lockdowns closed schools and families were faced with the challenge of schooling at home, many were outraged: long considered a core responsibility of the state, angry parents demanded that schools reopen before the safety of their children and teachers could be assured. The pandemic appears to have opportunistically turbocharged a shift to private schools and home schooling, especially among right-wing conservatives (McCluskey Reference McCluskey2021; Musaddiq et al. Reference Musaddiq, Stange, Bacher-Hicks and Goodman2022). Yet as more than one scholar has noted, the growth of the homeschooling movement marks a turn away from the family’s traditionally deputed role in republican democracy of creating a new generation of responsible citizens who can respect differing views (Bartholet Reference Bartholet2020; Fineman and Shepherd Reference Fineman and Shepherd2016; Galston Reference Galston1991; Kerber Reference Kerber1980). Indeed, it fuels contemporary contempt for public institutions echoed in the labeling of efforts to bolster shared public support for inevitable vulnerability, from childcare to retirement and public transportation to accessible healthcare, as “socialist,” robbing public discussion of the vocabulary needed to describe the full costs of living according to the values of democracy. Instead of talking about tax structures capable of providing basic security for all—healthcare, education, public infrastructure, housing, retirement, dependency care—we look for time hacks and spouses who can help with our work–life balance, and put our faith in increased efforts to privatize public goods, such as school vouchers and the shifting of social security taxes to mandatory personal savings accounts (Feldstein Reference Feldstein1998).

The second way relates to inequality: by familializing the responsibilities of care and the means to do that, possessive familialism feeds and justifies inequality, which is poison to democratic possibility (Bartels [Reference Bartels2008] 2016). As we have seen, families operate in a simulacrum of the possessive model only through structures of extraction and inequality that extend globally. Even if we focus only on the impact on the health of democracy in the US, this means that possessive familialism is instrumental in the growth of material and social inequality that hurts the majority of families. We know that democratic politics can flourish in the face of moderate inequalities but suffers in the face of extreme material and persistent social inequalities (Brown Reference Brown2019; Levitsky and Ziblatt Reference Levitsky and Ziblatt2023; Shklar Reference Shklar1995). But whereas Brown (Reference Brown2019) argues that neoliberalism proceeds via two privatizations—economic and familial—and that it is the former that drives the inequalities so detrimental to democracy, we maintain the reverse: economic privatization and the possessiveness of the model of family that dominates the neoliberal context together produce the inequalities that undermine sustainable democratic politics. Possessive familialism undermines the very possibility of democratic life.

The third and most significant mechanism is social in nature: possessive familialism contributes to the demise of democratic society—the space “where we experience a linked fate across our separateness,” as Brown (Reference Brown2019, 27–28) has put it—which is essential to democratic politics. It is within society—the space between the intimate, the personal, the private, and the formal structures of government—where diverse and unequal members of a shared fate encounter one another, where realities of multilayered interdependence are lived and may become visible, and thus where affiliations and even solidarities that cross lines of difference might emerge. By disavowing society and the webs of interdependence and interaction that make it up, possessive familialism undermines the culture, language, and structures upon which democratic politics depends.

Gutmann and Thompson (Reference Gutmann and Thompson1996, 125) maintain that democracy must develop ways of reconciling disagreements and offer a theory of deliberation they believe can achieve that. Levels of distrust in US society seem to put such a solution out of reach: government shutdowns and threats of shutdowns have become a regular part of the US political landscape due to increased partisan intransigence. The US today is plagued by desiccated social networks and high degrees of distrust, not only of government but also of experts—in climate science, medicine, and the social sciences, particularly political science (American Political Science Association 2026; Pearson Reference Pearson2026)—and even of fellow citizens. Such distrust has generated severe conflict that centers disrespect for, and even violent hostility to, opposing views. Many factors, of course, feed this distrust: possessive familialism fuels it by instilling the belief that family is the only thing one can count on, that we are responsible for ourselves alone, and that society and government are the enemy.

