Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution

by Wendy Brown

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 Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow 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 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 for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Economics, Theory, History, Political Science

296 pages, Paperback

First published February 6, 2015

About the author

Wendy L. Brown is an American political theorist. She is Class of 1963 First Professor of Political Science and a core faculty member in The Program for Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend of mine suggested I read this book – I’m not sure I would have found it otherwise. It is essentially a review of neoliberalism from the perspective of Foucault. One of the last things Foucault did was to present a series of lectures on neoliberalism to the Collège De France in 1979 – quite something, since neoliberalism was hardly ‘a thing’ at the time. In these lectures, it seems he not only identified the likely path of development of neoliberalism, but also spent quite a bit of time criticising contemporary Marxist ideas concerning the then current state of capitalism. At some stage I am going to have to track down these lectures, but not now.

One of the things about neoliberalism – as opposed to classical liberalism – is that it undermines notions of democracy. The most quoted example of this is the line from Thatcher – society does not exist, only the individual and families exist. Now, if society doesn’t exist, that has to also be true of ‘the people’ and so ‘rule by the people’ similarly becomes something fundamentally opposed by neoliberalism if only by definition. One of the things I’ve noticed in the comments in the threads that follow books I’ve reviewed by people who support neoliberalism is their disdain for democracy – this book helps to explain why that is necessary, rather than just an accidently feature of their world view.

Foucault is interesting to use here because he doesn’t think ideas exist in isolation from our lived reality. In fact, if you need to know just one thing about Foucault, the idea that power and knowledge are two sides of the one coin is as good a thing to take away from him as anything else. For Foucault, the changes that were being prepared for by the application of the ideas of Hayek and Friedman would not just impact economics or even just markets, but they would spread across to politics, law and to how people defined their own subjectivities. The author gives examples, they are neither pretty nor designed to make the reader feel comfortable.

One of those examples is the preference people have for university courses that they feel are most likely to provide them with an immediate financial return on their investment – so, engineering, an MBA, accountancy, rather than liberal arts, say. This is a shift that has accelerated over recent years, but not one that has led to young people necessarily getting the return on investment they anticipated. As the author quotes in her notes, “the average starting salary for
a graduate in 2009 was $48,633, according to the national Association of Colleges and employers, a decrease of 1.2 percent from 2008. From 2000 to 2007, real starting pay for those with bachelor’s degrees fell 3.2 percent among men and 1.7 percent among women. In contrast, between 1995 and 2000, real starting pay for college-educated men and women increased 20.9 percent
and 11.7 percent, respectively.” (p.266) A graph I show students in a course I gave for a couple of years on the sociology of education shows that from 1970 to 2011 the starting salary of a graduate fell from being equal to average male earnings to being about 70% of those earnings.

The point isn’t only that it is hard to pick a good degree that will give you a good wage, it is that education has been turned into something where the only justification for doing it in the first place is economic. We have become ‘entrepreneurs’, where we need to manage our own selves to ensure we become commodities likely to be purchased in the market. The market is no longer a means to provide a good life – it is the only definition of ‘life’ we can understand at all. University is a place to build your human capital – you might even be happy with this idea, but it is an idea that is significantly different from what university meant only a generation ago, and today this definition is accepted on all sides of politics as the only sole meaningful one. We have become cogs and we can’t even imagine a world where that wouldn’t be our first and only choice.

Which is interesting too – because choice is meant to be the hallmark of the ‘freedom’ neoliberalism promises. But the whole ideology is based on the idea of making people ‘responsible’ – that is, whatever happens to you, it is your fault, it is your problem to deal with, it is your project to overcome. Everything is personalised. Perhaps this is why we have people in the US who appear to be happy to replace a reality TV star with a talk show host whose only qualification for office seems to be that she believes in ‘the secret’. Power structures create subject positions that we can either fill (and therefore become ‘that sort of person’) or that we do not, and therefore struggle to find our place. This is pretty well Foucault’s dreadful vision – and we are living it.

The author gives examples of the undoing of the demos – the Citizens United decision, for instance, where corporations, due to the fiction that they are ‘people’, are able to buy themselves politicians, is a case in point. That is, where neoliberal ideology trumps the people, but also where this ‘fiction’ becomes the new ‘truth’ and therefore the demos is redefined to mean something ‘the people’ once needed to be protected from.

The particularly horrible chapter before this, and one that demands to be read, concerns farming in Iraq and India, and how Monsanto et al helped to destroy the local farming communities and thousands of years of farming practices. As she says, “This is what happened in India a decade ago, pushing cotton farmers into an ever-deepening hole of debt. The result? An epidemic of farmer suicides (at least twenty thousand at this point), often committed by drinking a bottle of RoundUp, the Monsanto-produced herbicide that kills everything except Monsanto’s genetically modified seed”. (p.146)

But we have grown accustomed to corporate rapaciousness being more important than human lives – take the reparations enacted on Greece forced to repay debts that would be illegal if demanded after a war, and where the human cost this is counted in suicides, deaths due to hospital cuts, poor food, wasted talent – enough to destroy a generation.

The last chapter of this books compares our current obsession with the market (as the provider of all good things) with that of ‘primitive’ peoples and the sacrifices they would make to their gods. I really liked this chapter – the market is presented as a similarly disinterested force to which we must make our own sacrifices in the hope it too will provide. However, sacrifices almost always made by the middle class and the poor to the ‘wealth creators’. We have witnessed the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the planet from to the wealthy. Think Trump’s latest tax cuts, or the news a week or so ago that austerity in Britain has caused life expectancy to fall and has meant 30,000 additional people died in 2015 and that perhaps a million additional people will die due to these cuts by 2058.

Human sacrifices to the gods of the market is literally what we are seeing, that is, not figuratively, literally. And the outcome is just the same – the sacrifices are just as meaningless.

The author makes it clear that to change this state of affairs means more than changing the system piecemeal, but rather that the power of neoliberalism lies in its ability to define the truth. To overcome this truth means to recreate a demos – and that is damn hard, given the universal despair neoliberalism feeds from. To quote her last paragraph:

“Thus, the Left’s difficulties are compounded by the seduction of such surrender to the overwhelmingly large, fast, complex, contingently imbricated, and seemingly unharnessable powers organizing the world today. Tasked with the already difficult project of puncturing common neoliberal sense and with developing a viable and compelling alternative to capitalist globalization, the Left must also counter this civilizational despair. Our work on all three fronts is incalculably difficult, bears no immediate reward, and carries no guarantee of success. Yet what, apart from this work, could afford the slightest hope for a just, sustainable, and habitable future?”

Indeed.

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brown is the ideal thinker/scholar to break down the destructive forces of neoliberal statecraft and what they've done to the democracy. The book is a must-read.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a specter haunting contemporary politics; a specter called 'neoliberalism.'

In Undoing the Demos, Brown goes full bore for the origins and nature of the current crisis of faith, an ideology which consumes labor, democracy, law, education, and life itself in the quest for every higher profits for a small group of elites. Brown offers a strong definition of neoliberalism, capable adapting to it's protean forms, as the "economizing of spheres and activities" in policy, practice, and rhetoric, and everything which casts life as a matter of competition rather than community or exchange, and takes as it's best model the building of a diverse and exponentially expanding investment portfolio. The ultimate form of neoliberalism is the transformation of human beings, political entities with defined rights who form self-governing communities and live and die, into human capitals, value-increasing portfolios of skills, assets, and social networks, who are combined into ever greater portfolios for the purposes of wealth expansion.

Brown tackles this neoliberalism mostly with a dissection of theory, looking at rights and democracy across time, and ably interlocating Foucault's lecture on biopolitics. Case studies include the rise of 'governance' as a mode of regulation and power, the Citizens United decision and speech as capital, and the erosion of the liberal arts in higher education. Academic readers will appreciate it for its (relative) clarity and definiteness on a variety of subjects. More causal readers may enjoy it for the truly epic amounts of shade that Brown throws on the present. Witness discussing Obama's 2013 State of the Union, which called for job creation as the North Star of American policy.

"Attracting investors and developing an adequately remunerated skilled workforce--these are the goals of the world's oldest democracy led by a justice-minded president in the twenty-first century... Striking in it's own right, this formulation means that democratic state commitments to equality, liberty, inclusion, and constitutionalism are now subordinate to the project of economic growth, capital positioning, and capital enhancement. These political commitments can no longer stand on their own legs, and the speech implies, would be jettisoned if found to abate, rather than abet, economic growth."

Damn, girl. Damn.

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 4 out of 5]

21. yüzyıl burjuva ideolojisine dair çok öğretici, çok iyi yazılmış bir çalışma. Yazarın temel tezi, neoliberalizmin yalnızca özelleştirme, düşük maaşlar ve güvencesiz çalışma demek olmadığı. Ona göre, son 30-40 yıldır ağırlığını artan bir şekilde hissettiğimiz bu yeni dönem, geçmiş burjuva ideolojilerinden farklı bir ideolojiyi önümüze sürüyor. Egemen sınıflar devleti, kamu kurumlarını, eğitimi ve insanı yeni bir kalıba döküyor. Burjuvazi yalnızca nesnel dünyayı değil, bizim öznelliğimizi, dünyayı anlama araçlarımızı da kendi istediği biçime sokuyor.

