The Ethopoietic Family: From the Oikonomia to the Crisis in the Neoliberal Household

Starting in the 18th century, the family no longer held a position as clearly separate from the public space as it had in classic antiquity. It became more or less directly involved in strategies designed to govern the population and to promote the market economy. The fact that working-class families in the 19th century were encouraged to practice setting aside money as a safety net for times of unexpected change in the market or in personal fortunes, played an important role in the formulation of the liberal ethics of risk as the price of individual freedom. With the development of social safety systems and the welfare state, this process seemed to lead to the promotion of social solidarity. Instead, the political successes of neoliberalism, starting in the 1980s, revealed how both families and society in general were extremely subject to the influence of liberal economic rationality. This process was aided by a certain evolution in the relationship between economic development, on the one hand, and the family household, procreation and childrearing, on the other hand. Especially in the education of children and the care of its members, the family of advanced liberal societies seems to be one of the main creators of the ethic of the individual as the holder of “human capital.” The extreme economisation and privatisation of the family ethic today seems to be further favoured by the genetic approach to the health of the individual as a member of a group of blood relations who share the risk of getting certain diseases, by the application of the corporate model to university instruction, and by the financialisation of daily life which has pushed families into that “insolvent debt” which, paradoxically, is one of the greatest causes of the current crisis in neoliberal globalisation.