The uncertainty that such fear and mistrust generate encourages us to turn inward to ever-shrinking relational spheres of immediate family and neighbors while, from the “safety” of our homes, we increasingly rely on ever-expanding online sources that promote distrust through disinformation: hence the viral distrust in elections, science, and medicine, and the increased trust in the sources that promote democratic disintegration by perpetuating disinformation (Freeder and Shino Reference Freeder and Shino2024; Kerr, King, and Wahman Reference Kerr, King and Wahman2024; Kirk Reference Kirk2025; Weingart Reference Weingart, Eyal and Medvetz2023). This combination of forces undermines the imaginative possibility of democratic world building and the possibility of coordinated efforts of the many against concentrated power at the top. It is within society—the space between the intimate, the personal, and the private, on the one hand, and the formal structures of government, on the other—where diverse and unequal members of a “shared fate” (Smith Reference Smith1997) encounter one another to forge a common civic identity, where realities of multilayered interdependence are lived and may become visible, and thus where affiliations and even solidarities that cross lines of difference might emerge. As Anne Norton describes it, democracy requires “open hands,” but she maintains that “liberalism has inclined too many to believe that they cannot trust the judgment of their fellow citizens.” This is fatal, for “our disdain for each other can make us tyrannical” (Norton Reference Norton2025, 109), as we are witnessing in the US today. We sharpen the analysis: the shape-shifting resource of possessive familialism, born in early liberal thought and honed over centuries of use, is taken up and deployed as a key element of the governing rationality in the neoliberal context. This has greatly exacerbated these tendencies of distrust and division for which liberalism laid the groundwork and on which neoliberalism has capitalized. As Cooper (Reference Cooper2017) shows, the wealthy can, under the guise of protecting the family, divide the many by selling fear to a middle class that is under the spell of possessive familialism, thus allowing the wealthy to secure a tax structure from which only they will benefit. Sold on the fantasy that families can and should be responsible for themselves, those with just enough to imagine they might benefit from such a structure turn a blind eye to the predictable impacts on shared public goods, generally to their own harm. By starving society and the social, possessive familialism weakens any sense of shared interest in or responsibility for meeting nested needs of care, and thus catches the demos in a trap of its own disempowerment.

Our aim in this article has been to help us see and understand this trap by identifying an essential but obscured element of the neoliberal social formation we inhabit and the political rationality within which we operate. Brown, Cooper, and many others have made the case that familialism and family values are not incidental to neoliberal politics. We expand this insight by showing that possessive familialism—which produces and exploits the possessive family as its delivery mechanism—is foundational to neoliberal political rationality. Its centrality to this rationality makes it difficult to identify, much less resist, resulting in damage to our democratic culture, norms, institutions, and practices. To avoid overly general claims we have focused on the US, but of course liberalism and neoliberalism are global phenomena, so our analysis might be fruitfully applied well beyond this context. With increased attention to the structural elements of this political rationality, democratic institutions might be mended, possessive familialism attenuated, and families could take less possessive forms.

However, our aim is not to speculate what this outcome might look like. Our aim instead has been to show the effects of this ideational framework that underlies all of the other critiques of the family we have referenced throughout this article in a neoliberal era. The possessive family is the linchpin—both a figure and a fact—of politics in the early twenty-first-century US because of the ways in which neoliberalism has taken the original vision of the Lockean possessive family, as nonideal as that may have been, to new extremes. By inculcating in the public the importance of the self-contained possessive family, it becomes almost impossible for a majority of the public to see the harms that possessive familialism inflicts on the very families it claims to value so highly. This in turn has made it difficult for the US public to see the ways they are being exploited, disenfranchised, and subordinated to power structures that are not in fact accountable to them, which has increased the fear and uncertainty that causes citizens to seek refuge by drawing inward. The forces that possessive familialism fosters have grown rampantly to overshadow actual human lives and needs. On the wings of possessive familialism, the realities of our deep interdependence, and the true costs of both care and democratic politics, are lost.