Her şeyin bir sermayeye dönüştüğü, kişinin kendisini de bir sermaye olarak düşünmeye zorlandığı bir dönem bu. Herkes kendinden sorumlu; her yaptığı faaliyeti (gönüllü katıldığı etkinlikleri de) CV'sini güçlendirecek birer başlık olarak gören öğrenci. Sevdiği insana 'duygusal yatırım' yapan insanlar. Bir şirket gibi yapılandırılan ve kar etmekten sorumlu kamu hastaneleri. Felsefe, sosyoloji, sanat tarihi okumanın değersizleştiği, teknokentler ve alışveriş merkezleri ile dolu üniversiteler. Ekonominin kurallarının her ama her alana yayıldığı bir toplum. Böyle bir toplumda demokrasi mümkün müdür?

Eskimiş olan ölüyor, onun yerine gelecek olan da bir türlü doğamıyorsa, çürüme kaçınılmazdır, diyordu Lenin. Kitabın tek sorunu, yazarın geçmiş sosyalist deneyimlere koyduğu mesafesi ve umutsuzluğu nedeniyle devrimci alternatife işaret edememesi. Yakında Metis yayınlarından Türkçesi yayımlanacak kitabın. Mutlaka edinip okuyun, bugünü daha iyi anlayacaksınız.

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this absolutely brilliant book Brown takes apart our current mode of socio-cultural organization and how it forecloses possibilities for democratic thought and action. She builds on Foucault's notion that neoliberalism is simultaneously an expansion from and break with classical Liberalism, largely in the sense that it takes classical economics and the Liberal emphasis on individual freedom and it empties those ideas of all non-economic/non-market content, thereby reconceptualizing subjects as homo oeconomicus and eliminating homo politicus. In other words, each subject becomes a form of human capital responsible both to him or herself for increasing in value but also responsible to society for increasing value. However, society has no reciprocal obligations because the realms of the social, political, and public are (if not eliminated entirely) reduced as much as possible to the sphere of a competitive market in which there are no public obligations and any capital can be eliminated as soon as it ceases to be economically efficient. This of course explains why there is so much reluctance to fund things like the arts in schools, higher education (which could easily be offered for free in the US), and why corporations play such a major part in writing legislation that benefits the corporations at the expense of middle and working class people. Brown ties all of this back to shrinking possibilities for democratic action as neoliberal governance and rationality (both terms she explains clearly) contribute to the erosion of political subjects and a public sphere--if we can only think of ourselves as capital competing in a market place, there is no theoretical space in which we could think of ourselves as engaged in discussions for a common good or providing public services without relying on them providing a good financial return.

[Nick Geiser · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book falls in a category that I like to call "normative sociology": the study of what human problems /should be/. At its best, this book gives a clear and quite specific conceptualization of what "neoliberalism" is and how it might tie together a variety of seemingly unrelated social trends over the last two generations in developed capitalist democracies. It also offers a useful summary of Foucault's 1978-79 lectures (published later as "The Birth of Biopolitics"). However, the meat of the book's argument is its case studies of "neoliberal rationality" at work (the growth of "governance," a reading of the Citizens United majority opinion, and changes in US/UK higher education). Here, Brown engages in either armchair social science or tendentious interpretation in the case of Citizens United. She presents no evidence that "neoliberal rationality" explains or even clarifies any of the cases she identifies. At most, she relies on suggestive metaphors (such as the role of "the market" as a metaphor in the Citizens United opinion) or correlational trends (such as the coincidence in the post-WWII US of both massive increases in college enrollment and the emergence of social movements).

In fact, there are /actual methods/ social scientists use to understand the effects of ideas and a whole literature in political science on ideas as explanatory variables. This book cites none of that work. Instead, it at most shows that certain outcomes are /consistent/ with the existence of a neoliberal "governing rationality"--a much weaker conclusion.

[Gordon Hilgers · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a feminist, a devotee of Foucault, studied in biopolitics, Wendy Brown's writings, while perhaps an acquired taste, especially those uninitiated into the throes and thrills of more advanced thinking in both ideologies and that intersection where the soft power of economic force meets the now-endangered engine of political force worldwide, should be required reading for even armchair warriors who want to better understand political dynamics both inside the United States and around the world at large.

While the neoliberal imaginary has been moving towards realization since the 1960s, first making an overstated "cameo appearance" in the assassination of Salvador Allende by the CIA under President Richard Nixon's direction in 1973, all of it an experiment designed to see if the theories of Milton Friedman's idea of a market freed of outside intervention--we call this "free" market economics today--regardless of its hideous failures, from Brazil to Argentina to post-Soviet Russia and much of Latin America, the increasing frequency of free trade agreements and the "economic capture" of the International Monetary Fund by neoliberal ideologues intent upon forcing neoliberal "governmentalization" to all countries in need of loans and help in the wake of the worldwide 2008 economic downturn should indicate to even common American citizens that the very concept of democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere is being hijacked.

Many terms in our political situation have been re-interpreted in order to adhere to the neoliberal imaginary: marketplace of ideas, this endless need for $$$ in our political campaigns, all sorts of out-of-place terminology, and indeed, people do perceive on gut level that something is not quite right, and many are then directed to blame the federal government when the culprit is neoliberalism itself.

Ms. Brown unmasks this "stealth revolution" many simply are unwilling to accept after over 35 years of continual propaganda barrage on AM radio, on television, in commercialism in general, and now ideologues are now bent upon punishing poor people. Brown goes into detail regarding the hot mess Greece became when it became evident that, not only were wealthy Greeks skipping-out on their duties as Greek citizens in terms of paying taxes, but were willing to take it even further in squirreling money in offshore banking havens, even while a simple ride in a helicopter over Athens could put lies pleading poverty to rest. The neoliberalism tactic of "austerity" bludgeoned Greece's poor to the point that the Greek people elected a Socialist government and sought to repudiate the IMF's bullying tactics, but eventually lost due to lack of ready cash. This has also occurred in Italy, Ireland, parts of eastern Europe and most especially in Spain when "indignatos" took to the streets, rioting against forced austerity embodiesdin the relinquishment of social welfare programs in favor of saving "capital expenditures".

This is happening in Brazil too. Most pointedly, during the World Soccer Cup matches a couple of years ago, when the Brazilian federal government pled poverty in terms of offering help to the huge favellas, massive and unsanitary ghettos on the hills around Rio De Janero, only to turn right around and spend close to a billion dollars to build stadiums, beach-side hotels and infrastructure repair for a silly sports ball event, the poor of Brazil also rioted--to the point that the WSA nearly canceled the games out of fear of, well, being burned alive by poor people so desperate they had no options beyond gaining the world's attention over patent injustices that nevertheless persist.

All the fancy dancers and disco-goers seemed unconcerned by any of this, mainly because the poor, in Brazilian eyes, are to be out of sight and out of mind. Why feed poor people when one can do the Bossa Nova and get hip over some foreign fad that enthralls Europeans?

Brown does not go into outrage so much as examination. She is perhaps the world's finest commentator and explorer of the underbelly of an economic ideology that seeks to dominate and even destroy democracy, freedom, equality, justice and more simply in favor of coddling the wealthy.

This writer suspects the backlash against neoliberal ideology is going to be fierce and destructive, mainly because the wealthy are in deep denial over their "reciprocal obligation" (to use an economic term) towards the society and culture that made their wealth possible in the first place.

Let's hope the international business set that visits Davos each year gets on the problem and solves this nastiness before it's too late. This is a difficult read, but well worth the effort and the recourse to the dictionary.

[pınar · Rating 4 out of 5]

insanın bir sermayeye dönüşümünün, sermayeden ibaret kalışının çok berrak bir dökümü ancak bu dönüşümü salt liberalizm vs neoliberalizm üzerinden okuduğu için eski liberalizm iyiydi neoliberalizm kötü oldu gibi bir ikilikte sıkışmış olduğunu düşünüyorum, neoliberalizme giden yolların taşları bizzat liberalizm tarafından döşenmemişcesine. bu da Brown'u dilinden düşürmediği liberal arts eğitimli klasik batı insanını över bir pozisyona atıyor. Farklı birlikte yaşayış ihtimal ve sol alternatifleri es geçmesiyle, başka nasıl olabilirdi, bundan sonra nasıl olabilir sorularına hiç değinmemesi ile klasik liberal demokrasiye bir ağıt hissi veriyor.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm giving it five stars even though I am now thoroughly depressed as a result of this text. Ugh, academia. Ugh, America. Ugh.

[Göker Makaskıran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kitap hakkında kapsamlı bir inceleme yazısı şuradan okunabilir : http://www.politics.ankara.edu.tr/der...

