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Never Ending Nightmare: The Neoliberal Assault on Democracy
How do we explain the strange survival of the forcesresponsible for the 2008 economic crisis, one of the worst since 1929? How do we explain the fact that neoliberalism has emerged from the crisis strengthened? When it broke, a number of the most prominent economists hastened to announce the 'death' of neoliberalism. They regarded the pursuit of neoliberal policy as the fruit of dogmatism.For Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, neoliberalism is no mere dogma. Supported by powerful oligarchies, it is a veritable politico-institutional system that obeys a logic of self-reinforcement. Far from representing a break, crisis has become a formidably effective mode of government.In showing how this system crystallized and solidified, the book explains that the neoliberal straitjacket has succeeded in preventing any course correction by progressively deactivating democracy. Increasing the disarray and demobilization, the so-called 'governmental' Left has actively helped strengthen this oligarchical logic. The latter could lead to a definitive exit from democracy in favour of expertocratic governance, free of any control.However, nothing has been decided yet. The revival of democratic activity, which we see emerging in the political movements and experiments of recent years, is a sign that the political confrontation with the neoliberal system and the oligarchical bloc has already begun.
193 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 16, 2019
16 people are currently reading
280 people want to read
About the author
Pierre Dardot
23 books22 followersPierre Dardot, né le 28 octobre 1952, est chercheur rattaché au laboratoire Sophiapol de l’Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense et professeur en classes préparatoires à Paris. Titres universitaires : Agrégation de philosophie (1980) et Doctorat en lettres et sciences humaines (philosophie) de l’Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (1988). Animateur depuis 2004 du groupe d’études et de recherches « Question Marx » avec Christian Laval. Ouvrages : Sauver Marx ? (avec Christian Laval et El Mouhoub Mouhoud), La Découverte, 2007 ; La Nouvelle raison du monde (avec Christian Laval), La Découverte, 2009 ; Marx, prénom : Karl (avec Christian Laval), Gallimard, 2012 ; Commun (avec Christian Laval), La Découverte, 2014.
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July 7, 2019
If you can only read one book this summer, I’d recommend you read this one. Also a great title and potentially theme for your post-romantic beach holidays with your formerly exciting partner and children “Never-Ending Nightmare: The Neoliberal Assault on Democracy” (VERSO, 2019, original French 2016). (Just kid-ding, guys!)
Now why is this such a great read? I think it’s fairly obvious, even to the most ignorant, that we have entered a ‘great regression’ with a gamut of actually existing right-wing alternatives to liberal democracy. And while the far-right is upping its nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric and attacks, it’s the so-called defenders of liberal democracy and European values who fortify their borders knowing that thousands of the global destitute die of thirst in the desert or drown in the sea (I read somewhere there’s two refugees dying in the desert foe each drowning in the sea). While the free movement of capital has become an almost religious mantra and somehow an expression of freedom (lol), the movement of people is becoming ever more restricted. As ‘we’ force (or encourage trough conditional loans in the guise of reforms) African countries to remove capital controls, we also force them to close their borders. These two ‘freedoms’ have to be thought of together. But this is just an aside.
The book is among those voices that argue that we have seen another metamorphosis of neoliberalism since the global financial crisis where neoliberalism no longer needs its democratic image. The post global financial crisis authoritarianisms we see, say in the form of Trump or Orban, are not alternatives to neoliberalism but ‘we are living in a moment when neoliberalism secretes from within an original political form that combines anti-democratic authoritarianism, economic nationalism and expanded capitalist rationality’. The book aims to make explicit this ‘original political form’ and advocates a dynamic conception of neoliberalism, which continues to undergo mutations as crises arise, it feeds on the crises it produces. Neoliberalism is a mode of governance that is fueled and radicalized by its own crises and governs through crises.
The Eurogroup’s response to the ‘Greek crisis’ was probably the most eye-opening manifestation of this mutation towards authoritarian neoliberalism where real power is concentrated in the hands of the economically most powerful at the expense of the mass of citizens. The troika’s dealing with Syriza in 2015 (who may be voted out of power at today’s snap election) was an expression of what the author calls ‘necropolitics’ where unelected elites (IMF, ECB etc) rule through debts and hold the power of life or death over a financial system and thus governments, rendering the popular will or democracy meaningless.
