Although the American family is a quintessentially political institution, writing on the family by political scientists has been limited. The lacuna is no surprise: Rendering the family legible in a political sense has always been challenging. The “private” family is difficult to theorize. In both its internal dynamics and its interactions with the state, the family is messy, idiosyncratic, and constantly in flux. Moreover, while there is a dominant narrative of “the family” in American politics, that narrative has never corresponded neatly to the lives of most—or even many—individuals. Finally, the sheer variety of issues touching upon the family complicates efforts to articulate a consistent set of principles to guide policy.

Two new books focus attention on the political theory and politics of the family. While the authors hold widely divergent political outlooks and employ distinct methodologies, both books underscore how deeply concerns about the family permeate American political consciousness. Whereas David Tubbs wants to recast liberal political theory to promote a particular set of policy outcomes on behalf of children, Susan Markens presents a policy analysis of surrogacy that brings the reader directly back to theory and the need to understand how policy is shaped by race, gender, and class ideologies.

In Freedom's Orphans, Tubbs argues that liberal philosophers from the mid-twentieth century to the present have reordered the central tenets of liberal theory in ways that significantly injure the interests of children. Contemporary liberal theory endorses a notion of individual liberty as license and has ushered in an age of public and private excess. Following the lead of liberal philosophers, he continues, the U.S. Supreme Court has endorsed liberty qua license over democratic rule, construing the Constitution to preclude regulation of moral issues traditionally assumed to be within the purview of the state's police power.

Children, Tubbs asserts, are dependent and impressionable. To grow into responsible, self-governing citizens, children must learn to master their impulses. Unfortunately, according to Tubbs, American law and the ideology of liberalism that undergirds it allows children to be exposed to harmful pornographic materials and endorses promiscuous sexual practices that encourage children to surrender to their impulses, and then prohibits schools and other public institutions from articulating religious messages that might provide a counterweight. Contemporary liberalism, he claims, is “morally reticent,” a stance he traces to Isaiah Berlin's championing of negative over positive liberty in his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Today's liberals, Tubbs argues, eschew any obligation for molding character and shy away from “public policies intended to help adults and children resist self-destructive impulses or potentially dangerous choices” (p. 32).

Liberal feminists like Susan Okin, he argues, have simply exacerbated the problem. By “overstat[ing] the historical subordination of women” (p. 73), and endorsing a variety of family forms and reproductive rights that ignore the impressionability of children, feminists have ignored the fact that “a person's talents may be squandered through self-destructive conduct or the corruption of an institution [presumably the family]” (p. 65). Feminists, he suggests, are eager to deny children their entitlement to a two-parent, heterosexual family, and to force the costs of child rearing onto a welfare state.

Tubbs then critiques the right of privacy recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in Griswold and Eisenstadt, not because it laid the groundwork for recognizing abortion rights but because it undermined state laws establishing the monogamous married couple as the “social norm and as a family structure most conducive to the welfare of children” (p. 100). Having thus limited the regulatory authority of states in a cavalier disregard for traditional morality, he continues, the Court multiplied its errors with its rulings on pornography and school prayer, disregarding the extent to which children might be damaged by exposure to the former and left without moral grounding by denial of the latter. He concludes that contemporary liberals must revive a notion of positive freedom and be vigilant about how recognizing adult liberties may affect the welfare of children.

In Surrogate Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction, Markens shifts the reader's attention to the way in which disputes over surrogacy reflect anxieties about who is—and who ought to be—a parent, and a mother in particular. Markens explores the emergence of laws regarding surrogacy in New York and California in 1992 to determine how the framing of the issues led to diametrically opposed policies in those two bellwether states. She begins by charting the emergence of two distinct reproductive “crises” during the 1980s. The first was an alleged infertility “epidemic” among white middle- and upper-middle-class women, while the second stemmed from the alleged overfertility of young women of color bearing legions of “crack” babies: Concerns about surrogacy stitched the two crises together, reaching a fever pitch with the Baby M. and Johnson v. Calvert custody cases in 1987 and 1990, respectively. Baby M. involved a white surrogate who was the biological mother of the resulting child, while Johnson v. Calvert involved a “gestational” surrogate who had not provided genetic material and was, furthermore, a woman of color. New York, acting in response to Baby M., banned commercial surrogacy altogether, while California, home to Johnson v. Calvert, opted to permit and regulate commercial surrogacy. These distinctive legislative outcomes, Markens asserts, reflected different approaches for dealing with profound anxieties—inflected with concerns about race and class—about the value of motherhood in general and who, in particular, should be recognized as a mother.

Markens explores the framing of the surrogacy debates to reveal how similar language could be used to reach divergent conclusions. Both sides, for example, drew upon the language of “choice”: Supporters of surrogacy argued that deciding to bear a child for another should be a matter of women's autonomy, while those opposed argued that surrogacy denies that very autonomy by turning women's bodies into the property of others for the duration of a pregnancy. Similarly, both sides invoked arguments about the best interests of the child, with supporters arguing that surrogacy creates “wanted” children and the opposition arguing that the practice turns children into commodities. Throughout, the author highlights the ideologies of race and gender that informed the debates, noting that in both Baby M and Calvert, a “distinctively male standard of parenthood” according primacy to genetics was invoked, pitting two mothers against each other (pp. 174–75), and that the Calvert case was continuously framed to emphasize Johnson's history as a welfare mother and her audacity as a black woman seeking custody of a nonblack child (p. 120).

Markens's study demonstrates how the specific framing of an issue can lead to distinct policy outcomes, a conclusion that would not strike most political scientists as surprising, but is illustrated with considerable clarity here. While the book carefully analyzes the framing of the surrogacy debates—which is, after all, its main objective—it is less successful in moving a conversation about gender, surrogacy, and the family to a deeper level. It is fairly obvious, for example, that “public reaction and political responses to surrogacy are immersed in ongoing societal debates about women, mothers, fathers, and families” (p. 18). It is also clear that “explicit racial assumptions … are deeply embedded in the politics of reproduction” (p. 137). In addition to laying out the evidence that supports those assertions, however, it would be useful to suggest ways for dealing directly with those concerns; Markens never quite takes on the issue of what to do about surrogacy.

There is little that is tentative in Tubbs's analysis. Freedom's Orphans joins a familiar jeremiad: The traditional family is falling apart, creating a society in which individuals are positively encouraged to follow their most sordid instincts. This headlong rush into Sodom has been facilitated by political and jurisprudential philosophies that are wholly inattentive to the need to articulate a common vision of the good life that considers the vulnerability of children. While Tubbs repeatedly refers to children's interests, however, he never fully articulates those interests, nor does he suggest how a conversation about the good life and children's interests might be structured. There is, additionally, a critical piece of the picture missing: He writes as though children's parents play no role at all in their development. To omit any mention of parental rights in liberal theory and constitutional jurisprudence leaves this book's analysis thin. Finally, throughout the book, Tubbs draws facile connections between the welfare of children and what he asserts are primary liberal positions. It is no doubt true that most liberal theorists endorse the principle that, as a matter of human dignity, adults should be allowed to pursue intimate connections with others, whether gay or straight. But to extrapolate from that assertion to the position that all same-sex couples disdain sexual fidelity and will raise their children to reject commitment and value dishonesty (p. 84)—and that liberals would endorse such a position—is laughable.

As Markens's study makes clear, simplistic formulations of problems and single-minded solutions will rarely make sense when dealing with issues that touch upon the family. The issues are enormously complex, and there are compelling conversations to be had at the level of both theory and day-to-day politics. Both of these books should spark such a conversation.