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

While leftists today routinely criticize “neoliberalism” and its attendant norms, leftist critiques assail neoliberal reason at a myriad of levels with sometimes explicit, often implicit assumptions about what “neoliberalism” entails in the first place. Does it refer to intensified inequality, the crass or unethical commercialization of non-economic spheres, the nascent intimacy of corporate and finance capital with the state, or the economic havoc wreaked on the economy by the ascendance and liberty of finance capital (29-30)? While Presidents Clinton and Busch the second are certainly neoliberals, does Barack Obama count as one as well? If so, why, and on what terms? And how does neoliberalism differ from twentieth-century liberal democracy or economic liberalism? Most of the time in popular leftist discourse, these questions remain unanswered; to explicate what, exactly, “neoliberalism” refers to would dilute the potency of leftist critiques aimed at its deleterious consequences in public life. Yet without a clear sense of what neoliberalism means, it is difficult, if not impossible to understand the mechanisms that produce the effects that leftists correctly abhor, let alone the conditions for its possibility and continued dominance across the world. And without a clear sense of its conditions, its mechanisms, and the rationality that underpins its life-destructive machinery, leftists and all those concerned with justice are left impotent to proffer substantive alternatives to its leveled-down version of common life. Thus, in this incisive work of critical political theory, Wendy Brown tackles what neoliberalism means and what structures its influence on our lives: neoliberalism, she claims, is “an order of normative reason” which, once ascendant, extends “a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life.” That is, “neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities,” such that it posits humans exclusively and “exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus” (30-31). Beyond this critical foray into the conditions of neoliberalism’s possibility with respect to its political rationality, Brown also insists that “neoliberalism assaults the principles, practices, cultures, subjects, and institutions of democracy understood as rule by the people.” It is thus “profoundly destructive to the fiber and future of democracy” and threatens to eradicate the possibility of democracy in any identifiably democratic form in the future. If Brown is correct, then the need to better understand neoliberalism is more crucial than ever before.

Brown leans heavily on Foucault in her effort to disclose the conditions for the possibility of ascendant neoliberal political rationality. Her careful attention to Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics both stands on its own as a perceptive interpretation of an understudied set of texts and offers the key to her overall analysis: with Foucault, Brown asserts that neoliberalism posits and fashions a new, distinctive subject: homo oeconomicus, a small bit of human capital expected to invest in itself, accrue value, and contribute to the broader economic health of the (economic, not political) community which it inhabits. More specifically, Brown insists that neoliberal political rationality determines this subject and its attendant responsibilities, expectations, and modus vivendi in a novel way: “neoliberalism activates the state on behalf of the economy, not to undertake economic functions or to intervene in economic effects, but rather to . . . economize the social” (62). On this model, the state does not colonize the economic sphere, but rather the economic sphere appropriates the state to itself and refashions it on economic terms. “With neoliberalism,” Brown writes, “the political rationality of the state becomes economic in a triple sense: the economy is at once model, object, and project. That is, economic principles become the model for state conduct, the economy becomes the primary object of state concern and policy, and the marketization of domains and conduct is what the state seeks to disseminate everywhere,” even in traditionally non-economic realms (ibid.). This represents a radical shift from the orthodox principles of liberal democracy and liberal economics, Brown observes with help from Foucault. Neoliberalism does not merely extend classical liberalism, but transforms it: the state is not just to leave the economy alone; more radically, the market is to be the principle of all life, both public and private.

Ultimately, Brown seeks to transcend Foucault’s astute analyses of neoliberal political rationality in that she adds, rather provocatively, that the neoliberal triumph of homo oeconomicus undermines the conditions for the continued existence of homo politicus—that is, the subject which democratic institutions and norms presuppose in order to flourish. This subject, Brown maintains, has survived modifications at moments of political flux across modernity—from Adam Smith, to Jean Jacques Rousseau, and even to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Only with the recent ascent of neoliberalism at the end of the twentieth century, she claims, has homo oeconomicus nearly vanquished homo politicus with its distinctively political concerns, premised on a commitment to individual and collective self-rule meant to establish the social conditions for a life well-lived in communion with fellow citizens. The result? “Citizenship itself loses its political valence and venue[,] . . . since homo oeconomicus . . . cannot think public purposes or common problems in a distinctly political way[,] . . . [and] political life, and the state in particular . . . are remade by neoliberal rationality.” This, in turn, “eliminates the very idea of a people,” the demos which democracy requires to function as such (39).

In the penultimate chapter, Brown skillfully explains why neoliberalism’s ascendence in Euro-Atlantic education threatens the viability of democracy in that it evacuates education’s aim to mold the “educated participants in public life and common rule” which democracy requires (177). Rather, education remade on neoliberalism’s terms fashions “citizens” as “technically skilled human capital” tasked to “self-invest in ways that contribute to its appreciation or at least prevent its depreciation” (ibid.). On Brown’s view, neoliberal reason has saturated education (particularly public universities reliant on taxpayer dollars) with market rationality that transforms education’s primary objectives. If, on the one hand, we have dispensed with the assumption that upward mobility and middle-class status require instruction in the liberal arts, and, on the other hand, neoliberal political rationality abandons the idea of a well-educated public as a condition for the possibility of democratic politics, then education in the liberal arts loses its native purpose, once so clearly stressed in twentieth-century American academia: not just to facilitate upward mobility, but also to instruct the many for a life of freedom, understood both as individual autonomy (to choose and pursue one’s own ends) and participation in collective self-rule (182-185). Instead of self-rule (both individual and collective), neoliberal education is oriented toward self-enhancement tethered to human capital’s capacity to accrue value. Public universities that fail to educate students in a manner that enhances their capacity to earn more lose public trust and thereby public funds; their efforts to modify instruction in view of the demand for human capital enhancement consequently decreases their esteem in academic circles, which further inhibits these institutions’ ability to attract top-tier research faculty, which likewise hurts their rank in Forbes or U.S. News and World Report. This cycle, Brown notes, is vicious: public universities “price themselves out of a market in which they are also trapped,” and democracy suffers as an ultimate consequence. Moreover, while most private universities continue to offer a liberal arts education, this is more of a luxury than a constitutive element of what they provide student-consumers. That is, the liberal arts curriculum private universities still teach their students is effectively a side-show to their alumni networks, corporate connections, and venerable reputation; “what students learn at these institutions,” Brown writes, “is mostly irrelevant to their future in worlds of business, finance, and tech,” which is where most students at private universities are headed (193). The reason wealthy families pay extraordinary tuition rates for their children to attend such universities has far more to do with “return-on-investment” indexed to students’ future incomes than with their future contributions to public life.

Brown correctly observes that in order for liberal arts education to survive, citizens must affirm its value for democracy. The problem is, however, that its value is occluded by neoliberal political rationality that reshapes the conditions for democratic politics—conditions which have no need for the liberal arts, since, on neoliberal terms, a well-educated public is not necessary for democracy. Brown therefore concludes that “democracy hollowed out by neoliberal rationality cannot be counted on to renew liberal arts education for a democratic citizenry” (200)—a bleak verdict, since neoliberal rationality seems ever-ascendant. Brown’s conclusion coheres with a broader trend she identifies in leftist politics, which she calls “a predicament without precedent: we know what is wrong with this world, but cannot articulate a road out or a viable global alternative” (220). What alternatives are there to neoliberal political rationality when it so potently saturates our social, cultural, moral, and political discourse? What other ways of life with one another can we envision when neoliberalism sets the terms on which alternative sociopolitical settlements are posited and contested? Consequently, leftists “are reduced to reform and resistance” rather than re-creation and construction and this, Brown insists, is the product of “a ubiquitous, if unavowed, exhaustion and despair in Western civilization. At the triumphal ‘end of history’ in the West, most have ceased to believe in the human capacity to craft and sustain a world that is humane, free, sustainable, and, above all, modestly under human control” (221). For Brown, neoliberal political rationality both relies on this ubiquitous despair and “consecrates, deepens, and naturalizes” it (ibid., my emphasis). Thus, to abandon belief in the actualization of, say, beloved community both accelerates the ascendency of neoliberal reason and explains why its distinctive form of reason has so easily taken hold.

While Brown does not say as much, this is the way in which neoliberalism is, at its core, a nihilistic worldview and, perhaps, the natural consequence of the “death of God” in a postmodern, post-Christian Euro-Atlantic world (a claim which Brown definitively does not make). For neoliberalism, there simply is no moral arc of the universe, no creative, personal force fundamentally committed to the full manifestation of justice in human communities. If leftists are to confront the toxic despair upon which neoliberal rationality relies and which it deepens as constitutive of their efforts to posit and promote more just alternatives to neoliberal politics, they may do well to rehabilitate the notion of faith in political life. To confront despair, one needs hope, and faith is the condition for the possibility for any hope at all. By faith, I do not necessarily mean faith in the Christian God, or faith in the particular vision of justice articulated in, for example, Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or any of the other Hebrew prophets. I do, however, think that without faith in some ideal situated in and crafted by events in a shared narrative, hope is near-impossible to come by. What that narrative may be is, I suppose, for leftists to either create, discover, or re-appropriate—for my part, the Christian story remains determinative. For Brown, this invocation of faith may be anathema, but it certainly offers one response to her call for leftists to confront despair. To combat neoliberalism and all its destructive manifestations, leftists will, it seems to me, need lots of faith to sustain us.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Undoing the Demos offers a sound exploration of the neoliberal revolution. The writing is dense, and every word seems to count - as such, I found myself rereading paragraph after paragraph (not so much to make it clear, but to absorb everything Brown is saying).

The most interesting thing for me was Brown's discussion that neoliberalism not only transforms the citizen into an entrepreneurial-subject (without power), and the 'responsiblization' of that isolated individual, or that it leads to inequality, the loss of democratic power, and economic austerity as it applies to social services - but that it actually transforms the human from 'homo-politicus' to 'homo-economicus' so thoroughly that there is no fulcrum other than economy/efficiency to lever social change. In other words, we are losing the very lexicon with which to sustain social values in society.

