Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
Neoliberal rationality -- ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture -- remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In vivid detail, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled.
The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice cede to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either. In an original and compelling theoretical argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that, far from being the lodestar of the twenty-first century, a future for democracy depends upon it becoming an object of struggle and rethinking.Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliateA prize-winning examination of why nation-states wall themselves off despite widespread proclamations of global connectedness.
Political theorist Wendy Brown opens her brilliant and incisive new book, Undoing the Demos, with a clarion call: Western democracy is imperiled. According to Brown, democracy has grown gaunt as a consequence of an ascendant political rationality that, like an ideological autoimmune disorder, has assaulted its very fiber and future...Democracy is the crux of the issue...and by focusing on how it's been diminished Brown has written a book that deserves to be widely read.
--Astra Taylor, BookforumIn her important new book Undoing the Demos (2015), Wendy Brown draws attention to the ways in which neoliberalism, like original sin, finds a home in the deepest core of our being. For Brown, that core is not the soul but democratic citizenship: our sense of belonging in a common world that we can govern together with others. In the era of neoliberalism, she writes, we are forced to translate ourselves into the inhuman idiom of entrepreneurial competitiveness, rendering our entire lives legible in the ruthless grammar of market competition.
--Boston ReviewBrown's book is theoretical yet accessible...essential reading not only for academics but for anyone concerned with our collective political future, and with the defense of democratic politics.
--Pop MattersDraws important empirical and analytical connections between Foucault's analytical approach to governmentality and a complementary Marxist critique of the material inequality that follows from neoliberal market reforms...[and] shows how such developments are reinforced by widespread acceptance of the concept of human capital.
--Foucault Studies