In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West

by Wendy Brown

Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring?

In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism’s multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works of the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Wendy Brown traces the ambition to replace democratic orders with ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality and democratic states with technocratic ones.

Yet plutocracy, white supremacy, politicized mass affect, indifference to truth, and extreme social disinhibition were no part of the neoliberal vision. Brown theorizes their unintentional spurring by neoliberal reason, from its attack on the value of society and its fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality. Above all, she argues, neoliberalism’s intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white male supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which this supremacy disappears.

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

264 pages, Hardcover

First published July 16, 2019

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

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. Wendy Brown is the great radical theorist of democracy we need to understand wtf actually happened to neoliberalism and democracy as we knew it in the second decade of the 21st century. Incidentally, I started reading Wendy Brown’s book ‘In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West’ (Columbia, 2019) in this very bizarre first week of the third decade of the 21st century with the so-called storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021.

So let’s recap a little to better understand where the book is coming from why it makes such an important contribution to the analysis of 21st century democracy (and where it really advances our understanding of neoliberalism). So for the past 30 years or so, there was a fairly standard theoretical body of work that synthesized Marxist and Foucauldian (plus minus Gramsci) approaches into a comprehensive analysis of neoliberalism which empirically took the shape of technocratic third-way governments, global free trade and rational selves that embody the morals of the market. This was accompanied by a steadily hollowing out of democracy whereby economic decision making was moved out of the realm of public decision making onto the level of constitutions and treaties – the WTO, EU are the more obvious examples but also balanced budget requirements either through the IMF requirements in the global south or ‘self-imposed’ in the west. This is a very, very rough and shaky outline of a much more complex process, but essentially as decades of neoliberal capitalism have dispossessed the ’99 per cent’ (think global financial crisis) capitalism and democracy became increasingly incompatible. We had got this covered. We thought.

Then came the post GFC second decade of the 21st century and the rise of far right populist movements and governments, ethno-nationalism, racism, trade and border walls. This ‘authoritarian’ and conservative turn questioned whether this was the end of neoliberalism or a mutation of sorts.

Brown’s book argues that neoliberalism attacked society and democracy and in doing so laid the foundation for right-wing authoritarianism and nihilism. Importantly – and this is where the book breaks new ground – Brown shows (through re-reading Hayek and Friedman’s concepts of ‘the social’ and ‘politics’) that neoliberalism always sought to expand a traditional morality as much as the morality of the markets. The neoliberal alliance with right-wing religious groups is no mere marriage of convenience, but confirmation that neoliberalism has always invested itself in conservative ideals of ‘traditionalism’. This ties in with other radical feminist theorists such as Melinda Cooper in her book ‘Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism’ (Princeton, 2017), which makes the case that neoliberalism and social conservatism have been consistent collaborators in creating an economy that redistributed wealth ruthlessly upwards with a risk-absorbing family at its privatized center. I think this phenomenon of ‘familialization’ and the ‘re-traditionalizing’ of certain aspects of reproduction – whether in its rainbow form of ‘marriage equality’ or otherwise – is an often overlooked key feature of neoliberalism.

So while conservative ideals, including the family as the privatized space for social welfare, are inherent in the neoliberal project, today’s anti-democratic politics appear as a Frankenstein version of the imaginations of classical neoliberalism. Today’s plutocracy with big capital having taken over the state is kind of the opposite of the imagined free market of classical neoliberalism. As Brown writes: ‘Things went wrong in actually existing neoliberalism as they did in Marxist revolutions of the 20th century’. Four decades of neoliberal rationality have resulted in a profoundly antidemocratic culture - combined with declining living standards in the global north and existentially threatened futurity, and the populist rage attacking democracy is inevitable.

Focusing on the rise of conservative ideals and the culture war of evangelical Christians, the book also includes a (scary) deep dive on neoliberalism’s ‘accidental’ wounding of white male supremacy couples with its intensification of nihilism and related degenerated concept of disinhibited freedom – such as the freedom to discriminate against minorities – dressed in religious righteousness or conservative melancholy for a phantasmic past. The book also includes some high profile cases of neoliberal jurisprudence where tradition was successfully weaponized as a bulwark against equality and anti-discrimination laws.

Trumpism is precisely this deadly symbiosis of neoliberal policy and reactionary politics. Trumpism success was a good example of neoliberals buying off the white evangelical vote - throwing them meat like abortion or same sex marriage. Only 17 percent of Americans are white Evangelicals but constitute half of Trumps base.

The book leaves us with the most important question – a question, as the Capitol events have shown, which is not purely academic, but that we are, as we enter the third decade of this bizarre 21st century, actually at the brink of descending into a regressive, nihilist and inhumane time (I guess if we look at the 21st century from a less western-centric perspective, we have long entered this period).

‘Nation, family, property, and the traditions reproducing racial and gender privilege, mortally wounded by deindustrialization, neoliberal reason, globalization, digital technologies, and nihilism, are reduced to affective remains. To date, these remains have been activated mostly by the Right. What kinds of Left political critique and vision might reach and transform them?’.

We can only find our way out, if we correctly analyze how we got here. Brown’s ‘excavation’ of neoliberal reason is a critical part of this analysis.

[Mesoscope · Rating 5 out of 5]

I posted my critical review of Brown's outstanding new book on my blog here:
https://mesocosm.net/2020/10/30/wendy...).

Here is the introduction:

After decades of conflict, democracy had emerged by 1992 as the undisputed winner of the Cold War, holding a position of dominance so universal that the term “democracy” became synonymous with political legitimacy. Even authoritarian states often imitate its discourse to justify rule, using sham elections and fraudulent polls to shore up their legitimacy.

Yet a few decades later, despite the complete absence of any serious external challenge or internal crisis, democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Turkey, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Germany, and France are awash with anti-democratic popular movements. Some of them openly flirt with abandoning democracy altogether, others have already done so.

In the United States, the Republican party has openly embraced an anti-democratic platform on the national level. To take one of countless examples, in October 2020, GOP Senator Mike Lee from Utah tweeted “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

“Rank democracy”?

Yet this statement from a US senator, which would have recently been regarded as inflammatory and shocking, provoked no controversy whatsoever. The question a lot of us are asking with increasing urgency is: “How the hell did this happen?”

[Jenna Spinelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an advance copy of this book for a podcast interview with Wendy Brown. It was very interesting to hear how her thinking has changed between "Undoing the Demos" and this book. This book is a good summary of the roots of our current political situation, and I really enjoyed speaking with her about it: https://www.democracyworkspodcast.com....