"At the triumphal “end of history” in the West, most have ceased to believe in the human capacity to craft and sustain a world that is humane, free, sustainable, and, above all, modestly under human control. This loss of conviction about the human capacity to craft and steer its existence or even to secure its future is the most profound and devastating sense in which modernity is “over.” Neoliberalism’s perverse theology of markets rests on this land of scorched belief in the modern. Ceding all power to craft the future to markets, it insists that markets “know best,” even if, in the age of financialization, markets do not and must not know at all, and the hidden hand has gone permanently missing. / Neoliberal rationality did not germinate this civilizational despair. However, its figuration of the human, its reality principle, and its worldview — “there is no alternative” — consecrates, deepens, and naturalizes without acknowledging this despair. In letting markets decide our present and future, neoliberalism wholly abandons the project of individual or collective mastery of existence. The neoliberal solution to problems is always more markets, more complete markets, more perfect markets, more financialization, new technologies, new ways to monetize. Anything but collaborative and contestatory human decision making, control over the conditions of existence, planning for the future; anything but deliberate constructions of existence through democratic discussion, law, policy. Anything but the human knowledge, deliberation, judgment, and action classically associated with homo politicus" (p.221).

[Jayson Floyd]

I finally understand neoliberalism.

Will forever remember this book as the one that I was reading when I decided I didn't want to go into academia anymore. Reading it wasn't not a factor in my decision. Oscillates between incisive discussions on neoliberalism as it's understood today and wildly myopic/banal comments on how to surpass it.
The sections on Foucault's lectures are excellent, I really came out with a comprehensive understanding of what neoliberalism is, and more importantly, what it isn't, seeing as it's the cool term to use when something is bad in contemporary society. Brown lays it out extremely clearly, and the examples she used like the Bremer orders and the Citizens United decision do a lot to set it in an understandable context. Great stuff.
Where she totally loses me is her positive argument, which is what we should do about it. And her answer seems to be... the liberal arts? It's a hilarious non-sequitur that reveals how single-minded Brown's worldview is as a tenured university professor at Berkeley. She somehow identifies these global trends working in concert to reduce our understanding of democratic society, and then she also throws in there that it's fucked up that US News ranks schools on "Best Value" and how sad it is that professors who prioritize teaching over research are seen as "losers" by their peers (she actually uses that word in the book). There's a really awesome part where she suggests that if we lose the liberal arts, "humanity will have entered its darkest chapter ever". EVER. In the HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Luckily this part of her argument is not a huge part of the book so it doesn't sink the whole thing. While myopic, her critiques of the professionalization of universities are actually pretty spot-on, including a section where Amherst gets a little shout-out: "what is taught or learned (or not) at Princeton or Amherst is largely irrelevant to the prestige obtained and the networks accessed and reproduced... the truth is that what students learn at these institutions is mostly irrelevant to their futures in worlds of business, finance, and tech, which is where most of them are going." So true! Another critique I have is that it barely even bothers to talk about why democracy is inherently important, which is annoying but standard fare in political theory. She weirdly even admits that democracy is not a safeguard against bad outcomes but insists that it's important and does not elaborate. ok.

[Boka]

eye-opening and sometimes a little bit too dramatic

[goddess · Rating 1 out of 5]

A complete leftist bent in which this UC Berkeley professor blames neoliberalism (a.k.a. capitalism, basically) for many of the ills in our country today. So in other words, another Evil Capitalists! book. Claiming that it is "common knowledge" that the white heterosexual male is privileged (yeah, ask any of them how easy it is to get financial aid or even a job these days), she proceeds to argue that this neoliberalism is responsible for the dismantling of labor unions, pensions, employment security. Never mind that labor unions have outlived their purpose and that some of these pensions are bankrupting states. And as if people are entitled to all these things. She seems to say that market economies are immoral and that too much wealth is bad. (Who decides what is "too much"?)

One of my biggest gripes of this book is Brown's claim that women are unfairly burdened when public services are taken away. As if it's the government's job to take care of people. And that they are poorly represented in the workforce because they have to care for the children. As if!! These poor females are punished because they have to care for their own children. Brown also basically asserts that neoliberalism is responsible for impoverished mothers' failures to provide. Here's a thought: How about not having children out of wedlock? How about fathers stepping up? How about some personal responsibility?

She goes on to say things like entitlement programs are blamed for our debt and potential ruin. (Uh, rightly so.) And that there's an attack on collective action, a.k.a. unions, yet she does not tell the other side of the story. Such as the damage that unions do.

My personal favorite is her rant that neoliberalism is destroying higher education. Apparently, in order to be a good productive citizen not only must one attend college but one must obtain a liberal arts degree. Because apparently only a liberal arts degree fosters creativity and critical thinking as well as stimulates the intellect. This reeks of elitism and is exactly what non-academics hate about higher education. I of course value higher education--I'm working on degree number 3--but in no way feel like university training is the only way to educate oneself. As if sitting in a classroom with liberal professors, reading liberal books, and possibly having your free speech squelched (all of which are very common place on campuses today) is the only way to prepare one for popular sovereignty. Good citizenry does not necessarily come from a 4-year degree, a "liberal arts" one at that. I personally have a liberal arts degree but that does not make me better than say my brother who has a more technical one. Brown gripes that colleges are only churning out graduates to make money. Gasp! Last I checked, the purpose of college was to secure employment and provide a living for oneself.

So, to sum up: Left-wing drivel.

[Ferda Nihat Koksoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

-Kitabın amacı, NEOLİBERAL RASYONALİTENİN hakimiyetiyle ideal, hayali ve siyasi DEMOKRASİ PROJESİNİN TEHLİKEYE GİRDİĞİNİ göstermektir.
Siyasi hayat ekonomikleşmekte, siyasetin yerini piyasa ve işletme mantığı almakta, eğitim ticarileşmekte, seçimler pazaryeri anlayışına devrolmaktadır.

-Homo POLITICUS, Homo ECONOMICUS tarafından gaspedilmektedir.
Bunun temel belirteçleri TOPLUMSAL altyapının ÇÖZÜLMESİ, KAMU mallarının ÖZELLEŞTİRİLMESİ, SERMAYE üzerindeki KONTROLLERİN (Vergi vb) KALDIRILMASI ve BİREYİN her şeyden SORUMLU TUTULMASI 'dır.

-BİREY hem kendisi dışındaki tüm siyasi alanlardan uzak tutularak kendine yatırım yapmaya zorlanırken hem de paradoksal olarak kemer sıkma dönemlerinde "MÜŞTEREK fedakârlık" taleplerine (işten çıkarılma, ücret azaltılma dahil) maruz kalır.
Faşizm benzeri bir kurban/fedakârlık kültürü yaratılmaktadır.

-Klasik modern ULUS imgesi yerini, idarecilerin "ekip lideri, işçilerin "küçük ortak", tüketicilerin ise "misafir" olduğu ve sadece RAKAMLARIN önemsendiği WAL-MART modeline bırakmaktadır.

-Neoliberal rasyonalitenin yerini BAŞKA bir SİYASİ ve TOPLUMSAL AKIL almadığı sürece toplumların çözülmesi aynı hızla sürecektir.
Bu akıl tepki siyasetini aşan, herkesin iyi yaşayabileceği, özgürce yaşayabileceği ve hep beraber yaşayabileceği ALTERNATİF bir siyaset olmalıdır. Bu iddialarda direten sadece SOL'dur ve işi çok zordur; bunun dışında da UMUT bağlayabileceğimiz bir şey yoktur.

-Demokrasinin, demokratik olmayan idare pratikleriyle harmanlanması veya AHLÂKİ MUTLAKLARLA SINIRLANMASI gereken zamanlar vardır (Rousseau).

[Ferda Nihat Koksoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

-Kitabın amacı, NEOLİBERAL RASYONALİTENİN hakimiyetiyle ideal, hayali ve siyasi DEMOKRASİ PROJESİNİN TEHLİKEYE GİRDİĞİNİ göstermektir.
Siyasi hayat ekonomikleşmekte, siyasetin yerini piyasa ve işletme mantığı almakta, eğitim ticarileşmekte, seçimler pazaryeri anlayışına devrolmaktadır.
*Homo POLITICUS, Homo ECONOMICUS tarafından gaspedilmektedir.
Bunun temel belirteçleri TOPLUMSAL altyapının ÇÖZÜLMESİ, KAMU mallarının ÖZELLEŞTİRİLMESİ, SERMAYE üzerindeki KONTROLLERİN (Vergi vb) KALDIRILMASI ve BİREYİN her şeyden SORUMLU TUTULMASI 'dır.

-BIREY hem kendisi dışındaki tüm siyasi alanlardan uzak tutularak kendine yatırım yapmaya zorlanırken hem de paradoksal olarak kemer sıkma dönemlerinde "MÜŞTEREK fedakârlık" taleplerine (işten çıkarılma, ücret azaltılma dahil) maruz kalır.
Faşizm benzeri bir kurban/fedakârlık kültürü yaratılmaktadır.

-Klasik modern ULUS imgesi yerini, idarecilerin "ekip lideri, işçilerin "küçük ortak", tüketicilerin ise "misafir" olduğu ve sadece RAKAMLARIN önemsendiği WAL-MART modeline bırakmaktadır.

