REVOLUTIONARY CONSERVATISM

Biography of Melinda Cooper

Melinda Cooper earned her Doctorate from the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-St-Denis) in 2001. She is currently professor in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. She is the author of Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (2008), Clinical Labour: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Economy (with Catherine Waldby, 2014), Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (2017) and Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (2024).

Her most recent book Counterrevolution seeks to unpick the reactionary logic of neoliberal public finance, which mandates crushing austerity in public services alongside extravagant fiscal and monetary supports for asset-based wealth. The book demonstrates how this dual imperative has transformed the DNA of capitalism, turning capital gains into the primary profit form and elevating privately held corporations or partnerships above the classic publicly traded corporation as the institutional core of wealth creation.

---

Select bibliography

BOOKS

Cooper, Melinda (2024) Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. New York: Zone Books (Near Futures series). ISBN 9781942130932, 1942130937

Cooper, Melinda (2017) Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. New York: Zone Books (Near Futures series). ISBN-10: 1935408844. ISBN-13: 978-1935408840

Cooper, Melinda and Catherine Waldby (2014) Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN-10: 0822356228 ISBN-13: 978-0822356226. 50% authorship

Cooper, Melinda (2008) Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

BOOK CHAPTERS

Cooper, Melinda (forthcoming) “Patrimonial Capitalism: Agency Theory and the Return of Dynastic Wealth” in Rebooting Political Economy, eds. Greta Krippner, Sarah Quinn, and Marion Fourcade, Duke University Press. [available from SSRN]

JOURNAL ARTICLES

Cooper, Melinda (2025) “Trump’s Antisocial State,” Dissent Magazine, Winter: 73-85.

Cooper, Melinda (2022) “Family Capitalism and the Small-Business Insurrection,” Dissent Magazine, Winter: 104-14.

Cooper, Melinda (2021) “The Alt-Right: Neoliberalism, Libertarianism and the Fascist Temptation,” Theory, Culture and Society 38:6, 29–50.

INTERVIEWS

2025 “Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance,” New Books Network, podcast interview with Miranda Melcher, 6 February.

2024 Daniel Steinmetz-Jones and Kate Yoon, “The Age of Public Austerity and Private Extravagance: Conversation with Melinda Cooper,” The Nation, September 12

2024 “The Cultural Politics Behind JD Vance’s Obsession With “Cat Ladies’: Interview with Jacob Rosenberg,” Mother Jones, August 7

2024 Benjamin Kunkel, “A Conversation with Melinda Cooper: Extravagances of Neoliberalism,” The Baffler, May 13

2024 Uhia and Iker Jauregui, Interview with Melinda Cooper: “La familia siempre ha sido un paraíso fiscal,” Zona de Estrategia, 15 January

Prolog

In her last book, Melinda Cooper envisions the several decades of neoliberal hegemony as a successful counterrevolution. The Australian sociologist recounts that, by the mid-1970s, American business circles and their allies in the academic world had come to see the ongoing social unrest, in their country and beyond, as an existential threat to capitalism itself. They thus concluded that the postwar neo-Keynesian compact, which they had hitherto tolerated, had become a Trojan Horse for socialism and needed to be jettisoned.

More than to restrain the State from redistributing resources and covering risks, Neoliberalism seeks to change its priorities. On the one hand, governments are required to give precedence to price stability over the pursuit of full employment, which compels them to profess an undying allegiance to balanced budgets. But on the other hand, the deflationist consequences of their vow to curtail demand entices them to opt for so-called supply-side policies. According to the neoliberal doctrine, in other words, pursuing economic growth can only be achieved through measures such as tax cuts, deregulations and subsidies, which are meant to sustain the confidence of capital owners in the profitability of investments.

Combining austerity for wage earners with extravagant generosity toward asset holders, counterrevolutionary neoliberalism seems, since the financial crisis of 2008, to have entered an era of fatal turbulence. However, as Melinda Cooper explains in the interview she gave us, the regime that is in the process of taking its place looks neither like the neo-Keynesian compact that preceded it nor like the post-capitalist future that neoliberals were determined to ward off.

Encouraged by the measures meant to ensure the stagnation of wages and the appreciation of capital, the more audacious exponents of the neoliberal creed did not wait for the waning of their own legitimacy to take on the third pillar of postwar managerial capitalism: along with their assault on the Welfare State and labor unions, they set out, if not to destroy, at least to transform the type of firm that had come to represent US business culture, namely the publicly traded corporation where property is dispersed among a large number of shareholders while power is exercised by salaried managers.

Under the guise of fighting technocracy and democratizing finance, Melinda Cooper argues, what these reformers successfully brought about is a new “gilded age” of capitalism, where property and power are once again reunited, either in the hands of one single individual or shared by a small group of associates. Such is the case of tech corporations that were born as startups and remain under the control of their founder even after they go public, but also of private equity funds whose partners are licensed to restructure, chop up and sell the companies that they subject to leveraged buyouts.

Now, as it turns out, these new “robber barons” happen to be the close guard surrounding the newly elected president of the United States. Far from satisfied with the tax breaks and loosened regulations distinctive of the counterrevolutionary period, they harbor much greater ambitions: what these oligarchs want from Donald Trump is for his administration to dismantle the public agencies in charge of social programs and public services and to grant them the management of the tasks that the federal state is no longer capable of administering.

To be able to sell public institutions at auction, however, the 47th president of the United States needs the same free rein that his cronies enjoy in their own companies. Hence the so-called “Unitary Executive Theory”, according to which the powers of the president supersede those of all the other branches of government. The return of patrimonial capitalism is thus intimately linked with the advent of an autocratic presidency – a regime that Melinda Cooper no longer calls counterrevolutionary neoliberalism but revolutionary conservatism.

Our interview took place in Sydney and Paris, on March 14, 2025.