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing analysis of neoliberalism and neoliberal ideology and how it contributed to the rise of conservative and anti-democratic regimes and politics in the West. Using a variety of political theorists including Hayek, Foucault and Marx Brown maps the movement away from democracy and to market based political economies.

"The argument is not that neoliberalism by itself caused the hard-right insurgency in the West today or that every dimension of the present, from the catastrophes generating great flows of refugees to Europe and North America to the political siloization and polarization generated by digital media can be reduced to neoliberalism. Rather, the argument is that nothing is untouched by a neoliberal mode of reason and valuation and that neoliberalism's attack on democracy has everywhere inflected law, political culture, and political subjectivity."7-8

"To make these argument, In the Ruins revisits selected aspects of the thinking of those who gathered as the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, took the name "neoliberalism," and offered the founding scheme for what Michel Foucault would call the dramatic "reprogramming of liberalism" that we know as neoliberalism today." 8

"Forged in the crucible of European fascism, neoliberalism aimed at permanent inoculation of market liberal orders again the regrowth of fascist sentiments and totalitarian powers. Eager to separate politics from markets, the original neoliberalism would have loathed both the crony capitalism and international oligarchical powers spawned by finance that yanks the chains of states today." 9

"Neoliberalism is most commonly associated with a bundle of policies privatizing public ownership and services, radically reducing the social state, leashing labor, deregulating capital, and producing a tax-and-tariff friendly climate to direct foreign investors." 17-18

"These principles become saturating reality principles governing every sphere of existence and reorienting homo oecononicus itself, transforming it from a subject of exchange and the satisfaction of needs (classical liberalism) to a subject of competition and human capital enhancement (neoliberalism)." 19-20

"Political equality is democracy's foundation. Everything else is optional-from constitutions to personal liberty, from specific economic forums to specific political institutions. Political equality alone ensures that the composition and exercise of political power is authorized by the whole and accountable to the whole. When political equality is absent, whether from explicit political excursions or privileges, from extreme social or economic disparities, or from manipulation of the electoral system, political power will inevitably be exercised by and for a part, rather than the whole. The demos ceases to rule." 23

"The importance of political equality to democracy is also why ancient Athenian democrats, savvier about power than most moderns, identified democracy's three pillars as isgoria, the equal right of every citizen to speak and be heard by the assembly on matters of public policy; isonomia, equality under the law; and isopoliteia, equally weighted votes and equal opportunity to assume political office. Athenians may have cherished freedom, but they understood that democracy is moored by equality."24

"Democracy, then, is the weakest of warring triplets born in early European modernity, alongside nation-states and capitalism." 25

"Democracy also required constant vigilance to prevent concentrated wealth from grasping the levers of political power. Wealth-corporate, consolidated, or individual- will never stop reaching for these levers, and once it has a significant hold there is no limit to its self-serving practices, which may include efforts to prevent the ordinary, the poor, and the historically marginalized from staking political claims and even from voting." 26

"More than an ideological persuasion, social justice-modulations of the powers of capitalism, colonialism, race, gender, and others-is all that stands between sustaining the (always unfulfilled) promise of democracy and wholesale abandonment of that promise." 27

"The neoliberal attach on the social...is key to generating an antidemocratic culture from below while building and legitimating antidemocratic forms of state power from above." 28

"Outside of a neoliberal frame, social power rests in what Marx identified as relations of exploitation and dominating, what Foucault identified as forces of subjectification and social construction, or what critical race, feminist, and queer theorists identify as grammars of subordination and abjection." 40-41

"When the claim 'society does not exist' becomes common sense, it renders invisible the social norms and inequalities generated by legacies of slavery, colonialism, and patriarchy. It permits the effective political disenfranchisement (and not only the suffering) produced by homelessness, lack of heath care, and lack of education. And it permits assaults on whatever remains of the social fabric in the name of freedom." 42

"In short, the neoliberal critique of society and social justice in the name of freedom and traditional moral norms has become the common sense of a robust neoliberal culture today. At its extreme, is the Alt-Right "red pill" ideology; in its more moderate form, it is the conviction that life is determined by genetics, personal responsibility, and market competition." 44

"Freedom without society destroys the lexicon by which freedom is made democratic, paired with social consciousness, and nested in political equality. Freedom without society is a pure instrument of power, shorn of concern for others, the world, or the future. Reducing freedom to unregulated personal license in the context of disavowing the social and dismantling society does something else. It anoints as free expression every historically and politically generated sentiment of (lost) entitlement based in whiteness, maleness, or nativism while denying these to be socially produced, releasing them from any connection to social conscience, compromise, or consequence." 44-45

"As the social vanishes from our ideas, speech, and experience, it vanishes from our visions of the future, both utopian and dystopian." 52

"Throttling democracy was fundamental, not incidental, to the broader neoliberal program. Democratic energies, the neoliberals believed, inherently engorge the political, which threatens freedom, spontaneous order, and development and at the extreme yields state despotism or totalitarianism. Even ordinary rule by democratic majorities yields a redistributive, administrative, overreaching state, and robust democratic activism both challenges moral authority and disrupts order from below." 62

"Notwithstanding their differences, the neoliberals converged in recognizing that representative democracy based on universal suffrage in large capitalist nation-states would inevitably be controlled by the numerically largest class, making social democracy, with its tendentially totalitarian trajectory, inevitable. Unless they are tricked, trained, or effectively disenfranchised, the workers and poor will always fight markets as unfair in their distinction of opportunities and rewards. This class can be tricked, however, with appeals to other lines of privilege and power, such as whiteness or masculinity, especially since liberty, rather than equality reproduces and secures those powers." 63-64

"In both neoliberal thought and practice, the critique of democracy and of the political is masked as a brief for individual liberty, especially by Friedman and Hayek." 64

"The notion of political sovereignty, he writes, did not exist in the West "until the arrival of absolutism in the sixteenth century. When they overthrew the monarchs, democrats adopted this absolutism for government ostensibly representing the people." 71

"While ohdoliberal prescriptions for a neoliberal state differ from those of Hayek and Friedman, the three schools of neoliberalism share a rejection of robust democracy and of the expansive notion of the political on which democracy rests." 81

"The neoliberal dream was a global order of freely flowing and accumulating capital, nations organized by traditional morality and markets, and states oriented almost exclusively to this project." 82

