wendy brown undoing the demos neoliberalism's stealth revolution

wendy brown undoing the demos neoliberalism

And once competition is established as a guiding principle for society, inequality becomes naturalized, and the state is less compelled to provide basic protections and safeguard universal rights. Its advocates subordinate traditional democratic principles-equality, liberty, inclusion, and constitutionalism-to the market demands of financial growth, capital enhancement, and competition. However and wherever neoliberalism emerges, its effects are strikingly uniform, instituting the supremacy of economic logic and ends. Nevertheless, neoliberalism is real, and has acquired its shifting global identity from its varied temporal and geographic history. Neoliberalism is an equally imprecise concept, a “loose and shifting signifier,” to use Brown’s phrase, and one mainly deployed by academic critics (nobody ever discusses neoliberalism to praise it).

It stands for everything from free elections to free markets and is as likely to be invoked by presidents as protesters.

It is also “among the most contested and promiscuous terms in our modern political vocabulary,” writes Brown. To put the problem another way: Democracy remains a popular brand, but it is an increasingly fraught and feeble one. And yet, everywhere we look, democracy is in crisis, with scholars warning that the United States has essentially become an oligarchy and mounting evidence that ostensible formal democracies such as Turkey are creeping toward authoritarianism. By one estimate, eighty-one countries moved from authoritarianism to democracy between 19. Superficially, of course, there is no shortage of democracy. According to Brown, democracy has grown gaunt as a consequence of an ascendant political rationality that, like an ideological auto-immune disorder, has assaulted its very fiber and future. Political theorist Wendy Brown opens her brilliant and incisive new book, Undoing the Demos, with a clarion call: Western democracy is imperiled.

Wendy brown undoing the demos neoliberalism's stealth revolution