The Patriarchal Order of the Market and the Neoliberal Reaction to the U.S. Feminist Movement (1970-1980)

Abstract

This essay aims to show how supporters of free-market economics in the United States between the 1970s and 1980s made the conflict with liberation movements, particularly feminism, and opposition to the welfare state and its affirmative actions, the occasion to hierarchically redefine the market order, giving it legitimacy and stability through extra-economic conceptual tools. The essay argues that the analysis of this conflict allows to observe the specific political form that neoliberalism took at the time of its rise in the United States. This hypothesis is screened by examining how the non-mercantile assumptions of the market economy, in particular, morals, natural order and biology, were mobilized by key figures of neoconservatism, libertarianism and neoliberalism – Irving Kristol, Murray Rothbard and Gary Becker, respectively – to reestablish not only the family order, but the complex of hierarchical social relations necessary for the effective functioning of the market.