"Instead, legislating in the United States is dominated by the need to satisfy both a donor class and an angry electorate, with a resulting political culture of logrolling and pork for the plutocrats and meat thrown to the base. In American politics today, because political parties must woo voters, but are beholden to donors, they pull the state in two directions....Four decades of neoliberal rationality has resulted in a profoundly antidemocratic political culture." 86

"Only 17 percent of Americans are white evangelicals today, but this population constitutes a full one-half of Trump's base." 94

"The most powerful tool for replacing democratic rule with deregulated markets and traditional morality is liberty disembodied from society and from democracy...Liberty claims have been core to the religious right-wing strategy to re-Christianize the public sphere since the early 1990s, but have been ramped up and popularized in the past decade...Challenging equality and anti discrimination law as protections of individual liberty is the strategy brilliantly honed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the most powerful arm of evangelical Christianity in the United States. (ADF International takes the cause to other lands and other courts, national and transnational.)" 110

"Enacting this aspect of the proclamation wages familial, rather than market warfare on democratic principles and institutions...Far from public and democratic, the nation is figured as privately owned and familial, and the president is the paterfamilias." 116-117

"Walls and gates of homes, of course, are the strongest visual signifiers demarcating the private from the public, the protected from the open, the familiar from the strange, the owned from the common. At the same time, as the domain of the private expands, it requires ever more state protection through law, public and private security forces, border patrols, police, and the military."117

"In this developing jurisprudence, First Amendment liberties are expanded beyond their classical civic meaning and even beyond a market meaning. Rather, they are freighted with a comprehensive neoliberal charge, pushing back against the overweening regulatory and social state that imposes schemes of justice where the spontaneous orders generated by markets and morals ought to prevail." 126

"What is developing today as a right-wing political and legal strategy is this: free speech takes free exercise by the hand, pulls it into the public and commercial world, and uniquely empowers it there." 140

"The passion and pleasure in trolling and trashing are signs of what Nietzsche called "wreaking the will" simply to feel its power when world affirmation or world building are unavailable. Perhaps negation-whether crude or moralistic-is what remains when the powers shaping the world appear uncontrollable and uncontainable, and existential doom appears imminent." 170-171

"Here, desublimation permits what was formerly the material of shame, misery, and self-loathing to be acted out as murderous rage. At the same time, the movement draws on a nihilistic version of moral traditionalism, "before feminism," in which male sexual access to women was a matter of right." 172

"Trump's boorishness and rule breaking far from being at odds with traditional values, consecrates the white male supremacism at their heat, whose waning is crucial spur to his support." 174

"In fact, his abuses of power-martial and political-are vital to this desire, not at cross purposes with it. He has power they lack and is nothing but the will to power. His base knows this, needs this, electing him not for moral rectitude, let alone political competence, but for revenge against the wound of nothingness by destroying the imagined agent of that wound. This is resentment in a nasty stew with nihilism." 179

"The third spatial shift pertains to the rise of financial capital and the modality of value that it ushers into the world. Multi-national corporations and global assembly lines of post-Fordism already challenged the visibility and tangibility of capital ownership and control. However, the vaporous powers of finance, which rule everything, but live nowhere, are akin to a Copernican revolution for subjectivity in relation to the powers making and governing the world." 184

[Rhys · Rating 5 out of 5]

A yummy little book that packages a stinging critique of neoliberalism - that is, 'freedom without society'.

"Freedom without society destroys the lexicon by which freedom is made democratic, paired with social consciousness, and nested in political equality. Freedom without society is a pure instrument of power, shorn of concern for others, the world, or the future" (p.44).

And in a nutshell ... "Free, stupid, manipulable, absorbed by if not addicted to trivial stimuli and gratifications, the subject of repressive desublimation in advanced capitalist society is not just libidinally unbound, released to enjoy more pleasure, but released from more general expectations of social conscience and social comprehension. This release is amplified by the neoliberal assault on the social and attack on intellectual knowledge as well as by the depression of conscience fostered by nihilism" (p.167).

Brown says she wasn't offering any solutions in this book. If not a solution, I think she has certainly provided the location of the trailhead and a topographical lay of the land to work with.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

A strange and mostly unpleasant book. The basic argument is that the contemporary wave of hard-right authoritarian populism is the fault of neoliberalism. This is a somewhat tough charge to substantiate since, as Brown herself concedes, hard-right authoritarianism is pretty far from what neoliberals themselves wanted or advocated. But Brown wants to show that they are nevertheless the unintended consequence of neoliberalism.
At times, Brown is surprisingly and refreshingly good at characterizing neoliberal thought. Her exegesis of Hayek, for instance, is often quite comprehensive and accurate. And she deserves credit for highlighting the role of values and tradition in Hayek's thought - something that many of his economist followers have ignored or downplayed.
But Brown never quite manages to connect the dots between Hayek, or neoliberal thought more generally, and the present political crisis. In order to do this, she would need to show either that hard-right authoritarianism is somehow connected to neoliberalism either logically (as a heretofore unrealized implication of neoliberal ideas) or causally (as something that has been generated by the promulgation of neoliberal ideas or by neoliberal practice). Neither of these checks ever get cashed. And so we're left with chapters that provide a long exegesis of contemporary Supreme Court cases like Masterpiece Cake, which simply assert without any sort of support that the findings and arguments of this case are "Hayekianism realized."
There's some value in this book as a critique of neoliberalism. But it's a pretty painful slog.

[Brad · Rating 3 out of 5]

===

The core of this book is to counterpose the

Hayekian dream -- replacing democratically governed society with one organized by markets and traditional morality, under the sign of freedom.

...with "actually existing neoliberalism" that, as anyone with cursory awareness of capitalism knows, involves corporate policy capture and the erosion of the social by pervasive, alienating, marketization of social relations. Crucially, for "ordoliberals", deliberate weaponization of "free speech" and other manoeuvres to delegitimize 'social justice' reforms are key to this pseudo-holy alliance.

===

This work has a very thorough layout of the classic neoliberal ideologues' reasoning, particularly Hayek and Friedman. Brown seems to go out of her way to present a fuller outline of Hayekian philosophy's vision before critical comment, rather than a "critique as we go". There's almost a pained effort to get you as the reader to follow that logic to its conclusions before presenting any critical tone. It reads more like a textbook description, at times, than a polemic.

