The most quoted example of this is the line from Thatcher – society does not exist, only the individual and families exist. One of the things about neoliberalism – as opposed to classical liberalism – is that it undermines notions of democracy.
At some stage I am going to have to track down these lectures, but not now. In these lectures, it seems he not only identified the likely path of development of neoliberalism, but also spent quite a bit of time criticising contemporary Marxist ideas concerning the then current state of capitalism. One of the last things Foucault did was to present a series of lectures on neoliberalism to the Collège De France in 1979 – quite something, since neoliberalism was hardly ‘a thing’ at the time. It is essentially a review of neoliberalism from the perspective of Foucault. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.Ī friend of mine suggested I read this book – I’m not sure I would have found it otherwise.
Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. In an original and compelling argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Radical democratic dreams may not either. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital concerns with justice bow to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation equality dissolves into market competition and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. Neoliberal rationality - ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture - remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus.
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