*Neoliberal rasyonalitenin yerini BAŞKA bir SİYASİ ve TOPLUMSAL AKIL almadığı sürece toplumların çözülmesi aynı hızla sürecektir.
Bu akıl tepki siyasetini aşan, herkesin iyi yaşayabileceği, özgürce yaşayabileceği ve hep beraber yaşayabileceği ALTERNATİF bir siyaset olmalıdır. Bu iddialarda direten sadece SOL'dur ve işi çok zordur; bunun dışında da UMUT bağlayabileceğimiz bir şey yoktur.

-Demokrasinin, demokratik olmayan idare pratikleriyle harmanlanması veya AHLAKİ MUTLAKLARLA SINIRLANMASI gereken zamanlar vardır (Rousseau).

[Quin Rich · Rating 2 out of 5]

Smart discussion of Foucault and some helpful explications of neoliberal rationality. Underwhelming political analysis that ignores race, colonialism, and gender. Strange valorization of liberalism (and especially the Euro-American liberal arts university) throughout.

This feels very presentist. I am not sure that particularities of Brown's analysis (e.g. the role of "sacrifice" in neoliberal logics) has or will hold up in the long term. Useful for Brown's theoretical explications of neoliberalism, but otherwise very limited.

[Omesh Dwivedi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ever wonder why the US student loan structure is endemic to America? Why public transportation and public libraries in the US (or more like every public structure) is excessively dilapidated even compared to many peer states? Short answer. Neoliberalism! Brown's book is a good first introduction to understanding the concealed ideology of neoliberalism, which most don't understand or most can't even define but what governs everything in our society to minute levels.

[Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for everyone on the left or anyone trying to understand how the economy has become the sole talking point of "serious politics" while state-intervention is simultaneously seen as a disaster. As brilliant as Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of instrumental reason, Wendy Brown critiques "neoliberal rationality" and its erosion of democracy on all major levels. Absolutely brilliant and the most thought-out academic text I've come across that has been published in recent years.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a book about political theory, it's relatively readable, and certainly well-argued. I think it gives a good theoretical underpinning to the question "Why is everything so shitty right now?" I would say this probably wouldn't be the best choice for a casual reader (like me), but it's definitely doable. Though there are certain parts where the author assumes you're intimately familiar with the ideas of thinkers such as Foucault, Marx, and Rousseau.

[Girl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book honestly terrified me but was a great, comprehensible read on neoliberalism today.

[MassiveMichael · Rating 5 out of 5]

The main question this book tries to answer is the following: “What happens when the practices and principles of speech, deliberation, law, popular sovereignty, participation, education, public goods, and shared power entailed in rule by the people are submitted to economization?”

A short answer: “Neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic.”. And by doing so neoliberalism is quietly undoing the basic element of democracy.

As a consequence the homo polticus is replaced by the homo economicus: “To speak of the relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life by neoliberalism is thus not to claim that neoliberalism literally marketizes all spheres, even as such marketization is certainly one important effect of neoliberalism. Rather, the point is that neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities-even where money is not at issue and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo economicus.”

The only thing I could criticize is that it is sometimes highly complicated to read, as it mostly builds on Foucault lectures on biopoltics. Below you can find some quotes:

“Rather, as a normative order of reason developed over three decades into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality, neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic.”

“What happens when the practices and principles of speech, deliberation, law, popular sovereignty, participation, education, public goods, and shared power entailed in rule by the people are submitted to economization?”

“Both persons and states are construed on the model of the contemporary firm, both persons and states are expected to comport themselves in ways that maximize their capital value in the present and enhance their future value, and both persons and states do so through practices of entrepreneurialism, self-investment, and/or attracting investors. Any regime pursuing another course faces fiscal crises, downgraded credit, currency or bond ratings, and lost legitimacy at the least, bankruptcy and dissolution at the extreme. Likewise, any individual who veers into other pursuits risks impoverishment and a loss of esteem and creditworthiness at the least, survival at the extreme.”

“Striking in its own right, this formulation means that democratic state commitments to equality, liberty, inclusion, and constitutionalism are now subordinate to the project of economic growth, competitive positioning, and capital enhancement.”

“For firms and the state alike, competitive positioning and stock or credit rating are primary; other ends-from sustainable production practices to worker justice-are pursued insofar as they contribute to this end.”

“To speak of the relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life by neoliberalism is thus not to claim that neoliberalism literally marketizes all spheres, even as such marketization is certainly one important effect of neoliberalism. Rather, the point is that neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities-even where money is not at issue— and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo economicus.”

“As neoliberalism wages war on public goods and the very idea of a public, including citizenship beyond membership, it dramatically thins public life without killing politics. Struggles remain over power, hegemonic values, resources, and future trajectories. This persistence of politics amid the destruction of public life and especially educated public life, combined with the marketization of the political sphere, is part of what makes contemporary politics peculiarly unappealing and toxic-full of ranting and posturing, emptied of intellectual seriousness, pandering to an uneducated and manipulable electorate and a celebrity-and-scandal-hungry corporate media.”

“We are no longer even creatures of interest relentlessly seeking to satisfy ourselves. In this respect, the construal of homo oeco-nomicus as human capital leaves behind not only homo politicus, but humanism itself.”

“Neoliberalism retracts this "beyond" and eschews this "higher nature": the normative reign of homo economicus in every sphere means that there are no motivations, drives, or aspirations apart from economic ones, that there is nothing to being human apart from "mere life." Neoliberalism is the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity - not only with its machinery of compulsory commodification and profit-driven expansion, but by its form of valuation. As the spread of this form evacuates the content from liberal democracy and transforms the meaning of democracy tout court, it subdues democratic desires and imperils democratic dreams.”

“Liberal democracy has featured both imperial and colonial premises. It has secured private property and thus the proper-tyless, facilitated capital accumulation and thus mass exploitation, and presumed and entrenched privileges for a bourgeois white heterosexual male subject. All of this is common knowledge.”

“Neoliberalism is not about the state leaving the economy alone. Rather, neoliberalism activates the state on behalf of the economy, not to undertake economic functions or to intervene in economic effects, but rather to facilitate economic competition and growth and to economize the social, or, as Foucault puts it, to "regulate society by the market."”

“Again, neoliberal political rationality does not merely marketize in the sense of monetizing all social conduct and social relations, but, more radically, casts them in an exclusively economic frame, one that has both epistemological and ontological dimensions.”

“Homo economicus is made, not born, and operates in a context replete with risk, contingency, and potentially violent changes, from burst bubbles and capital or currency meltdowns to wholesale industry dissolution. Put differently, rather than each individual pursuing his or her own interest and unwittingly generating collective benefit, today, it is the project of macroeconomic growth and credit enhancement to which neoliberal individuals are tethered and with which their existence as human capital must align if they are to thrive. When individuals, firms, or industries constitute a drag on this good, rather than a contribution to it, they may be legitimately cast off or reconfigured - through down-sizing, furloughs, outsourcing, benefits cuts, mandatory job shares, or offshore production relocation. At this point, the throne of interest has vanished and at the extreme is replaced with the throne of sacrifice. In short, homo oeconomicus today may no longer have interest at its heart, indeed, may no longer have a heart at all.”

“I think the answer is that gender subordination is both intensi fied and fundamentally altered. The intensification occurs through the shrinking, privatization, and/or dismantling of public infrastructure supporting families, children, and retirees. Such infrastructure includes, but is not limited to affordable, quality early childhood and afterschool programs, summer camps, physical and mental health care, education, public transportation, neighborhood parks and recreation centers, public pensions, senior centers, and social security. When these public provisions are eliminated or privatized, the work and/or the cost of supplying them is returned to individuals, disproportionately to women. Put another way, "responsibilization" in the context of privatizing public goods uniquely penalizes women to the cient that they remain disproportionately responsible for those who cannot be responsible for themselves. In this respect, familialism is an essential requirement, rather than an incidental feature of the neo. liberal privatization of public goods and services.”

“The persistent responsibility of women for provisioning care of every sort, in and out of the household, means that women both require the visible social infrastructure that neoliberalism aims to dismantle through privatization and are the invisible infrastructure sustaining a word of putatively selfinesting human capitals. Thus, the figure of homo economicus is not simply illusory or ideological in its disavowal of the persons and practices that make and sustain human life. Rather, when homo economicus becomes the governing truth, when it organizes law, conduct, policy, and everyday arrangements, the burdens upon and the invisibility of those excluded persons and practices are intensified.”

“This is the central paradox, perhaps even the central ruse, of neoliberal governance: the neoliberal revolution takes place in the name of freedom-free markets, free countries, free men —but tears up freedom's grounding in sovereignty for states and subjects alike.”

“In sum, governance disseminates a depoliticizing epistemology, ontology, and set of practices. Soft, inclusive, and technical in orien-tation, governance buries contestable norms and structural striations (such as class), as well as the norms and exclusions circulated by its procedures and decisions. It integrates subjects into the purposes and trajectories of the nations, firms, universities, or other entities employing it. In public life, governance displaces liberal democratic-justice concerns with technical formulations of problems, questions of right with questions of efficiency, even questions of legality with those of efficacy. In the workplace, governance displaces the lateral solidarities of unions and worker consciousness and the politics of struggle with hierarchically organized "teams," multiparty cooperation, individual responsibility, and antipolitics. Governance is also a key mechanism of the "responsibilization" policies and practices that make individual agency and self-reliance (regardless of means, social position, or con-tingencies) the site of survival and virtue and for the economization of domains and conduct through best practices and the metrics of bench-marking, points to which we now turn.”