The ideas laid out are of the 'spontaneity of tradition' and 'voluntary conformity' as a free, liberal practice in contest with state-driven campaigns for justice (what some would call "social engineering", crucially, obscuring the very "engineered" nature of idealized "tradition"). Thus "neoliberalism in practice" runs afoul of idealized spontaneity, as a form of "ordoliberalism" (liberalism, but with the idea that the state at least supports value systems that would otherwise corrode). Commitment to tradition as such gives way to its nihilistic weaponization by entrenched privilege, in a conscious fit of rage, shoring up its own power and privileges.

Hence the pseudo-holy alliance of markets and Christian nationalism explored in Chapter 4: Wedding Cakes and Pregnancy Centers, dealing with Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and National Institute of Family Life Advocates, DBA NIFLA, et al. v. Becerra, Attorney General of California. In both the case of a wedding cake-maker being 'compelled' not to discriminate against same-sex couples & the case of "Crisis Pregnancy Centers" discouraging abortion being compelled to disclose that they are unlicensed (and to make visitors aware of available state-supported resources for reproductive health),

Free speech is the means by which free exercise is extended into the commercial and public sphere, where...'religious beliefs cannot legitimately be carried'.

Just as laissez-faire ideologues seek 'free competition in a deregulated market', Christian nationalist allies instrumentalize an analogous reasoning that these discriminatory practices are "speech" competing in a "marketplace of ideas" in which the state has no rights or place.

Not to be trite, but *SIGH*...Western left. Audibly groaned at this passage:

In its failure to reckon deeply with the political, neoliberalism perversely shares a crucial weakness with Marxism. Not only do both inadequately theorize political life, both reject the siting of freedom (which they cherish, if differently) in the political domain, and both fetishize the independence of "the economy" from political discourse. Above all, both conflate their deconstructive and normative critique of political powers (in excess of the administrative ones they want to make use of) with the practical withering away of these powers "after the revolution." One result of neoliberalism's repetition of the Marxist failure to address political life and power is its deformation by what it ignores.

This somehow manages to ignore the very point of the vanguard (!) as explicit recognition that spontaneity is insufficient and conscious organization of revolutionary energy beyond crude economism is essential. This remains irrespective of the overoptimistic fatalism that declared working class triumph inevitable and actually existing socialism as an irreversible fait accompli.

===

Brown treats reaction as a millenarian philosophical edifice constructed on the "ressentiment" (explicitly "revising Nietzsche") of aggrieved power.

This is ressentiment stuck in its trapped rancor, unable to become "creative." It has only revenge, no way out, no futurity.

Contrary to the embrace of class consciousness, in which breaking our chains means seizing the material forces (some made by us!) that direct consciousness and putting them to the task of our liberation,

The paradox of humanly created powers that diminish the human by revealing our incapacity to direct our fates or even preserve ourselves and our habitat, reaching new heights as these powers are revealed as all that makes the world - this breeds a nihilism beyond Nietzsche's wildest imagination.

The question posed in the conclusion, to me, distills the dilemma of neoliberalism's consequences in "late capitalism" in regional spaces explored in both the California of Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster and the Appalachia of What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia.

Frightened by the loss of values and goods heretofore secured by the nomos [spirit of law] of the earth, this population rages against secular cosmopolitans oriented toward use in place of ownership and embracing...the rootlessness of everyday life. The 'somewheres' cling to the soil, even if it is planted in suburban lawn devastated by droughts and floods from global warming, littered with the paraphernalia of addictive painkillers, and adjacent to crumbling schools, abandoned factories, terminal futures...Nation, family, property, and the traditions reproducing racial and gender privilege, mortally wounded by deindustrialization, neoliberal reason, globalization, digital technologies, and nihilism, are reduced to affective remains. To date, these remains have been activated mostly by the Right. What kinds of Left political critique and vision might reach and transform them?

I was reminded of the somewhat infamous "Andreyeva letter", its controversial reference to the "rootless cosmopolitan", and the fallback on resurgent Great Russian chauvinism in the Brezhnev years by a conservative nomenklatura too unimaginative and dispirited to present a revitalized socialist challenge by taking risks like OGAS or bolder reforms (Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union).

The reevaluation and reframing of "Appalachia" in What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia starts to answer this question by revisiting and reclaiming the radical history of labour activism, but without taking it to a clearly defined radical goal in mind beyond reclaiming the narrative. Brown seems unsure of the way forward, as well---a perennial problem for the Western left.

[Lukáš · Rating 3 out of 5]

