Download or read book Critical Theory Democracy and the Challenge of Neoliberalism written by Brian Caterino and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using ideas derived from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, this book develops key elements of a radical theory of democracy that challenges both the assumptions and commitments of contemporary neo-liberalism.

Download or read book Critical Theory Democracy and the Challenge of Neoliberalism written by Brian Caterino and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a few exceptions, critical theorists have been late to provide a comprehensive diagnosis of neoliberalism comparable in scope to their extensive analyses of advanced welfare state capitalism. Instead, the main lines of critical theory have focused on questions of international justice which, while no doubt significant, restrict the scope of critical theory by deemphasizing linkages to larger political and economic conditions. Providing a critique of the Frankfurt School, Brian Caterino and Phillip Hansen move beyond its foundations, and call for a rethinking of the bases of critical theory as a practical, freedom-creating project. Outlining a resurgence of neoliberalism, the authors encourage a fresh, nuanced analysis that elucidates its political and economic structures and demonstrates the threats to freedom and democracy that neoliberalism poses. They propose the reformulation of a radical democratic alternative to neoliberalism, one that critically addresses its limitations while promoting an enhancement of communicative and social freedom.

Download or read book Critical Theory in Critical Times written by Penelope Deutscher and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in critical times. We face a global crisis in economics and finance, a global ecological crisis, and a constant barrage of international disputes. Perhaps most dishearteningly, there seems to be little faith in our ability to address such difficult problems. However, there is also a more positive sense in which these are critical times. The world's current state of flux gives us a unique window of opportunity for shaping a new international order that will allow us to cope with current and future global crises. In Critical Theory in Critical Times, eleven of the most distinguished critical theorists offer new perspectives on recent crises and transformations of the global political and economic order. Essays from Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Cristina Lafont, Rainer Forst, Wendy Brown, Christoph Menke, Nancy Fraser, Rahel Jaeggi, Amy Allen, Penelope Deutscher, and Charles Mills address pressing issues including international human rights and democratic sovereignty, global neoliberalism, novel approaches to the critique of capitalism, critical theory's Eurocentric heritage, and new directions offered by critical race theory and postcolonial studies. Sharpening the conceptual tools of critical theory, the contributors to Critical Theory in Critical Times reveal new ways of expanding the diverse traditions of the Frankfurt School in response to some of the most urgent and important challenges of our times.

Download or read book Power Neoliberalism and the Reinvention of Politics written by Amy Allen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-08-08 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wendy Brown is one of the most prolific and influential political theorists of her generation. This collection of essays, designed for the undergraduate classroom, presents an introduction to and critical assessment of Brown’s substantial body of work, with a particular focus on her contributions to the tradition of critical theory. Coeditors Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta provide an overview of Brown’s work, situating her scholarship in relation to some of the major thinkers and methodologies of the Frankfurt School. Brown opens the discussion with a new essay expounding upon the meaning of freedom and the prospects for emancipation in our current political moment. Subsequent chapters address different aspects of Brown’s corpus, including her early feminist interpretation of the history of political theory, her influential critiques of identity politics and progressive philosophies of history, and her recent interrogation of the rise of neoliberalism and the resurgence of authoritarian politics. The volume concludes with Brown’s response to her critics, where she clarifies and expands upon the implications of her core ideas. In addition to Brown and the editors, the contributors to this volume include Robin Celikates, Loren Goldman, Asad Haider, Robyn Marasco, and Johanna Oksala.

Download or read book In the Ruins of Neoliberalism written by Wendy Brown and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring? In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism’s multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works of the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Wendy Brown traces the ambition to replace democratic orders with ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality and democratic states with technocratic ones. Yet plutocracy, white supremacy, politicized mass affect, indifference to truth, and extreme social disinhibition were no part of the neoliberal vision. Brown theorizes their unintentional spurring by neoliberal reason, from its attack on the value of society and its fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality. Above all, she argues, neoliberalism’s intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white male supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which this supremacy disappears.

Download or read book Authoritarianism written by Wendy Brown and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-11-08 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three distinguished scholars draw on critical theory to address the causes and circumstances behind the rise of autocracies and oligarchies. Across the Euro-Atlantic world, political leaders have been mobilizing their bases with nativism, racism, xenophobia, and paeans to “traditional values,” in brazen bids for electoral support. How are we to understand this move to the mainstream of political policies and platforms that lurked only on the far fringes through most of the postwar era? Does it herald a new wave of authoritarianism? Is liberal democracy itself in crisis? In this volume, three distinguished scholars draw on critical theory to address our current predicament. Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky share a conviction that critical theory retains the power to illuminate the forces producing the current political constellation as well as possible paths away from it. Brown explains how “freedom” has become a rallying cry for manifestly un-emancipatory movements; Gordon dismantles the idea that fascism is rooted in the susceptible psychology of individual citizens and reflects instead on the broader cultural and historical circumstances that lend it force; and Pensky brings together the unlikely pair of Tocqueville and Adorno to explore how democracies can buckle under internal pressure. These incisive essays do not seek to smooth over the irrationality of the contemporary world, and they do not offer the false comforts of an easy return to liberal democratic values. Rather, the three authors draw on their deep engagements with nineteenth—and twentieth—century thought to investigate the historical and political contradictions that have brought about this moment, offering fiery and urgent responses to the demands of the day. “A brilliant and urgent assessment of democracy’s current crisis and capitalism’s increasing authoritarianism. . . . a profound diagnosis of this moment’s political ills.” —Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It's Gone