“But devolved power and responsibility are not equivalent to thoroughgoing decentralization and local empowerment. Devolution frequently means that large-scale problems, such as recessions, finance-capital crises, unemployment, or environmental problems, as well as fiscal crises of the state, are sent down the pipeline to small and weak units unable to cope with them technically, politically, or financially. Thus, state funding cuts in education or mental health devolve responsibility for these undertakings to municipalities, which in turn devolve them to individual schools or agencies, which devolve them to individual departments, which then have something called "decision-making authority," absent, of course, the resources to exercise this ghostly autonomy and sovereignty.”

“Through this bundling of agency and blame, the individual is doubly responsibilized: it is expected to fend for itself (and blamed for its failure to thrive) and expected to act for the well-being of the economy (and blamed for its failure to thrive). Not only, then, are Greek workers, French pensioners, California and Michigan public employees, American Social Security recipients, British university students, European new immigrants, and public goods as a whole made to appear as thieving dependents operating in the old world of entitlement, rather than self-care, they are blamed for sinking states into debt, thwarting growth, and bringing the global economy to the brink of ruin. Perhaps most importantly, even when they are not blamed, even when they have comported properly with the norms of responsibilization, austerity measures taken in the name of macroeconomic health may legitimately devastate their livelihoods or lives.”

“The U.S. government handout of genetically modified seed in 2004 was like offering heroin to a desperate single mother out of a job, facing eviction, and despairing of the future. Not only did it promise relief, but the first bag was free. It permanently attached the recipient to the supplier, and the addiction was deadly-to sustainable Iraqi farming, Iraqi self-sufficiency, and even the farmers themselves.”

“Certainly, the discussion in chapter 4 of the Bremer regime in Iraq comports with Foucault's argument: neoliberalizing Iraq required a plethora of large and small legal reforms even before a state could be (re)built. Chile under Augusto Pinochet and the "Chicago Boys" after the overthrow of Salvador Allende offers another obvious example. On the one hand, law was mobilized to privatize state industries, seduce foreign ownership and investment, secure profit retention, and reduce trade restrictions. On the other hand, popular assemblies and Left parties were outlawed, strikes were criminalized, unions banned.”

“More is at stake in these four decisions than support for capital in the name of freedom. Rather, an important remaking of the demos is taking place. The first decision permits large corporations to finance elections, the ultimate icon of popular sovereignty in neoliberal democracy. The second eliminates the primary legal means by which consumers or workers band together to fight corporate abuses. The third and fourth join a string of recent laws constricting the capacity of public-sector and private-sector workers to act in concert. Together, these decisions assault every level of organized popular power and collective consciousness in the United States: citizens, consumers, work-ers. When these kinds of assaults on collective consciousness and action are combined with neoliberalism's displacement of democratic values in ordinary political discourse, with dramatic disinvestment in public education, and with the governance-based substitution of efficacy for accountability in economic and political policy, the result is not simply the erosion of popular power, but its elimination from a democratic political imaginary. It is in that imaginary that democracy becomes delinked from organized popular power and that these forms of identity and the political energy they represent disappear, generating the "changing of the heart and soul" that Margaret Thatcher identified as fundamental to the success of the neoliberal project.”

“Rather, in what Foucault identified as the signature move of neoliberal rationality, the decision recasts formerly noneconomic spheres as markets at the level of principles, norms, and subjects. It remakes the political sphere as a market and remakes homo politicus as homo economicus-in the political sphere, individuals, corporations, and other associations are all operating to enhance their competitive positioning and capital value.”

“Neoliberalism, I have argued throughout this book, is best understood not simply as economic policy, but as a governing rationality that disseminates market values and metrics to every sphere of life and construes the human itself exclusively as homo economicus. Neoliberalism thus does not merely privatize-turn over to the market for individual production and consumption-what was formerly publicly supported and valued. Rather, it formulates everything, everywhere, in terms of capital investment and appreciation, including and especially humans themselves.”

“Rather, human capital is constrained to self-invest in ways that contribute to its appreciation or at least prevent its depre-ciation; this includes titrating inputs such as education, predicting and adjusting to changing markets in vocations, housing, health, and retirement, and organizing its dating, mating, creative, and leisure practices in value-enhancing ways. Human capital is distinctly not concerned with acquiring the knowledge and experience needed for intelligent democratic citizenship.”

“Fourth, knowledge, thought, and training are valued and desired almost exclusively for their contribution to capital enhancement. This does not reduce to a desire only for technical knowledges and skills. Many professions today-from law to engineering to medicine-require analytical capacities, communications skills, multilingualism, artistic creativity, inventiveness, even close reading abilities. However, knowledge is not sought for purposes apart from capital enhancement, whether that capital is human, corporate, or financial. It is not sought for developing the capacities of citizens, sustaining culture, knowing the world, or envisioning and crafting different ways of life in common. Rather, it is sought for "positive ROI" —return on investment-one of the leading metrics the Obama administration proposes to use in rating colleges for would-be consumers of higher education.”

“A citizenry left to its (manipulated) interests and passions, especially in an epoch of unprecedentedly complex powers, inevitably comes to be governed by what Alexis de Tocqueville termed the "gentle despotism" of these powers, even as it continues to travel under the sign of democracy and imagine itself "free."”

Education is not only about producing a job holder, it’s about developing a person and a citizens: “Consider this justification, from the 1946 President's Commission on Higher Education, for immense federal investment in public higher education: "It is an investment in social welfare, better living stan-dards, better health and less crime. It is an investment in a bulwark against garbled information, half-truths and untruths, against ignorance and intolerance. It is an investment in human talent, better human relationships, democracy and peace."”

“This is a measure of how far neoliberalization has already gone. Even its critics cannot see the ways in which we have lost a recognition of ourselves as held together by literatures, images, religions, histories, myths, ideas, forms of reason, grammars, figures, and languages. Instead, we are presumed to be held together by technologies and capital flows. That presumption, of course, is at risk of becoming true, at which point humanity will have entered its darkest chapter ever. We would be the entities of human capital, and nothing else, of the contemporary economic theoretical imagination.”

“Crucially, citizens educated in the liberal arts are being prepared for what Aristotle called "the good life," which he understood as cultivating the higher human faculties for thoughtful civic engagement and eudamonia, that special Greek term for happiness comprising rich fulfillment through the elaboration of human possibility.”

“Thus, the popular contemporary wisdom that a liberal arts education is outmoded is true only to the extent that

[Wessel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting in-depth account of neoliberal governmentality philosophy and how this 'colonizes' every sphere of human society to the market.

[Georg Sagittarius · Rating 4 out of 5]

11/58 S Register/Endnoten! Mangel an GEISTIGEM (Jakob Lorber Bertha Dudde...): Franz Deml Kurt Eggenstein Gerd Gutemann M Kahir Walter Lutz!