*gasp* 3 stars out of 5 for this? What the hell are you thinkning...? The answer to such a rhetorical question might be - I'm perplexed too. First thing first, the book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution, Wendy Brown's previous effort, was an excellent read, even though at times a bit annoyingly melancholic, arguably the most comprehensive overview of theories and analyses of neoliberalism, enhanced by the use of Michel Foucault's concept of political rationality (governmentality) instead of 'ideology', which allowed for much needed clarity as far as a number of distinctions go. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West pretty much starts off where Undoing the Demos ended, builds on its analysis, extends it and also revises it. There's a lot here, and on one level, I think it's an excellent book, a great and a very timely read - and just as what is being done here shows Brown's strengths as a political theorist, it also shows her weaknesses much more vividly than Undoing the Demos. Now, if that book has focused on the problematic effects of neoliberal politics of financialization, deregulation and marketization as far as their social and political costs to democracy go, In the Ruins supplements this analysis by looking at the moral ideas surrounding the free market politics as in neoliberals (Hayek, Friedman), German Ordo-liberalism and some selected neo-conservative figures (mostly Irving Kristol) and extends the analysis by claiming that while marketization was seen as one of the ways how to limit the state, neoliberal social reformists' 'investment' was also into the promotion of traditional moral structures as a means to guarantee order and stability 'beyond the state'. Brown rather brilliantly interprets this in two levels - as an attack on 'the social' and an attack on 'the political', and reads this all the way to the 'Trumpization' / 'LePenization' of present-day politics (one might ironically smirk that after a few months of President Biden, all of this is 'gone', and white supremacy, heteropatriarchal misogyny and everything that was abnormal about Trump's America is now off the screen, so it looks almost like nothing has happened at all, but really, sarcasm aside...) as an unwanted by-product coming from the blind spots of the aims and reliance on traditional morality and traditional structures like the family by authors like Hayek. In any case, just as there is 1. a lot that is contemporary to this argument, and 2. might make Hayek and others actually extremely interesting to people that have been reading their work as narrow-minded 'anti-totalitarian' free-marketism and little else with bringing up the case that there is actually a rather sophisticated mesh of relations between the economy, morals, what is denied to exist under the name 'society' and what is left of politics in Hayek, but just as it is mostly disturbing, it offers a bit of a glimpse that there might have been a little more there than merely a reactionary 'petty-bourgeois' or 'bourgeois' neo-Victorian (or, if I remember correctly, it might have been from Thinking the 20th Century by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, a riff tagging Hayek a Viennese intellectual nostalgic for the simple life under the Habsburgs after the socialist 'Red Vienna' reformism of the 1930s, i.e. rather neo-Habsburg?) ideologue. (At some points where it begs the question of what might be the most extreme conclusions one could reach in this way and whether there, despite all the caution that might be caused by the very name of Hayek might be something capable of a critical re-assessment of this and that, Brown unfortunately doesn't pursue this trajectory, instead just highlighting where the results turned out quite at odds with what Hayek stood and hoped for). Just as there is an effort at a sophisticated argument about how it is in fact the problem of nihilism that flips around the investment into traditional morality and family values by mostly conservative and far right movements into an untrammelled pursuit of power with the ethos of vengeance (exemplified by Brown's reading of two US Supreme Court cases about wedding cakes for gay couples and conservative 'crisis pregnancy centres' being demanded to transparently provide their clients information that they are trying to spin and conceal), which in an enjoyable way quickly departs the Nietzschean grounds and digresses rather through Carl Schmitt and Herbert Marcuse in a pretty interesting way.
Just as I believe that this makes for a rather excellent book, I can't refrain from recalling the rather melancholic tone, I find this book not merely reinforcing - rather, what doesn't let me rest comfortably here is how much this book seems to show Brown's overt faith in the viability of the U.S. model of democracy as mutually reinforcing itself with a liberalism - in the broad sense - that Brown would surely prefer to see drawn more to the left. But just as with what I remarked with Hayek, it seems to me that there are points where it is difficult for Brown to conceive that there might be forms of life and politics beyond those promoted by liberal modernity. While this might not be necessarily for the better, it feels like a symptom of a certain type of blindness (I don't feel like getting too geeky about Nietzsche here, but let's say that I would protest the thought of his political thought fitting neatly in the modern frame, where it might actually offer some further ways how to account for the nihilism and overtly cynical pursuit of morality which Brown chooses to conceptualize through other thinkers instead) - to the extent, where I can't but recall the text by Judith Butler that appeared in e-flux soon after Trump was elected, and the sound of shock, horror, and disbelief echoed in her question / call "Who are these people?" in fact might seem to resonate with Brown whom I usually find myself slightly more sympathetic to (I wouldn't have brought it up if they didn't have a personal relationship and didn't clearly exert some mutual influence...) at a much deeper level, and, here I would speculate about the extent to which her thinking falls prey to the partisan politics in the U.S. and the media machinery and its biases, sustaining unaccountable levels of negative affection towards the other side of the political spectrum. (I don't want this to be taken as a token of some secret sympathy for Trump and his supporters, yet if there's anything that helps me feel less scornful about people saying in publics things that I feel no sympathy towards is the possibility that perhaps we, on the liberal-left side of the political spectrum 'know' far less about these people than we think, and that there still *might* be space left open for a different kind of political encounter. But if there is one, then this book seems to me to rather close instead of opening the possibility of such.)

[Jacob Chak · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll try to address the final question of the book from an activist's view (not an economist, just a happy reader!:)

People want meaning, they don't want to feel like their lives are meaningless- generations before had (or felt like they had) national pride, religion, and/or tribal bonds/cultural bonds. Capitalism, via the internet and globalization, has desecrated every sacred cow of traditional morality and has turned pretty much all of the ways we organize meaning into commodities, it's a true harbinger of the death of meaning (which is not all bad because, as Brown points out, traditional morality is strongly rooted in patriarchy & white supremacy.) Marx saw this and it's probably his most important observation. I think Brown would roughly agree with this assessment and she really does a great job addressing this through court cases, addressing the nihilistic drift and showing how neoliberalism tries to solve the problems it creates but just winds up generation more tension. Also, some great Nietzsche quotes.

So what is the Left's antidote? Shit, wish I knew for sure but here it goes: A global revolution of the public- public parks, museums, libraries, co-working spaces, housing all underpinned by a green revolution. Two futures are in front of us, nihilistic anarcho-capitalist Mad Max post-climate apocalypse or a lurch to the singularity where all humans are treated as equals and can actualize themselves freely regardless of where they are born or whom they are born to. Each community should be built to it's self-dictated standards with unalienable rights baked in, rising like a snow-globe to be exalted by the world or fine-tuned, if necessary. There is no alternative. There is no justice until we have total economic liberation and I think we get there by building a global public works project and climate project. I think if people see glimmers of these things the levy will break and neoliberalism's grip on our psyches will start to soften. Anecdotally, people are exhausted, through and through and I speak from a circumstance of privilege, I can't even imagine that hopelessness of less fortunate people. We gotta give people hope.

[Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very thorough analysis of what neoliberalism intended, and how its flaws led to what we have now - a monster of resentment and inequality and valuelessness. The assessment was excellent, but as a slightly postmodern sociological text, the writing was sometimes difficult.

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is there any connection between neoliberalism and the rise of neo-nationalist, fascist, authoritarian politics? A lot of Left political analysis assumes that the rise of these politics and the emergence of the Trump era is a repudiation of neoliberal politics and an end to the "end-of-history" consensus. Enter Brown- following on the work of theorists like Wendy Cooper and Quinn Slobodian- Brown argues that authoritarian politics are a return of the repressed of precisely the politics that neoliberalism has paradoxically both opposed and engendered with its dedemocratizing project. Further, following Melinda Cooper, Brown recognizes that neoliberalism cannot be theorized as the totalization of a homo economicus (as she emphasized in her previous work Undoing the Demos). Instead, the neoliberal revolution is a revolution "aimed at releasing markets AND morals to govern and discipline individuals while maximizing freedom." Like Cooper, Brown recognizes that market privatization is intimately linked to a responsibilizing and disciplinary project aimed at creating a certain kind of subjectivity. Thus, "neoliberalism is a moral-political project that aims to protect traditional hierarchies by negating the very idea of the social and radically restricting the reach of democratic political power in nation states." The relationship between neoliberalism and Trump era Christian nationalism and fascism then is not so much one of intended spawn as much as Frankensteinian creation.