However, debt is but one of the ‘techniques’ of neoliberal power (here the authors borrow some of Foucault’s insights on the techniques of neoliberal governance) and tools of discipline (e.g., logic of competition, maintaining the ‘confidence of financial markets and rating agencies’). The book provides a timely reminder of neoliberalism’s key strategy to rule through dismantling democracy through the constitutionalizing of what was formerly political – ie subject to popular will – starting with the German model of making the central banks independent of the government thus removing monetary policies from the popular will, which the EU recently also extended to fiscal policy (laws on balanced budgets etc) so that we’re essentially left with hollowed out democratic shells where everything that matters is already written in various treaties and laws of supranational structures (EU, WTO, free-trade agreements) and constitutions.
This ‘economic discipline’ also accelerated the dismantling of social democracy who continues to be unwilling or unable to transcend the discourse of the ‘what’s economically feasible’ thus buying into neoliberal rationality. The answer should not be to devise policies that are ‘affordable’ within the current socio-economic framework but questioning the framework altogether. When Bernie was asked in last week’s debate how he’s going to pay for medicate for all, he didn’t fall for it. He simply said that tens of millions of people will push for an end to corporate greed and for their human right to health care. If the left enters the neoliberal terrain of ‘economic rationality’ and costed policy proposals within existing parameters, it has already lost. While neoliberalism makes everything look as if it were economic, it’s actually political. Overcoming neoliberalism will not happen through an adjustment to taxation and the minimum wage, it requires a political revolution because that’s what the elites have been carrying out over the past decades, for the past ten years or so, the masks have come off.
Now why is this such a great read? I think it’s fairly obvious, even to the most ignorant, that we have entered a ‘great regression’ with a gamut of actually existing right-wing alternatives to liberal democracy. And while the far-right is upping its nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric and attacks, it’s the so-called defenders of liberal democracy and European values who fortify their borders knowing that thousands of the global destitute die of thirst in the desert or drown in the sea (I read somewhere there’s two refugees dying in the desert foe each drowning in the sea). While the free movement of capital has become an almost religious mantra and somehow an expression of freedom (lol), the movement of people is becoming ever more restricted. As ‘we’ force (or encourage trough conditional loans in the guise of reforms) African countries to remove capital controls, we also force them to close their borders. These two ‘freedoms’ have to be thought of together. But this is just an aside.
The book is among those voices that argue that we have seen another metamorphosis of neoliberalism since the global financial crisis where neoliberalism no longer needs its democratic image. The post global financial crisis authoritarianisms we see, say in the form of Trump or Orban, are not alternatives to neoliberalism but ‘we are living in a moment when neoliberalism secretes from within an original political form that combines anti-democratic authoritarianism, economic nationalism and expanded capitalist rationality’. The book aims to make explicit this ‘original political form’ and advocates a dynamic conception of neoliberalism, which continues to undergo mutations as crises arise, it feeds on the crises it produces. Neoliberalism is a mode of governance that is fueled and radicalized by its own crises and governs through crises.
The Eurogroup’s response to the ‘Greek crisis’ was probably the most eye-opening manifestation of this mutation towards authoritarian neoliberalism where real power is concentrated in the hands of the economically most powerful at the expense of the mass of citizens. The troika’s dealing with Syriza in 2015 (who may be voted out of power at today’s snap election) was an expression of what the author calls ‘necropolitics’ where unelected elites (IMF, ECB etc) rule through debts and hold the power of life or death over a financial system and thus governments, rendering the popular will or democracy meaningless.