Kap. "Nachwort"
"Der Verlust der einfachen oder nackten Demokratie
Warum sollten wir uns aber überhaupt um die Demokratie kümmern?
Gefährdet der Neoliberalismus nicht viele weniger mehrdeutige Güter,
beispielsweise alles Leben auf diesem Planeten oder alle regionalen
Formen der Existenz und der Gemeinschaft? Wie steht es mit der
Gesundheitsfürsorge und erschwinglichen Wohnungen? Wie steht es um
den Schlaf, die Seele, das Heilige, das Intime, das Unaussprechliche?1 War
die wirklich existierende Demokratie denn nicht immer schon
gekennzeichnet von Klassenherrschaft und Ungleichheit,
Rassenunterordnung und -ausschluß, institutionalisierten
Geschlechtsunterschieden, kolonialen und imperialen Prämissen und
Praktiken, uneingestandenen religiösen Privilegien und Auslöschungen?
Warum sollten wir uns über den Schaden Sorgen machen, den der
Neoliberalismus diesem problembelasteten Gebiet von Bedeutungen,
Praktiken und Institutionen zufügt?
Demos/kratia. Das Volk herrscht. »Demokratie« bedeutet die
Bestrebung, daß die Menschen, und nicht etwas anderes, ihr gemeinsames
Leben dadurch ordnen und regulieren, daß sie sich selbst gemeinsam
regieren.2 Umgekehrt verneint die Demokratie die Legitimität der
Herrschaft durch einen Teil des Volkes anstatt durch das ganze – zum
Beispiel nur durch diejenigen, die Eigentum, Wohlstand, Bildung oder
Fachwissen besitzen – oder durch irgendein äußeres Prinzip wie zum
Beispiel Macht, Gott (oder Götter), Gewalt, Wahrheit, Technik oder
Nationalismus, auch wenn das Volk entscheiden mag, daß eines oder
mehrere davon ihre gemeinsame Existenz leiten oder gar bestimmen
sollten. Der Begriff »Demokratie« beinhaltet nichts über das Prinzip
hinaus, daß das Volk herrscht, obwohl sie als einzige politische Form, die
uns gestattet, daß wir alle an der Macht teilhaben, durch die wir regiert
werden, die Möglichkeit bietet, ohne sie zu garantieren, daß die Macht im
Auftrag der vielen anstatt der wenigen ausgeübt wird, daß alle als Zwecke
anstatt als Mittel betrachtet werden und daß alle eine politische Stimme
haben können. Das ist das einfache Versprechen der nackten Demokratie.3
Der Begriff spezifiziert nicht die Arrangements, Vereinbarungen oder
Institutionen, durch die die Herrschaft des Volkes erfüllt werden könnte
oder sollte. Er sagt nicht, ob das Volk seine Autorität delegieren oder direkt
ausüben wird, ob es den existierenden Gesetzen übergeordnet (souverän)
oder untergeordnet (unterworfen) sein wird, ob es seine Souveränität aktiv
durch die Bestimmung und Realisierung eines Gemeinwohls behaupten
oder sich nur an minimalistische Vereinbarungen für das Leben in
Nachbarschaft miteinander halten wird. Daher rufen Occupy-Aktivisten
»So sieht Demokratie aus!«, wenn sie Privateigentum (oder einen
privatisierten öffentlichen Raum) für die Allgemeinheit in Beschlag
nehmen, wenn sie stundenlang in allgemeinen Versammlungen Rat halten
und wenn sie sich weigern, rechenschaftspflichtige Anführer und
Stellvertreter zu präsentieren oder auch nur Forderungen zu stellen.
Andererseits berufen sich Bürgermeister, die Universitätsverwaltung und
die Polizei auf demokratische Gesetze und Prinzipien, wenn sie die
Besetzer zur Räumung zwingen oder festnehmen. Es gibt hier einen
tiefgründigen Streit darüber, was die Demokratie impliziert – keine bloße
Heuchelei, Verzerrung oder Instrumentalisierung des Begriffs. Ein langer
historischer Schatten und eine zeitgenössische Auseinandersetzung sind
jedoch ebenfalls im Spiel: Ist die Demokratie immer dazu bestimmt, von
den gesellschaftlich Dominierenden eingenommen und für ihre Zwecke
gebraucht zu werden? Wird das Volk immer im Namen seiner eigenen
politischen Form in Schach gehalten, geteilt oder unterdrückt werden?
Mehr als nur seinen Inhalt und die Einzelheiten unspezifiziert zu lassen,
weist der einfache Begriff der Demokratie (oder der Begriff der einfachen
oder nackten Demokratie) auch keine zusammenhängende oder
systematische Erklärung dafür auf, warum das Volk herrschen sollte,
sondern nur die negative, daß wir nicht von anderen beherrscht werden
sollten.4 Selbst Rousseau, der im abendländischen politischen Denken
nahezu einzigartig darin ist, daß er genau angibt, warum allein die
Demokratie die moralische Würde des Menschen sichert (oder
wiederherstellt), betrachtet die Demokratie als eine Möglichkeit, diese
Würde nicht zu verletzen, anstatt den positiven politischen Wert der
Demokratie zu beschreiben. Allein die Demokratie ist die
»Gesellschaftsform […] in der jeder einzelne, mit allen verbündet, nur sich
selbst gehorcht und so frei bleibt wie zuvor«.5
Merkwürdigerweise sind Politiktheoretiker im Hinblick auf den Wert
politischer Partizipation als Wert an sich mitteilsamer gewesen. Aristoteles
zufolge (der kein Demokrat war) ist die Teilnahme am Leben der Polis
Ausdruck des »guten Lebens«; auf der anderen Seite erfüllt und
vervollkommnet das »Herrschen und Beherrschtwerden« die Angehörigen
einer Spezies, die ihrer Natur nach politisch ist.6 Tocqueville verstand die
örtliche Partizipation als entscheidendes Gegengewicht zum Ethos des
Eigeninteresses, das von einer wachsenden Welt des Handels verkündet
wird, und als vorbeugendes Mittel gegen die Empfänglichkeit für politische
Vorherrschaft, die von diesem Ethos erzeugt wird. In Tocquevilles Sicht
wiegt die lokale politische Partizipation das Privatinteresse durch die
Orientierung am Gemeinsamen auf, sie mindert auch die Entfremdung von
der Regierung, die Bürger großer Staaten ansonsten verspüren, und hegt
dadurch eine Bürgerschaft, die die natürlichen Tendenzen zu einer
konzentrierten Regierungsmacht in Schach halten würde.7 Als Gegenmittel
gegen das, was er als die wesentlich undemokratische Natur von Staaten
und Verfassungen bezeichnet, hebt Sheldon Wolin den Wert dessen hervor,
daß Bürger in der Lokalpolitik routinemäßig »Macht teilen und mit ihr
umgehen«, und außerdem den Wert eines von Zeit zu Zeit aktiven Volkes,
das sich selbst gelegentlich anstatt ständig behauptet.8 Auffälligerweise
spricht keines dieser Argumente, die die Partizipation preisen, für den
Wert der Demokratie als solcher.
Im Laufe der Jahrhunderte hat es natürlich viele Schilderungen der
Überlegenheit und Vorteile der Demokratie gegenüber anderen politischen
Formen gegeben. Die meisten von ihnen haben jedoch wenig oder nichts
mit Volksherrschaft zu tun und weisen der Demokratie Merkmale zu, die
nicht zu ihrem Wesen gehören: Gleichheit, Freiheit, Rechte oder
bürgerliche Freiheiten, Individualität, Toleranz, Chancengleichheit,
Inklusion, Offenheit, Prozeduralismus, Rechtsstaatlichkeit, friedliche
Konfliktlösung und friedlicher Wandel. Nichts davon gehört ausschließlich
zur Demokratie, wenn man sie als Herrschaft des Volkes definiert.9 Alle
könnten auch von nichtdemokratischen Herrschaftsformen verbreitet oder
durchgesetzt werden. Darüber hinaus könnte jedes Volk eines oder
mehrere der folgenden Merkmale bejahen: extreme Ungleichheit, in die
Privatsphäre eingreifende Überwachung und Kontrolle; eingeschränkte
oder beschnittene Rechte, nicht-universelle Rechte; strenge
Einschränkungen der Rede-, Versammlungs- und Religionsfreiheit;
Konformismus, Intoleranz, Ausschließung oder Verfolgung gezielter
ethnischer Gruppen und Praktiken; Herrschaft durch Experten oder
Bürokraten; Krieg, Kolonialismus oder eine inländisch militarisierte
Gesellschaft. Viele Völker haben das getan.10 Es genügt nicht zu sagen, daß
solche Phänomene undemokratisch sind, wenn das Volk sie gewollt oder
gebilligt hat.
Seit ihrem Aufkommen im späten 18. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart
war die liberale Demokratie immer durchtränkt von kapitalistischen
Mächten und Werten. In einem allgemeineren Sinne hat sie durch ihre
politischen und rechtlichen Abstraktionen die Macht und die Privilegien
der gesellschaftlich dominierenden Kräfte gesichert, indem sie nicht nur
Privateigentum und Kapitalrechte, sondern auch Rassismus und eine mit
Unterordnung verbundene und gendernormative, geschlechtliche
Arbeitsteilung abgesegnet hat. Die Verquickung der liberalen Demokratie
mit Privilegien, Ungleichheiten und Ausschließungen wird durch explizite
Formulierungen wie Gleichheit vor dem Gesetz und auf Rechten
gegründete Freiheit sowie durch einen Fundus impliziter Regeln wie
moralische Autonomie und abstraktes Personsein maskiert. Gemeinsam
sichern diese Regeln ein ungleiches und unfreies Gesellschafts-, Kultur-
und Wirtschaftsleben, da sie ihre Schnittpunkte mit fest verwurzelten
Arbeitsteilungen und Klassenstrukturen und ihre Mobilisierung der
Normen des Personseins, die stark von ethnischer Zugehörigkeit,
Geschlecht und Kultur geprägt sind, leugnen.11 Durch ihren formalen
Kontext und die Inhaltsneutralität erscheinen liberal-demokratische Ideale
des Personseins, der Freiheit und Gleichheit universell, obwohl sie mit
Normen des bürgerlichen, weißen, männlichen, heterosexuellen
Paternalismus gesättigt sind.12 Das ist nur ein Grund, warum die historisch
Ausgeschlossenen lange nach der politischen Wahlberechtigung erst noch
eine substantielle Gleichheit und Zugehörigkeit erreichen müssen.
Die liberale Demokratie wird zu Recht wegen ihrer Leugnung dieser
Verquickungen und Effekte kritisiert. Die Dissonanzen, die eine solche
Leugnung hervorbringen – zum Beispiel zwischen Lobgesängen auf
Freiheit und Gleichheit einerseits und gelebten Wirklichkeiten der..."

[Jim Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is more a philosophical critique of neoliberalism than the usual political economy or historical approach seen in several other books recently, such as Gary Gerstle’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order’.

But that isn’t a criticism. In fact, it reflects the wider repercussions of neoliberalism in not only reshaping politics, economics and democratic institutions, but in changing human beings themselves.

It reminded me of what joke about two fish passing each other in the ocean and one saying to the other: ‘How’s the water?’ Confused, the other fish replies: ‘What water?’ Neoliberalism, Brown argues, is transmogrifying every human domain and endeavour such that we are unaware that this is now the ocean we swim in. We have lost all sense of agency and through neoliberalism’s ‘economisation’ of political life lack even the means of change.

“In letting markets decide our present and future, neoliberalism wholly abandons the project of individual or collective mastery of existence,” Brown writes. “The neoliberal solution to problems is always more markets, more complete markets, more perfect markets, more financial is action, new technologies, new ways to monetise.”

