Wendy Brown (2018) is interviewed about her book, Undoing the Demos. She views neoliberalism as a “political rationality”, a term she uses in order to reveal the extent to which people are governed by forms of reason, or perhaps forms of aesthesis, it might be said, and not simply by policy, material forces or belief. Following a Foucauldian line of thought, she adjudges that neoliberalism has brought new kinds of subjects, new forms of subjectivity and new social relations into being.
Under neoliberalism, she contends, we understand ourselves through and orient our actions around certain values which inform who we are and what we are worth, what we pursue or value in ourselves and others. These values also determine what we think politics and democracy are and what they are for.
These ways of being governed normatively, Brown continues, are as important as specific policies that favour capital, undermine organised labour, impede states from provisioning the basic needs of populations or erode national sovereignty.
By such means, a number of democratic fundaments have been attacked or undermined by neoliberal reasoning. Ironically, in many ways, what has unfolded in “actually existing neoliberalism” would appall the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Hayek, Friedman and the ordoliberals. While these founders sought to keep markets untouched by politics, to keep politics insulated from the emotional demands of the uneducated masses, and to avoid rent-seeking behaviour from capitalists, they nonetheless opposed other measures of what they decried as “social injustice". It is clear, then, that "actually existing neoliberalism” was nonetheless spawned by their dream.
Under neoliberalism, she contends, we understand ourselves through and orient our actions around certain values which inform who we are and what we are worth, what we pursue or value in ourselves and others. These values also determine what we think politics and democracy are and what they are for.
These ways of being governed normatively, Brown continues, are as important as specific policies that favour capital, undermine organised labour, impede states from provisioning the basic needs of populations or erode national sovereignty.
By such means, a number of democratic fundaments have been attacked or undermined by neoliberal reasoning. Ironically, in many ways, what has unfolded in “actually existing neoliberalism” would appall the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Hayek, Friedman and the ordoliberals. While these founders sought to keep markets untouched by politics, to keep politics insulated from the emotional demands of the uneducated masses, and to avoid rent-seeking behaviour from capitalists, they nonetheless opposed other measures of what they decried as “social injustice". It is clear, then, that "actually existing neoliberalism” was nonetheless spawned by their dream.
In serving as a governing rationality, neoliberalism produces “reality principles” by which we live unreflectingly. Neoliberalism designates a distinctive kind of valorisation and liberation of capital, making economics the model of everything, in a process of economisation of democracy in particular and politics more generally.
The situation in 2017, in which the ground is set for a right-wing assault on democracy, has arisen through three decades of devaluing and diminishing democracy, and is preceded by the “hollowed-out” neoliberal democracy seen under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. This ground was tilled, Brown points out, by neoliberalism’s destruction of viable lives and futures for working-class and middle-class populations through the global outsourcing of jobs, the race to the bottom in wages and taxes, and the destruction of public goods, including education. It was also tilled by neoliberalism’s valorisation of markets and morals and its devaluation of democracy and politics, Constitutionalism and social justice, Brown adds.
In the USA, anti-neoliberal politics are present both in party politics and movement politics, as witnessed, for example, by the Bernie Sanders campaign, which was very much a product of the Occupy Wall Street movement. One of the hardest questions for the anti-neoliberal left, Brown concludes, is where should it take place: should this politics be local, national or global?
References
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Brown, W. and Hamburger, J. (2018). Wendy Brown: ‘Who is not a neoliberal today?’ Tocqueville21 Blog. Available from https://tocqueville21.com/interviews/wendy-brown-not-neoliberal-today/ [Accessed 21 January 2018].
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