[Irmak Zileli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yaşadığımız çağın iktidar biçimlerini, ekonomik sömürü sistemini, değer yıkımını, özgürlük söylemiyle yaratılan esareti anlamak isteyenler okusun. Kitabın içinden şu harika neoliberalizm tarifini de okuma iştahını kabartması için bırakıyorum: "Demokrasiyle yönetilen bir toplumun yerine, özgürlük tabelasının altında piyasaların ve geleneksel ahlakın örgütlediği bir toplumu geçirmek"
#okudumbitti #okumaönerisi #

[Mia Burke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great, well researched book. Well deserving of 4+ stars.

However, Brown’s reading of Nietzsche is both ambitious and problematic. She positions Nietzsche as an unwitting progenitor of neoliberal rationality—someone who diagnosed the collapse of moral universals and celebrated self-making as an aesthetic project, a stance later mirrored in neoliberal subjectivity. For Brown, neoliberalism radicalizes Nietzsche’s critique of egalitarianism by transforming freedom into marketized self-optimization. Yet in doing so, she tends to flatten the philosophical complexity of Nietzsche’s project, especially his distinctions between creative freedom and herd morality.
Nietzsche’s thought was fundamentally anti-utilitarian and resistant to the reduction of life to economic or calculative logic—the very logic Brown identifies as neoliberalism’s core. While Nietzsche’s aristocratic disdain for egalitarianism is undeniable, his vision of self-overcoming was rooted in an aesthetic and existential register, not an economic one. Brown’s genealogy risks overstating continuity between Nietzsche’s moral critique and neoliberal governance, as if the latter were simply Nietzschean ethics turned technocratic.

I'm only complaining because he's often so misquoted/used improperly in discourse.

[Lola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una tía listísima a la que tuve la suerte de escuchar ayer en persona. Muy buen libro para comprender el funcionamiento actual del neoliberalismo como racionalidad política.

[Emily Schrampfer · Rating 2 out of 5]

ummmm okay so like yes the points in this book are important but can they please get to the point in a way i can understand 😭 like it’s not a bad book i just wish it was easier to understand. still could not give a full answer on what neoliberalism means 😳

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tiene que ser un libro increíble si eres doctor en filosofía. Para el resto, es un tostón incomprensible.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was cruising along at 3-star status for awhile, which is purely because this book is not really for me although I recognize it's just my own current bias/capability. While there was a good stretch in my 20s and 30s where I would have happily digested such a theoretical/philosophical work, I have no patience for it anymore. I did appreciate and learn from the discussions on the two Supreme Court cases.

I had to subtract a star though because when I got to the end I realized this book was purely DEscriptive, and not at all PREscriptive. And beyond personally hating when authors do not at all bother to offer solutions to the problems they're diagnosing, I also have come to believe it is objectively lazy and/or cowardly, especially over the last decade or so. We need more from political non-fiction this far into the 21st century... there's just no excuse for academics not to push themselves further while civilization is literally collapsing around them.

Not Bad Movie Reviews

[Noelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

jajsjajaa me
Leí esto hace tiempo pero es que necesito acordarme para siempre de lo que me acaba de ocurrir,,, por alguna razón siempre he pensado que wendy brown era negra (jamás la había visto físicamente))) pero hoy con razón de su visita a españa a un festival bastante cuestionable me he dado cuenta de que no es negra dios 😭😭 esto me da mucha vergüenza pero seguramente sea por el apellido??? ojalá esto solo lo lean mis amigos y les haga gracia y no suene racista es simplemente una anécdota de còmo funciona mi cerebro a mi me da algooooo q mal soy gilipollaaaaaaaas

[Michelle Simoni · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to understand what neo liberalism is since it has been on the rise since Nixon . It also is what makes up the Republican Party now . I think it is a great analysis of the political view . I also really loved to examples to help show how terrible neo liberalism is . There are a lot of big words in the book I had to lookup quite a bit but that shouldn’t deter someone from reading this . It was a great analysis .

[Roger Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

This quick book (based on recent lectures) has done more to help me understand what just happened at the Capitol than anything I’ve read all year, maybe all four years. Highly recommended if you’re craving some political theory that is actually clear and comprehensible.

[Boka]

No mushrooms to be found in this one

[drd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing work as always by Brown, though the insight is attenuated by the requisite Trump-era hysteria. But there is this gaping question left at the end that bothers me, and runs through my whole response to the book: what has the neoliberal nihilism sketched by Brown done to the Left?

To be clear, Brown's central argument is a persuasive one: Social conservatism is not a reaction to, but inherent in neoliberalism. Neoliberal theorists thought the state could withdraw to being market arbiter; in the absence of corrosive "social" engineering, a sophisticated interplay of markets (with their amazing rationality) and traditional morals (empowered by a weakened state) would take care of the rest, creating a non-democratic but resilient and adaptive order. But oops! Neoliberalism accidentally destroyed society and so disrupted tradition that "values" survived only as nihilistic cudgels to be wielded against the out-group, creating chaos, suffering, and Donald Trump.

The arguments are mostly sound, and the engagement with neoliberal theorists that Brown doesn't like are good-faith and deep (with a one-chapter exception discussed later). But there is a sort of obvious open question that is never addressed: If, as Brown argues, neoliberalism basically destroyed the human conscience, why did it mysteriously only affect the right?

The left is largely absent from the book except in two ways: One, as the unnamed in-group assumed to be writing and reading the book. Two, as the reviled enemy of the nativist right, the globalists and "anywheres", "embracing racial indeterminacy, gender fluidity, 'families we choose', godlessness, open borders, speculation, virtual sociality, and the rootlessness of everyday life" (187). This latter description is a bit unclear: is this how Brown sees the left, or is it a caricature drawn by the right? Because honestly if it's anywhere near correct, it sounds like a very strange group of people that must have all kinds of pathologies under our neoliberal regime. But nothing is theorized about half the population.

But surely there are serious implications for the left's psychology in her analysis. In her totalizing vision of neoliberalism's murder of society, humanity has become a "species of giant toddlers, appetitive for power, pleasure, and play" (181). Is the reader supposed to read that as a generalization applying only to the right? What is the left's role in this breakdown of sociality? Are they its victims? Are they the brave souls keeping the light alive? One might think so based on the tone of the book, but surely that would be far too naive for someone like Brown. (This is a sidetone, but the sudden psychoanalytic turn at the end of the book -- suggesting that neoliberalism torpedoed the human conscience -- is a particularly annoying just-so story that not only oversimplifies the nature of modern society and subjectivity, but seems to contradict some of the ideas about the internalization of human-capital-maximization as conscience in Undoing the Demos, unless I am misremembering that book, which is why I am leaving this as a parenthetical.)

