undoing the demos neoliberalism's stealth revolution

One comes on p.44, where she observes that ‘neoliberalism is the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity…’. There are points in this text when you sit up and take notice. The fabric of political life is thus said to be changing for the worse: we are losing our appetite for democratic values not least because liberty is being individualised and recast as a form of market conduct.īrown’s stark portrayal of these developments is disturbing. Using Obama as her primary example, she argues that democratic principles of equality or liberty are today being displaced by new concerns for ‘economic growth, competitive positioning, and capital enhancement’ (p.26). For Brown, nothing is now sacred or exempt from this process. Neoliberalism, then, is not simply about markets, money or social class (which is barely mentioned in this book, except to say that it has disappeared, see p.38) it is rather a condition under which a raw economic rationality is applied to all forms of human activity and becomes the basis of a certain style of political governance. Rather, the point is that neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities – even where money is not at issue – and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo economicus (p.31).

To speak of the relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life by neoliberalism is…not to claim that neoliberalism literally marketizes all spheres, even as such marketization is certainly one important effect of neoliberalism. In the first chapter of Undoing the Demos, Brown develops a position that is broadly sympathetic to Foucault’s concerns.

The starting point of this undertaking is Michel Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics, which analyses the extension of market principles into the state and beyond into civil society and, seemingly, everything ‘social’. This is a dark, haunting text that questions the fate of democracy under a new regime of neoliberal governance that understands the value of human life purely in economic terms. There are many good books on neoliberalism but this one stands apart.

Undoing the demos neoliberalism's stealth revolution