However, debt is but one of the ‘techniques’ of neoliberal power (here the authors borrow some of Foucault’s insights on the techniques of neoliberal governance) and tools of discipline (e.g., logic of competition, maintaining the ‘confidence of financial markets and rating agencies’). The book provides a timely reminder of neoliberalism’s key strategy to rule through dismantling democracy through the constitutionalizing of what was formerly political – ie subject to popular will – starting with the German model of making the central banks independent of the government thus removing monetary policies from the popular will, which the EU recently also extended to fiscal policy (laws on balanced budgets etc) so that we’re essentially left with hollowed out democratic shells where everything that matters is already written in various treaties and laws of supranational structures (EU, WTO, free-trade agreements) and constitutions.
This ‘economic discipline’ also accelerated the dismantling of social democracy who continues to be unwilling or unable to transcend the discourse of the ‘what’s economically feasible’ thus buying into neoliberal rationality. The answer should not be to devise policies that are ‘affordable’ within the current socio-economic framework but questioning the framework altogether. When Bernie was asked in last week’s debate how he’s going to pay for medicate for all, he didn’t fall for it. He simply said that tens of millions of people will push for an end to corporate greed and for their human right to health care. If the left enters the neoliberal terrain of ‘economic rationality’ and costed policy proposals within existing parameters, it has already lost. While neoliberalism makes everything look as if it were economic, it’s actually political. Overcoming neoliberalism will not happen through an adjustment to taxation and the minimum wage, it requires a political revolution because that’s what the elites have been carrying out over the past decades, for the past ten years or so, the masks have come off.
November 15, 2024
covers the rise of anti democratic and far right political tendencies in this neoliberal "project", (is this period "late" or "post" neoliberalism?). he spends a lot of time on the fall of Syriza and the practice of ordoliberalism. was hoping he would spend more time on Trmpism. im looking for any theoretical explanation right now. but obviously he cant go over everything. his writing is very technical and unwieldly (like way of the world). i had a difficult time slogging through this pretty short book, and im having trouble organizing my thoughts in general. but basically the financial system is running the show now, even powerful states are on bended knee to the might of financial capitalism. very important book now.
November 18, 2019
Yeah, amid the coruscating depthlessness that is political digestion garbed as critical theory, there's much of value here. Dardot and Laval are strong thinkers and deeply enmeshed in broad-strokes European political economy - and, refreshingly, they aren't shy from a gratifying side-swipe here and there. But I found myself adrift in the often locationless assertions about theoretical constructs and, when the converation turned to specificities, such as the threatened and unwilling Grexit, Dardot and Laval had little fresh to offer. So that was a little disappointing.
It's a short book and it's sometimes "stodgy", as one might say of a cake. Still, for their own brand of Foucauldian diagnosis focused on European neoliberalism and ordo-liberalism, the two are on solid ground.
It's a short book and it's sometimes "stodgy", as one might say of a cake. Still, for their own brand of Foucauldian diagnosis focused on European neoliberalism and ordo-liberalism, the two are on solid ground.
September 24, 2020
This is not a particularly optimistic take on the political terrain we find ourselves on in the early 21st Century. As they surmise themselves, “It is dark.” That, however, is a strength. You will find very little faux optimism here, a perennial feature of much writing on the left, but a serious attempt to theorize where we are and how to move forward.
Michel Foucault, the doyen of poststructuralism, for all his many faults was one of the first to point out that neoliberalism, admittedly a rather imprecise term, involved the construction of a distinctive subjectivity. Another French philosopher-historian, Pierre Rosanvallon, agreed, arguing that fraternity had been cast aside by this new ethos in favor of a rapacious individualism. It has, however, arguably been Dardot and Laval that have provided the most thorough articulation of the notion that neoliberalism has consisted not only of state-assisted privatization but, perhaps more importantly, the crafting of a new form of identity as the norm of existence, where we feel somehow defective if we lack the necessary drive to transform ourselves into a successful brand. They describe this as an ‘entrepreneurial rationality’, worming its way into not only the state but our very concept of who we are. In this seemingly never-ending nightmare, “the most unbridled capitalist instinct mingles with every kind of identitarian ireedentism” and “:an absolute submission to transcendence” where “democracy is emptied of its substance without being formally abolished.” This environment cultivates an abject narcissistic ethos of the self, in which we are meant to be ever more flexible and constantly preoccupied with reinvention, all ultimately, of course, for the benefit of transnational capital.