I am not trying to both-sides this issue, and obviously the book is interested in explaining the pathological ways the right weaponizes moralism without being themselves moral. But I am left with this question.

Maybe the answer involves something about the left being a group that has basically stockholm-syndromed itself into embracing the disruptions and desacralizations unleashed by neoliberalism, narrativizing postmodern nihilism as some sort of humanist liberation? Or perhaps, just as the right seeks to find villains in a world without clear masters, the left, too, creates a just-so story of villains and heroes to make sense of a world where, as Schmitt writes and Brown approvingly quotes, "power comes to be set against everyone, 'even the holder of power' " (162). All imagine themselves the losers of a hostile power structure with the out-group at the top, licensing all exercise of power to topple or at least wound the adversary. The fact that this generalizes to non-right-wing factions should be obvious, but Brown seems not to see it.

This blindness to her own, to use a dated word, positionality, is a bit of a weakness of the book. The work is painfully time-bound, suspended between the anti-Trumpism of 2018 and the anti-Bushism of 2003. She oscillates between #TheResistance-esque digs at Trump (the unselfconscious mention of "peeing prostitutes" is unforgivable) and crying wolf against an ever-ascendant religious right.

When the book doesn't sink to the level of 2018's hysterical op-ed pages, it is at its strongest. The deep, fair, and balanced engagements with Hayek and Schmitt in particular, two thinkers she must despise as people, bolster her credibility tremendously, as does her frank assessment of what she missed in her previous (and more influential) "Undoing the Demos". But this even-handedness is itself rather uneven, and almost completely absent in chapter 4. Here, we are treated to unadulterated hostility to the Christian Right which, unlike the neo- and ordo-liberals of previous chapters, is portrayed with the subtlety of Star Wars' characterization of Darth Vader. This chapter is basically what would happen if Jacques Derrida was a writer for Rachel Maddow. All of Brown's critical faculties are mustered to entrap conservative Supreme Court justices in the contradictions of their own arguments, an attempt to perform a series of pointless "by your own logic..." dunks that do little to advance the overall argument of the book. She also initially seems sympathetic to the infamous Colorado baker-as-artist, but later jarringly shifts gears and declares that "compelling exercise of artistic talents to express a message with which one disagrees does not violate one's First Amendment rights" (140). There are a few other moments where the mask slips and the reflexive 2018 leftist peeks out behind the philosophical depth of most of the book. But they are exceptions.

Enough complaining. The single highlight of the book, for me, is the implication that the ressentiment activated on the right is a response not necessarily to something specific about liberalism, neoliberalism, leftism, or any other concrete ideological or policy program, but rather to a universalized powerlessness: "The paradox of humanly created powers that diminish the human and especially its capacity to shape its world ... breeds new quantities and subjects of ressentiment, and a nihilism beyond Nietzsche's vivid dreams" (163). This builds beautifully on the argument in Brown's prescient 2010 book "Walled States" and offers almost a more non-partisan narrative for the pathologies of the right: robbed of a clear sovereign and center of power, but also of a sense of commons or the social, people sink into ressentiment, one that opportunistically builds on the wreckage of the old moral order. But again, as I said, what about the Left...

Speaking of the remains of the old world -- family, tradition, nation, etc -- this is how Brown ends the book: "To date, these remains have been activated mostly by the Right. What kinds of Left political critique and vision might reach and transform them?" (188). She is almost asking the right question. But it seems obvious that something similar -- a distorted instrumentalization of old shared values for raw will-to-power -- has happened on the Left. I want someone to figure it out, but I don't think Wendy Brown wants to do it.

[Sami Eerola · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mix bag of the history of neoliberalism and how its ideas have been perverted by the new far-right. There are very interesting conceptualizations of the Trumpian and New Rights ideology, but some chapters are steeped in hard to understand Marxist theory and almost obscure philosophical iideas that i do not care for or understand.

But the core idea of this book that the Neoliberal hegemonic ideology has created a new far-right that uses freedom and the destruction of the centralized state to uphold old racial and gender hierarchies is very well formulated and gave great insight in the analyses of the new far-right.

[dimwig · Rating 3 out of 5]

feels a little half-baked compared to undoing the demos. the best parts for me were about hayek & the definition of the political. i think there is a useful insight in here somewhere about neoliberalism not really existing anymore (owl of minerva flies at night etc) but i didn't feel like it really got elaborated through the rest of the book.

[Marisa]

Wasn't prepared for the seminar's worth of background reading that would be necessary to really follow all of Brown's arguments. Not very accessible, but Brown's central thesis - that neoliberalism is the combination of spontaneous, uninhibited free markets and morals, and that these have been used to erode democratic power and expand the personal sphere - is well outlined.

[Marissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was an undergraduate, I took a United States history survey course. On the first day of class, the professor posed a question to us: are capitalism and democracy compatible? Everyone’s gut instinct was to say “yes, of course!” The vast majority of us had grown up in the United States, fed the idea that competition makes for individual opportunity, a strong economy, and, therefore, a strong nation. But the more we discussed, the less confident we became in our response. We started to realize the many ways in which capitalism violated what we considered the basic tenets of a democracy: equality, security, and, necessarily, regulation and rules to maintain the “always unfulfilled” governing structure (Brown, 27).

Brown’s book brought me back to that conversation, but provided me with the terminology and context to think about it with more nuance. My grasp on concepts like “liberalism” and “neoliberalism” were shaky at best, and Brown’s explanation not only familiarized them but applied them to our currently reality in a way that was both didactic and disturbingly lucid. Her breakdown of neoliberalism’s relationship to the social and political highlighted its incompatibility with democratic governance. Democracy depends on the social and political—it requires cooperation and a community of care secured and stabilized by institutions (implemented and run by the government). Friedrich Hayek’s neoliberal philosophy centered on his concern that this democratic governance would merely substitute a tyranny of one (or the few) for the tyranny of the majority. This is a valid concern, but not one ameliorated by his “markets and morals,” as evidenced by our current moment of late-stage capitalism.