Download or read book Critique in a Neoliberal Age written by Pauline Johnson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-06 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critique in a Neoliberal Age brings a critique of ideology to main debates within economic sociology, populism studies, the neoliberal university, therapy culture, contemporary intimacies and feminism. Over the last decades, neoliberalism has worked to lift social protections and political regulations from the market and to identify modernity with capitalism itself. It has also engaged in an ideological project to screen alternative measurements of progress. Liberal and social democracy have been effectively disabled as grounds for weighing the costs of neoliberal predations. This volume examines the strategies through which neoliberalism has reconstituted and de-politicized liberal precepts such as universal justice, private right and a social democratic project responsive to needs. As such it will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and social and critical theory, political and social philosophy, politics, cultural studies and feminist thought.

Download or read book Undoing the Demos written by Wendy Brown and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-20 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neoliberal rationality — ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture — remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In vivid detail, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice cede 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. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either. In an original and compelling theoretical argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that, far from being the lodestar of the twenty-first century, a future for democracy depends upon it becoming an object of struggle and rethinking.

Download or read book Negativity and Democracy written by Vasilis Grollios and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current political climate of uncompromising neoliberalism means that the need to study the logic of our culture—that is, the logic of the capitalist system—is compelling. Providing a rich philosophical analysis of democracy from a negative, non-identity, dialectical perspective, Vasilis Grollios encourages the reader not to think of democracy as a call for a more effective domination of the people or as a demand for the replacement of the elite that currently holds power. In doing so, he aspires to fill in a gap in the literature by offering an out-of-the-mainstream overview of the key concepts of totality, negativity, fetishization, contradiction, identity thinking, dialectics and corporeal materialism as they have been employed by the major thinkers of the critical theory tradition: Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Bloch and Holloway. Their thinking had the following common keywords: contradiction, fetishism as a process and the notion of spell and all its implications. The author makes an innovative attempt to bring these concepts to light in terms of their practical relevance for contemporary democratic theory.

Download or read book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies written by Jodi Dean and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-02 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies is an impassioned call for the realization of a progressive left politics in the United States. Through an assessment of the ideologies underlying contemporary political culture, Jodi Dean takes the left to task for its capitulations to conservatives and its failure to take responsibility for the extensive neoliberalization implemented during the Clinton presidency. She argues that the left’s ability to develop and defend a collective vision of equality and solidarity has been undermined by the ascendance of “communicative capitalism,” a constellation of consumerism, the privileging of the self over group interests, and the embrace of the language of victimization. As Dean explains, communicative capitalism is enabled and exacerbated by the Web and other networked communications media, which reduce political energies to the registration of opinion and the transmission of feelings. The result is a psychotic politics where certainty displaces credibility and the circulation of intense feeling trumps the exchange of reason. Dean’s critique ranges from her argument that the term democracy has become a meaningless cipher invoked by the left and right alike to an analysis of the fantasy of free trade underlying neoliberalism, and from an examination of new theories of sovereignty advanced by politicians and left academics to a look at the changing meanings of “evil” in the speeches of U.S. presidents since the mid-twentieth century. She emphasizes the futility of a politics enacted by individuals determined not to offend anyone, and she examines questions of truth, knowledge, and power in relation to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Dean insists that any reestablishment of a vital and purposeful left politics will require shedding the mantle of victimization, confronting the marriage of neoliberalism and democracy, and mobilizing different terms to represent political strategies and goals.

Download or read book The Condition of Democracy written by Jürgen Mackert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-12 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent years have seen contestations of democracy all around the globe. Democracy is challenged as a political as well as a normative term, and as a form of governance. Against the background of neoliberal transformation, populist mobilization, and xenophobic exclusion, but also of radical and emancipatory democratic projects, this collection offers a variety of critical and challenging perspectives on the condition of democracy in the 21st century. The volumes provide theoretical and empirical enquiries into the meaning and practice of liberal democracy, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the consequences for citizenship and everyday lives. With a pronounced focus on national and transnational politics and processes, as well as postcolonial and settler colonial contexts, individual contributions scrutinize the role of democratic societies, ideals, and ideologies of liberal democracy within global power geometries. By employing the multiple meanings of The Condition of Democracy, the collection addresses the preconditions of democratic rule, the state this form of governance is in, and the changing ways in which citizens can (still) act as the sovereign in liberal democratic societies. The books offer both challenging theoretical perspectives and rigorous empirical findings of how to conceive of democracy in our times, which will appeal to academics and students in social and political science, economics, and international relations amongst other fields. The focus on developments in the Middle East and North Africa will furthermore be of great usefulness to academics and the wider public interested in the repercussions of western democracy promotion as well as in contemporary struggles for democratization ‘from below’. During the last 50 years, liberal democracies have been exposed to a fundamental reorganization of their politico-economic structure that transformed them through the impact of neo-liberal economic doctrines focused on low taxation, free markets, and out-sourcing that have little regard in reality for democratic institutions or liberal values. The failures of the neoliberal ‘remedy’ for capitalism are now dramatically obvious through the banking crisis of 2008-2011, the increase in income inequality, the social and psychological damage caused by the austerity packages across Europe, and widespread dependence on experts whose influence over government policies typically goes without public scrutiny. While this has only accelerated the destruction of the social fabric in modern Western societies, the dramatic redistribution of wealth and an open 'politics for the rich' have also revealed the long-time well-covered alliance of the global oligarchy with the Far Right that has the effect of undermining democracy. The contributions to this volume discuss a wide variety of processes of transformation, the social consequences, dedemocratization and illiberalization of once liberal democracies through the destructive impact of neoliberal strategies. These strongly politico-economic contributions are complemented with general sociological analyses of a number of cultural aspects often neglected in analyses of democracy.