This has been accompanied, both as cause and effect, by the demobilization of the left in any traditional sense, which suffers from a debilitating “lack of any imaginary.” This has enabled an emboldened right, just as identitarian in its own ways as the left, which has been able to exploit these weaknesses and pose as an anti-establishment alternative. The final part of this book attempts to address this and is in many ways the weakest. Rejecting any ‘party form’, they soon sink into rather imprecise talk of constructing ‘international democratic blocs’ and ‘global opposition arenas.’ The weaknesses and failures of convention ‘party’ organisations on the mainstream and far left are clear for all who have eyes to see, but then so is the ultimate failure of non or anti-party formations such as the Social Forum and Occupy Movements, which sound very similar to the sort of trans-national, broadly-based oppositional movements they are putting forward as alternatives. That they do not fully address this is certainly a weakness, although their sober articulation of the scale of the problem is to be welcomed.
Michel Foucault, the doyen of poststructuralism, for all his many faults was one of the first to point out that neoliberalism, admittedly a rather imprecise term, involved the construction of a distinctive subjectivity. Another French philosopher-historian, Pierre Rosanvallon, agreed, arguing that fraternity had been cast aside by this new ethos in favor of a rapacious individualism. It has, however, arguably been Dardot and Laval that have provided the most thorough articulation of the notion that neoliberalism has consisted not only of state-assisted privatization but, perhaps more importantly, the crafting of a new form of identity as the norm of existence, where we feel somehow defective if we lack the necessary drive to transform ourselves into a successful brand. They describe this as an ‘entrepreneurial rationality’, worming its way into not only the state but our very concept of who we are. In this seemingly never-ending nightmare, “the most unbridled capitalist instinct mingles with every kind of identitarian ireedentism” and “:an absolute submission to transcendence” where “democracy is emptied of its substance without being formally abolished.” This environment cultivates an abject narcissistic ethos of the self, in which we are meant to be ever more flexible and constantly preoccupied with reinvention, all ultimately, of course, for the benefit of transnational capital.
This has been accompanied, both as cause and effect, by the demobilization of the left in any traditional sense, which suffers from a debilitating “lack of any imaginary.” This has enabled an emboldened right, just as identitarian in its own ways as the left, which has been able to exploit these weaknesses and pose as an anti-establishment alternative. The final part of this book attempts to address this and is in many ways the weakest. Rejecting any ‘party form’, they soon sink into rather imprecise talk of constructing ‘international democratic blocs’ and ‘global opposition arenas.’ The weaknesses and failures of convention ‘party’ organisations on the mainstream and far left are clear for all who have eyes to see, but then so is the ultimate failure of non or anti-party formations such as the Social Forum and Occupy Movements, which sound very similar to the sort of trans-national, broadly-based oppositional movements they are putting forward as alternatives. That they do not fully address this is certainly a weakness, although their sober articulation of the scale of the problem is to be welcomed.
October 9, 2020
Dardot offers a counter-narrative of neoliberalism to how it has been canonized by now, analyzing how it constitutes both a rationale in macroeconomics and a structural, all-encompassing movement whose logic greatly differs from the classical liberal tradition (in that sense, Dardot is close to Foucault, whose critical stance seems to be crucial for his understanding). Once examined theoretically and historically, neoliberal imaginarium and its protagonists are rather vilified in Dardot's eyes.
By analyzing the destinies of Greek Syriza, Spanish Podemos, etc., Dardot also wants to propose an extensive, widely organized movement of resistance, believing in the bottom-to-top approach that would truly demonstrate the power of democracy.
By analyzing the destinies of Greek Syriza, Spanish Podemos, etc., Dardot also wants to propose an extensive, widely organized movement of resistance, believing in the bottom-to-top approach that would truly demonstrate the power of democracy.
October 24, 2022
What is a never-ending nightmare? You are in a nightmare; sights and sounds change, different characters emerge, events happen. Yet, you are still dreaming, or rather, nightmaring. What persists is that uncanny, unsettling feeling of insecurity, uncertainty, and anguish. Maybe nothing too bad is happening, but still, that restlessness is encompassing.