Admittedly, Brown gives due credit and time to breaking down neoliberalism. I was largely unconvinced, but found myself at moments considering the validity of the theory. In a perfect world—one without systems of domination like patriarchy and racism—Hayek’s theories could work. But that’s why chapter 5 of Brown’s book is so crucial:

“Perhaps there is a form of nihilism shaped by the waning of a type of social dominance or the waning social dominance of a historical type… [F]ar from going gently into the night, it turns toward apocalypse. If white men cannot own democracy, there will be no democracy. If white men cannot rule the planet, there will be no planet. Nietzsche was immensely curious about what would come after the two centuries of the intensifying nihilism he expected. But what if there is no “after”? What if supremacy is the rosary held tight as white civilization itself appears finished and takes with it all futurity? What if this is how it ends?” (Brown, 180)

In addition to being terrifying, this excerpt from chapter 5 emphasizes the incompatibility of neoliberalism in a world where capitalism flourished through the disproportionate exploitation of women and people of color, especially Black people. As democracy has attempted to correct its course, the backlash has pushed it further into the depths. There can be no regulation through “markets and morals,” no randomized luck to ensure equity, when so many historical factors have tied capitalism and democracy so closely together—and towards such a fatal and apocalyptic end.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the major theorists around these days takes a whack at defining These Times and the rise of the far right. I’d argue Brown does a better job than any of the other cracks out there, but the form it takes — short critical theoretical interventions — has its limitations.

As the subtitle promises, Wendy Brown frames the rise of the far right as an assault on democracy, already controversial as far as These Timesers are concerned, scared as they are of populism and “illiberal democracy.” In part, Brown elides them definitionally, arguing that democracy means equality and that whatever today’s moment about, it isn’t about equality in any meaningful sense. I happen to think she’s right that democracy, to be substantial, involves a downward distribution and equalization of power, but I know that’s not necessarily the agreed-upon definition.

Anyway… what is threatening democracy so? Brown’s most arresting image is of today’s far right as neoliberalism’s Frankenstein monster. The classical neoliberal thinkers did not have this in mind. Brown musters the latest work on neoliberalism, most notably that of Quinn Slobodian on the state and Melinda Cooper on moral politics, to argue that neoliberalism sought to encase an order defined by markets and traditional morality (somewhat underdefined in the lit, alas) from popular pressure. This included popular pressure from the right. But neoliberalism broke down so many social solidarities and so weakened democratic forces that, like ancient diseases emerging from the melting permafrost (my image, not hers), forces of rage and hatred neoliberalism thought it had short-circuited have arisen to remake the future in their image.

Her argument seems to be that neoliberalism essentially wanted an escape from politics, or anyway to contain politics in a little box that had minimum output onto (and in some cases maximum input from) markets and morals. But the repressed has a way of returning, and the political — the drive to define and use power — finds its way back, especially given how weak many neoliberal regimes have turned out to be. There’s some smidgen of hope there — liberatory politics, too, have made a comeback — but it could be too little, too late, against the anti-democratic forces over which neoliberalism has lost control. This, in short, “scans” as correct to me, and as a useful framing for further discussion.

Brown choices of material on which to dwell are interesting. She spends a lot of time getting her neoliberalism ducks in a row, correcting her previous work, “Undoing the Demos,” which largely ignored the moral elements of neoliberalism, and showing the ways different strains of the ideology both sought to undo democracy and avoid the sort of mass action on the right we see today. Her emphasis here is on the intellectual architects of neoliberalism- Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, the German ordoliberals. I wonder if it would have made a difference if she looked more at neoliberalism in the field, throughout the world. Jumping perhaps unfairly to the most dramatic example, she might have made use of Chile, which involved a certain amount of mobilization of popular right-wing sentiment. She’s also a legal expert and spends a lot of time with court cases, which was interesting in terms of its reconstruction of the logic of the neoliberal subject, but also at times more opaque than the rest of this work.

Brown goes a long way here towards giving a theoretical frame to further study of the contemporary far right. It’s interesting that she avoids the big “f-word,” fascism- popular anti-democratic politics sounds like a decent succinct definition to me. She probably avoided more trouble than wading into the fascism-definition game is worth. But I do think getting more into the historical specifics, which the example of fascism makes one do, would have strengthened this book. It’s not just fascism, either. Some sampling of the different ways both neoliberalism and its noxious spawn vary between times and places, outside of what she did on their intellectual pedigrees, also would have made for a robust work, closer to whatever unicorn of a book on the right I’m chasing. But helping define the question as Brown does here is surely a step in the right direction. ****’

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is timely and detailed, explaining the contemporary turn of national and international politics from 'objective' market fundamentalism to the highly emotional populist reactionary neo-conservative forces that once propped it up. It is pretty dense and could definitely use more enmeshed examples or even definitions of jargon employed from the beginning, but it is a worthwhile read to understand how Trump and the Alt-Right (including the Christian, straight, white, cis men) express their resentment at potentially losing their position of arbitrary supremacy while they unapologetically amp up their entitlement to remain in the spotlight of the spectacle. The concerning instability of it all is evident in the Orwellian redefintion of constitutional legal terminology, notably "free speech" and "freedom of religion".

Following on from reading other identitarian books attempting to gain greater political equality via racial re-orientation to feminism, rather than merely speculate on the sources of neoconservative retaliation of social justice movements, this book explains the nihilistic ideological and philosophical roots that bare much greater weight to understanding this frankly dangerous enemy. They are not restrained by their conscience/morality (of religion or otherwise) which are not only constantly shifting but used only instrumentally. They therefore cannot be appealed to on this basis.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lately I’ve been wondering: Is there really is a global rise in populism and antidemocratic movements - or maybe it’s just a trick of the news? And why is it that individual freedom, nationalism, free markets and traditional morality are tangled up in these antidemocratic movements ? Don’t they seem like strange bedfellows? Is that an accident?

Brown argues that we limit ourselves by focusing only on the economic projects of neoliberalism. While the populist results are unintentional, she convincingly argues that antidemocratic logics and energies are at the heart of the moral project of neoliberalism

I found this surprisingly accessible. While Brown may, with some relish, lay bare a ridiculous contradiction, she never straw mans. As needed, Brown succinctly and fairly summarizes schools of thought or key positions. At other times, with a microscope and scalpel, she carefully details and unpacks the core tenants animating neoliberalism, pinpointing connections and intertwined logics.

Your mileage may vary in how far you agree, but Brown brings fresh connection and brings new perspectives to debates that have run stale. In the end I think she overreaches slightly, but I highly recommend this book for any interested in democracy or the popular movements of today - as this book feels more relevant than ever - eg in understanding why Trump’s conviction isn’t going to persuade voters away from him.