A big section of the middle of the book is given over to 1978-79 reflections on neoliberalism by the French philosopher Foucault and I have to admit much of this went over my head. In a subsequent review of modern political philosophy from Rousseau to Hegel, Marx, Bentham and Mill, Brown charts the gradual vanquishing of ‘homo politicus’ for ‘homo economicus’

“As neoliberalism submits all spheres of life to economisation, the effect is not simply to narrow the functions of state and citizen or to enlarge the sphere of economically defined freedom at the expense of common investment in public life and public goods. Rather it is to attenuate radically the exercise of freedom in the social and political spheres. This is the central paradox, perhaps even the central ruse, of neoliberal governance: The neoliberal revolution takes place in the name of freedom - free markets, free countries, free men - but tears up freedom’s grounding in sovereignty for states and subjects alike.”


This book was released seven years ago, but if anything the threat of neoliberal philosophy has become even more sinister at a time of ecological catastrophe, the pandemic, the exhaustion of monetary and fiscal policy responses to economic crisis and the failure of the Left to formulate another worldview which accounts for the challenges of our common existence. As such, Brown writes, humanity finds itself on a kind of treadmill from which it cannot escape.

“The perpetual treadmill of a capitalist economy that cannot cease without collapsing is now the treadmill on which every being and activity is placed, and the horizons of all other meanings and purposes shrink accordingly,” she concludes.

For now, the most popular political response to the slow demise of neoliberalism is the embrace of populist ethno-nationalism and ‘strong man’ authoritarianism as expressed by the likes of Trump, Orban, Erdogan, Bolsonaro and others. Yet the people funding and fomenting this reactionary rump are the same ones who drove the neoliberal revolution, but now seizing upon neo-fascist scapegoating as both a useful wedge and as a last resort action to preserve their obscene wealth and privileges.

The Left, meanwhile, wallows around in a soup of ‘reasonable centrism’ that avoids challenging the real power centres. This in turn just serves to strengthen the right-wing backlash and cynical resort to culture wars to distract the masses from their dismantling of democratic institutions and the social safety net. If neoliberalism is to be defeated, finally, the Left will have to reinvigorate the demos and remind people they have agency.

We can only hope, but we need a strong international movement to challenge and destroy unrestrained capitalism.

[Can Uğurlu · Rating 5 out of 5]

neoliberalizm hakkında çok doyurucu bir metin. ancak işin saf ekonomik kısmıyla, iktisadi boyutuyla veya sömürü ilişkileriyle ilgilenmiyor, daha çok öznelerin neoliberal akıl tarafından inşası ve bu normatif rasyonalitenin demokrasi üzerindeki yozlaştırıcı etkisiyle ilgileniyor.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendy Brown acknowledges at the start of this work of political theory that no one uses the term "neoliberalism" who is not an opponent or critic of neoliberalism. I'm sure you've noticed this, that in popular usage, neoliberal is a term for anything the speaker doesn't like. In the past I would have said that neoliberal policies are identical with crony capitalism, or corruption. Brown makes the case that neoliberal reason has taken over from our society's previous liberal democratic assumptions. She uses the term reason rather than ideology I think to emphasize how pervasive the ideas of neoliberalism have become.

Brown's focus is on how we view government and the sovereignty of the individual. Starting with Michel Foucault's late 1970s-early 1980s Biopower lectures (no no, it's really not all about Foucault! She's very clear! I was able to understand even the two chapters of discussion of Foucault's ideas, because Brown is systematic.) Brown develops a definition of neoliberal reason with examples that made a lot of sense to me. In classical liberal thinking, the free market is naturally competitive, and the position of political parties on the task of government were variously to keep hands off or to regulate the market. In neoliberal thinking, the sole task of government is to facilitate competition in the economy, which might otherwise grind to a halt. Neoliberalism posits that a healthy economy is the sole responsibility of government, taking the place of any public goods (or even concepts of public good.)

We have taken on board some of the ideas that Brown considers neoliberal reason more than others. Her most radical notion is that human individuals have come to see ourselves as human capital. It is this idea that I think we've all swallowed, more than any other. Other ideas I think we have not. For example, when Brown discusses the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United in chapter five, she offers an interesting reading of the ideological underpinnings of a legal decision that already didn't make any sense to me. The reading was perhaps radical, but the idea that the decision was corrupt was intuitive. It's where she talks about non-profit organizations that want to be like businesses, and individuals who want to develop their human capital potential, and educational institutions that are all about human capital that I had my head-clutching, "aha!" moments.

The truth is, it's not only our villainous political opponents (whoever those are for you) who believe in neoliberal reason. In our desperation in a financialized economy that can function as well on our debt as on our labor, we've all taken on the project of developing ourselves and our children as human capital. We've all taken on the idea that our government's key responsibility is creating an economy where we can work rather than be farmed as debtors. Every public good is subordinate to our desire to make a living through our work. Gradually, but not all at once, we begin to see the reasons that we work for a living--families, books, music, leisure, sports, food, health--as reasons we should get to work, get hired, be part of the economy.

The end of the book is the part that surprised me. Brown is not a classical liberal. She doesn't believe that democracy as it was, was perfect. She recognizes the role of racism and sexism and other forms of bias to justify excluding individuals from the demos. At the end of the book, she makes a passionate case for the value of individual sovereignty and the promise of democracy. It's there I think readers of many political positions can have a meeting of the minds.

[William Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neoliberalism is a pernicious distortion of liberal politics and economics that has crept into modern consciousness. It redefines all of life in economic terms so that traditional ideas of democracy, freedom, meaning, and self-realization are erased. The notion has been advancing in America since the 1950s and became obvious to even the most casual observer by the 1990s, so this is nothing new. Brown’s thesis is that neoliberalism has now gone beyond economic and political transactions to invade consciousness itself, without us realizing. We now think of ourselves as “human capital,” and define our meaning in terms of salary or net worth. Virtue equals money.

The problem with this book is not that the idea is wrong, but with Brown’s hyperbolic language and implicit value assumptions. Economic thinking has become “ascendant” and has “vanquished” all other forms of rationality, she says, “hollowing out” the substance of democracy. “Vanquished?” Really? Her fondness for overly-dramatic adjectives and verbs makes the reading difficult. She is heavily influenced by Foucault, known for his wordplay.

But she is not wrong. Just about everything in American society is now evaluated in financial terms. Laws are made and interpreted based on how they affect “productivity” and “efficiency.” Politics is all about money. Government, from federal down to city, privatizes as many services as it can. People go to college (if they can afford it), not for education anymore, but to get the “credentials” they need for “a good job.” Everything is about money.

But here is the unanswered and unexamined question: Is this all bad? Brown strongly implies it is but doesn’t say why. I also believe that monetization of every aspect of life diminishes human experience, but counter-arguments are easy to think of, especially “the bottom line:” you have to make a living somehow, and it’s not easy.

Brown doesn’t say anything about this. She just rants about inequality and injustice without making a clear case of what the core logical, moral or aesthetic problem is with neoliberalism or what a better alternative would be. But she does win her main argument, I think, that neoliberalism has become more than economic and social policy and has become a mode of consciousness so subtle that most people don’t even consider alternatives.

There are better, more articulate critiques of neoliberalism, such as Chomsky’s “Profit over People,” just to name one, and there’s a mountain of books on critical theory that lay out the arguments better. This short book is worth reading to focus on the quality of rationality itself.

Brown, Wendy (2015).Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution.
Cambridge, MA: Zone Books/MIT Press, 295 pp.

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 2 out of 5]

I, too, think that Neoliberalism is problem and desire a working definition of the term and an explanation of its effects. Wendy Brown provides those two things and, for me, not much else.

My criticism with Brown stems from the lack of historical analysis on neoliberalism. From the book the reader is left to presume that neoliberalism is only a late twentieth century invention and that's not true. The current intensity of neoliberalism is a twentieth century invention but we can trace it's origins from the New Deal to the era of reconstruction in post-antebellum America. The marketing of one's self and turning bodies into economic "subjects" is not new. Take, for example, the "40 acres and a mule" narrative that indebted many former enslaved Black individuals after the Civil War. This concept promised former enslaved individuals a portion of the land they worked on. The narrative promised that if you work and turn yourself in an economic good you will be a viable product of society. Of course this concept was immediately privatized and managed by private co. and banks which used it as an opportunity to tax and redistribute the land back to white owners.

Now, the above example was my expectation of the book to trace neoliberalism in an attempt to understand why it is so dominant in our current society. I am not wrong for included my expectation within this critique as Brown alludes to human capital throughout her book and argues that starting from those who operate as human capital is a beneficial place to start from (p. 100). Instead of examining human capital as it has historically been examined as lives of migrant workers, refugees, and the enslaved, Brown shifts human capital to instead examine workers in a academic institution. No, not the prisoners who build the university, or the those who work in operations but students.

Now, I clearly agree with Brown that university students are being transformed into human capital in the neoliberalist turn our a profit because of the privatization of university funding which demands economic profit. Using human capital, which is a dense historical linguistic background, to serve the purpose of that of the privileged student who can attend a tier-one university is unacceptable. Especially because tier-one universities are not accessible to everyone.

With that being said, the first chapter offers a concise definition of what neoliberalism is for those who need it.