Download or read book Adorno and Neoliberalism written by Charles A. Prusik and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to investigate the relevance of Theodor W. Adorno's work for theorizing the age of neoliberal capitalism. Through an engagement with Adorno's critical theory of society, Charles Prusik advances a novel approach to understanding the origins and development of neoliberalism. Offering a corrective to critics who define neoliberalism as an economic or political doctrine, Prusik argues that Adorno's dialectical theory of society can provide the basis for explaining the illusions and forms of domination that structure contemporary life. Prusik explains the importance of Marx's critique of commodity fetishism in shaping Adorno's work and focuses on the related concepts of exchange, ideology, and natural history as powerful tools for grasping the present. Through an engagement with the ideas of neoliberal economic theory, Adorno and Neoliberalism criticizes the naturalization of capitalist institutions, social relations, ideology, and cultural forms. Revealing its origins in the crises of the Fordist period, Prusik develops Adorno's analyses of class, exploitation, monopoly, and reification to situate neoliberal policies as belonging to the fundamental antagonisms of capitalist society.

Download or read book Neoliberalism written by Alfredo Saad-Filho and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2005-02-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading writer Boris Kagarlitsky offers an ambitious account of 1000 years of Russian history.

Download or read book Liberal Democracy in Crisis written by Alen Toplišek and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-12 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book rethinks resistance against neoliberalism in the context of the crisis of Western liberal democracy and the rise of new radical left parties in Europe. Drawing upon a wide range of methodological approaches in contemporary political and social theory, it explores how the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis represents the opening of possibilities for resistance and examines the structural hurdles facing radical politics in effectively challenging neoliberalism. The author challenges the dominant conceptions of democratic politics by critically interrogating the role of liberalism in the depoliticisation of governing and the neoliberal restructuring of the democratic role of the state. The trajectory of new radical left parties in Slovenia, Greece and Spain is used to demonstrate the need to overcome the binary divide between institutional politics and resistance in radical political theory and practice.

Download or read book A Political Economy of the Senses written by Anita Chari and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anita Chari revives the concept of reification from Marx and the Frankfurt School to spotlight the resistance to neoliberal capitalism now forming at the level of political economy and at the more sensate, experiential level of subjective transformation. Reading art by Oliver Ressler, Zanny Begg, Claire Fontaine, Jason Lazarus, and Mika Rottenberg, as well as the politics of Occupy Wall Street, Chari identifies practices through which artists and activists have challenged neoliberalism's social and political logics, exposing its inherent tensions and contradictions.

Download or read book Edgework written by Wendy Brown and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edgework brings together seven of Wendy Brown's most provocative recent essays in political and cultural theory. They range from explorations of politics post-9/11 to critical reflections on the academic norms governing feminist studies and political theory. Edgework is also concerned with the intellectual and political value of critique itself. It renders contemporary the ancient jurisprudential meaning of critique as krisis, in which a tear in the fabric of justice becomes the occasion of a public sifting or thoughtfulness, the development of criteria for judgment, and the inauguration of political renewal or restoration. Each essay probes a contemporary problem--the charge of being unpatriotic for dissenting from U.S. foreign policy, the erosion of liberal democracy by neoliberal political rationality, feminism's loss of a revolutionary horizon--and seeks to grasp the intellectual impasse the problem signals as well as the political incitement it may harbor.

Download or read book The Decline of Public Access and Neo Liberal Media Regimes written by Brian Caterino and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the reasons behind the declining fortunes of public access channels. Public access, which provided perhaps the boldest experiment in popular media democracy, is in steep decline. While some have argued it is technologically outmoded, Caterino argues that the real reason lies with the rise of a neo-liberal media regime. This regime creates a climate in which we can understand these changes. This book considers the role of neo-liberalism in transforming notions of public obligations and regulation of media that have impacted non-profit media, specifically public access. Neo-liberalism has tried to eliminate public forums and public discourse and weakens institutions of civil society. Though social media is often championed as an arena of communicative freedom, Caterino argues that neo-liberalism has created a colonized social media environment that severely limits popular democracy.