That is the new neoliberalism. The key to ending this nightmare, if we ever could do- is to learn its anatomy, its ways of working, and connections to crisis, oligarchy, governance, anti-democracy and ordo-liberalism.
I am thankful to Dardot & Laval for the exquisitely clear delivery of their ideas. I am still in the nightmare, but at least now I can make sense of it.
That is the new neoliberalism. The key to ending this nightmare, if we ever could do- is to learn its anatomy, its ways of working, and connections to crisis, oligarchy, governance, anti-democracy and ordo-liberalism.
I am thankful to Dardot & Laval for the exquisitely clear delivery of their ideas. I am still in the nightmare, but at least now I can make sense of it.
January 2, 2024
Chapter 2: "The Neoliberal Project: An Anti-Democratic Project" is the standout. essential reading.
"Once we are dealing with a specific capitalism, it becomes possible to intervene in it so as to create
another capitalism, different from the first, which will itself represent a particular configuration determined by a set of juridico-political rules. Instead of an economic mode of production whose development is governed by a logic operating like some implacable ‘natural law’, capitalism is an ‘economico-juridical complex’ that can take a multiplicity of specific forms. This is also why we must refer to neoliberal society, not simply neoliberal policy or neoliberal economics. While undeniably a capitalist society, this society is a particular form of capitalism that needs to be analysed as such, in its irreducible specificity."
"Once we are dealing with a specific capitalism, it becomes possible to intervene in it so as to create
another capitalism, different from the first, which will itself represent a particular configuration determined by a set of juridico-political rules. Instead of an economic mode of production whose development is governed by a logic operating like some implacable ‘natural law’, capitalism is an ‘economico-juridical complex’ that can take a multiplicity of specific forms. This is also why we must refer to neoliberal society, not simply neoliberal policy or neoliberal economics. While undeniably a capitalist society, this society is a particular form of capitalism that needs to be analysed as such, in its irreducible specificity."
June 21, 2021
A surprisingly expansive text on the fashioning of society from the top down through economic rules and logic. The insurgency of capital has attained level 3 and is fighting, and winning, a war against the nation state. The kings of the new regime are private lenders who have fought for the supreme position. They have the power to choke off an economy by denying cash infusions, quickly leading to illiquidity and collapse.
August 19, 2019
quick & not not fun, the stuff that is a popularizing summary version of well-rehearsed left approaches to neoliberalism is fine, but y’know, wade through some predictable Foucauldian nonsense against Marxism, w/e I should be less prudish
February 28, 2022
A very interesting analysis of the reality of neoliberalism institutionalised and how this neoliberalist politics has built a system that co-opts democracy to blind the public to the autocratization of "Western democracies". While democracy becomes more and more a word, lacking of content and meaning, the political elite and plutocrats have evolved and used crisis as a form of "Shock Doctrine" to institute undemocratic policies favourable to private business and limit the influence of the general populace on the politicians they elect to represent them. My favourite analysis of this book is the claim that neoliberalism is the Rationality of Capital, and the spread of this rationality into the general population kills the the interest of the workers and changes the citizen individual into an enterprise themselves. In short neoliberalism is extremely powerful in its ability to push the dogma of Capital on the Labouring population.
From my analysis of the book, it is a call to the people to open their eyes to the death of democratic institutions from the actions of elite politicians and their corporate lobbies. The Few control the conditions of the Many and profit from it.
One criticism, some of the sections with intense political science language and analysis can be a struggle to read and comprehend. Certain chapters took me a couple reads to fully comprehend. Due to this I would give it a 4.5* rather than 5*.
From my analysis of the book, it is a call to the people to open their eyes to the death of democratic institutions from the actions of elite politicians and their corporate lobbies. The Few control the conditions of the Many and profit from it.
One criticism, some of the sections with intense political science language and analysis can be a struggle to read and comprehend. Certain chapters took me a couple reads to fully comprehend. Due to this I would give it a 4.5* rather than 5*.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews