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 In the Ruins of Neoliberalism written by Wendy Brown and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 264 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 Undoing the Demos written by Wendy Brown and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-02-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures. 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 Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. 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. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either. 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. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.
Download or read book States of Injury written by Wendy Brown and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark work from one of our leading political theorists A sympathetic critique that attempts to free Left politics from its own snares, States of Injury explores how woundedness became a basis for contemporary political identity. Without condemning identity politics, Wendy Brown carefully probes the varied historical forces generating them today and the ways these formative conditions constrain emancipatory desire. Along the way, she advances a novel feminist critical theory of liberalism and the liberal democratic state. She also develops an original theoretical practice that weaves together Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Foucault, and cultural theories of gender and race to analyze contemporary political predicaments.
Download or read book The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born written by Nancy Fraser and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neoliberalism is fracturing, but what will emerge in its wake? The global political, ecological, economic, and social breakdown—symbolized by Trump’s election—has destroyed faith that neoliberal capitalism is beneficial to the majority. Nancy Fraser explores how this faith was built through the late twentieth century by balancing two central tenets: recognition (who deserves rights) and distribution (who deserves income). When these begin to fray, new forms of outsider populist politics emerge on the left and the right. These, Fraser argues, are symptoms of the larger crisis of hegemony for neoliberalism, a moment when, as Gramsci had it, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” In an accompanying interview with Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara, Fraser argues that we now have the opportunity to build progressive populism into an emancipatory social force.
Download or read book Globalists written by Quinn Slobodian and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Louis Beer Prize Winner Wallace K. Ferguson Prize Finalist A Marginal Revolution Book of the Year “A groundbreaking contribution...Intellectual history at its best.” —Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level. It was a project that changed the world, but was also undermined time and again by the relentless change and social injustice that accompanied it. “Slobodian’s lucidly written intellectual history traces the ideas of a group of Western thinkers who sought to create, against a backdrop of anarchy, globally applicable economic rules. Their attempt, it turns out, succeeded all too well.” —Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg Opinion “Fascinating, innovative...Slobodian has underlined the profound conservatism of the first generation of neoliberals and their fundamental hostility to democracy.” —Adam Tooze, Dissent “The definitive history of neoliberalism as a political project.” —Boston Review
Download or read book Family Values written by Melinda Cooper and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged — and at the limit enforced — as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.
Download or read book Politics Out of History written by Wendy Brown and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens to left and liberal political orientations when faith in progress is broken, when both the sovereign individual and sovereign states seem tenuous, when desire seems as likely to seek punishment as freedom, when all political conviction is revealed as contingent and subjective? Politics Out of History is animated by the question of how we navigate the contemporary political landscape when the traditional compass points of modernity have all but disappeared. Wendy Brown diagnoses a range of contemporary political tendencies--from moralistic high-handedness to low-lying political despair in politics, from the difficulty of formulating political alternatives to reproaches against theory in intellectual life--as the consequence of this disorientation. Politics Out of History also presents a provocative argument for a new approach to thinking about history--one that forsakes the idea that history has a purpose and treats it instead as a way of illuminating openings in the present by, for example, identifying the haunting and constraining effects of past injustices unresolved. Brown also argues for a revitalized relationship between intellectual and political life, one that cultivates the autonomy of each while promoting their interlocutory potential. This book will be essential reading for all who find the trajectories of contemporary liberal democracies bewildering and are willing to engage readings of a range of thinkers--Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Benjamin, Derrida--to rethink democratic possibility in our time.
Download or read book A Brief History of Neoliberalism written by David Harvey and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-01-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Its spread has depended upon a reconstitution of state powers such that privatization, finance, and market processes are emphasized. State interventions in the economy are minimized, while the obligations of the state to provide for the welfare of its citizens are diminished. David Harvey, author of 'The New Imperialism' and 'The Condition of Postmodernity', here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. While Thatcher and Reagan are often cited as primary authors of this neoliberal turn, Harvey shows how a complex of forces, from Chile to China and from New York City to Mexico City, have also played their part. In addition he explores the continuities and contrasts between neoliberalism of the Clinton sort and the recent turn towards neoconservative imperialism of George W. Bush. Finally, through critical engagement with this history, Harvey constructs a framework not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
Download or read book The Limits of Neoliberalism written by William Davies and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2016-11-16 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliant...explains how the rhetoric of competition has invaded almost every domain of our existence." —Evgeny Morozov, author of To Save Everything, Click Here" "In this fascinating book Davies inverts the conventional neoliberal practice of treating politics as if it were mere epiphenomenon of market theory, demonstrating that their version of economics is far better understood as the pursuit of politics by other means." —Professor Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame "A sparkling, original, and provocative analysis of neoliberalism. It offers a distinctive account of the diverse, sometimes contradictory, conventions and justifications that lend authority to the extension of the spirit of competitiveness to all spheres of social life...This book breaks new ground, offers new modes of critique, and points to post-neoliberal futures." —Professor Bob Jessop, University of Lancaster Since its intellectual inception in the 1930s and its political emergence in the 1970s, neo-liberalism has sought to disenchant politics by replacing it with economics. This agenda-setting text examines the efforts and failures of economic experts to make government and public life amenable to measurement, and to re-model society and state in terms of competition. In particular, it explores the practical use of economic techniques and conventions by policy-makers, politicians, regulators and judges and how these practices are being adapted to the perceived failings of the neoliberal model. By picking apart the defining contradiction that arises from the conflation of economics and politics, this book asks: to what extent can economics provide government legitimacy? Now with a new preface from the author and a foreword by Aditya Chakrabortty.
Download or read book Neoliberal Reform in Machu Picchu written by Pellegrino A. Luciano and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Latin America completes its second decade of neoliberal reforms, Pellegrino A. Luciano takes readers on an ethnographic journey back to a moment of monumental social and economic change in Peru. In Neoliberal Reform in Machu Picchu, Luciano describes the privatization struggles and challenges of people living in the district of Machu Picchu, a heritage area and tourism destination, during the early 2000s. This Incan citadel became central to the Peruvian government’s neoliberal policies and efforts to project a new global image and attract foreign capital. Luciano analyzes the role of middle-class actors in consequence, resistance, and accommodation to these neoliberal changes. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, political science, economics, tourism studies, and history.
Download or read book The Political Theory of Neoliberalism written by Thomas Biebricher and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neoliberalism has become a dirty word. In political discourse, it stigmatizes a political opponent as a market fundamentalist; in academia, the concept is also mainly wielded by its critics, while those who might be seen as actual neoliberals deny its very existence. Yet the term remains necessary for understanding the varieties of capitalism across space and time. Arguing that neoliberalism is widely misunderstood when reduced to a doctrine of markets and economics alone, this book shows that it has a political dimension that we can reconstruct and critique. Recognizing the heterogeneities within and between both neoliberal theory and practice, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism looks to distinguish between the two as well as to theorize their relationship. By examining the views of state, democracy, science, and politics in the work of six major figures—Eucken, Röpke, Rüstow, Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan—it offers the first comprehensive account of the varieties of neoliberal political thought. Ordoliberal perspectives, in particular, emerge in a new light. Turning from abstract to concrete, the book also interprets recent neoliberal reforms of the European Union to offer a diagnosis of contemporary capitalism more generally. The latest economic crises hardly brought the neoliberal era to an end. Instead, as Thomas Biebricher shows, we are witnessing an authoritarian liberalism whose reign has only just begun.
Download or read book Mutant Neoliberalism written by William Callison and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tales of neoliberalism’s death are serially overstated. Following the financial crisis of 2008, neoliberalism was proclaimed a “zombie,” a disgraced ideology that staggered on like an undead monster. After the political ruptures of 2016, commentators were quick to announce “the end” of neoliberalism yet again, pointing to both the global rise of far-right forces and the reinvigoration of democratic socialist politics. But do new political forces sound neoliberalism’s death knell or will they instead catalyze new mutations in its dynamic development? Mutant Neoliberalism brings together leading scholars of neoliberalism—political theorists, historians, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists—to rethink transformations in market rule and their relation to ongoing political ruptures. The chapters show how years of neoliberal governance, policy, and depoliticization created the conditions for thriving reactionary forces, while also reflecting on whether recent trends will challenge, reconfigure, or extend neoliberalism’s reach. The contributors reconsider neoliberalism’s relationship with its assumed adversaries and map mutations in financialized capitalism and governance across time and space—from Europe and the United States to China and India. Taken together, the volume recasts the stakes of contemporary debate and reorients critique and resistance within a rapidly changing landscape. Contributors: Étienne Balibar, Sören Brandes, Wendy Brown, Melinda Cooper, Julia Elyachar, Michel Feher, Megan Moodie, Christopher Newfield, Dieter Plehwe, Lisa Rofel, Leslie Salzinger, Quinn Slobodian
Download or read book A World of Insecurity written by Pranab Bardhan and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious account of the corrosion of liberal democracy in rich and poor countries alike, arguing that antidemocratic sentiment reflects fear of material and cultural loss, not a critique of liberalism’s failure to deliver equality, and suggesting possible ways out. The retreat of liberal democracy in the twenty-first century has been impossible to ignore. From Wisconsin to Warsaw, Budapest to Bangalore, the public is turning against pluralism and liberal institutions and instead professing unapologetic nationalism and majoritarianism. Critics of inequality argue that this is a predictable response to failures of capitalism and liberalism, but Pranab Bardhan, a development economist, sees things differently. The problem is not inequality but insecurity—financial and cultural. Bardhan notes that antidemocratic movements have taken root globally in a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic groups. In the United States, older, less-educated, rural populations have withdrawn from democracy. But in India, the prevailing Hindu Nationalists enjoy the support of educated, aspirational urban youth. And in Europe, antidemocratic populists firmly back the welfare state (but for nonimmigrants). What is consistent among antidemocrats is fear of losing what they have. That could be money but is most often national pride and culture and the comfort of tradition. A World of Insecurity argues for context-sensitive responses. Some, like universal basic income schemes, are better suited to poor countries. Others, like worker empowerment and international coordination, have broader appeal. But improving material security won’t be enough to sustain democracy. Nor, Bardhan writes, should we be tempted by the ultimately hollow lure of China’s authoritarian model. He urges liberals to adopt at least a grudging respect for fellow citizens’ local attachments. By affirming civic forms of community pride, we might hope to temper cultural anxieties before they become pathological.
Download or read book The Morals of the Market written by Jessica Whyte and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fatal embrace of human rights and neoliberalism Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to “civilisation”. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects.
Download or read book The Architecture of Neoliberalism written by Douglas Spencer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Architecture of Neoliberalism pursues an uncompromising critique of the neoliberal turn in contemporary architecture. This book reveals how a self-styled parametric and post-critical architecture serves mechanisms of control and compliance while promoting itself, at the same time, as progressive. Spencer's incisive analysis of the architecture and writings of figures such as Zaha Hadid, Patrik Schumacher, Rem Koolhaas, and Greg Lynn shows them to be in thrall to the same notions of liberty as are propounded in neoliberal thought. Analysing architectural projects in the fields of education, consumption and labour, The Architecture of Neoliberalism examines the part played by contemporary architecture in refashioning human subjects into the compliant figures - student-entrepreneurs, citizen-consumers and team-workers - requisite to the universal implementation of a form of existence devoted to market imperatives.
Download or read book The Neoliberal Diet written by Gerardo Otero and published by Univ of TX + ORM. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “remarkable, comprehensive” study of neoliberal agribusiness and the obesity epidemic “is critical reading for food studies scholars” (Contemporary Sociology). Obesity rates are rising across the United States and beyond. While some claim that people simply eat too much “energy-dense” food while exercising too little, The Neoliberal Diet argues that the issue is larger than individual lifestyle choices. Since the 1980s, the shift toward neoliberal regulation has enabled agribusiness multinationals to thrive by selling a combination of meat and highly processed foods loaded with refined flour and sugars—a diet that originated in the United States. Drawing on extensive empirical data, Gerardo Otero identifies the socioeconomic and political forces that created this diet, which has been exported around the globe at the expense of people’s health. Otero shows how state-level actions, particularly subsidies for big farms and agribusiness, have ensured the dominance of processed foods and made fresh foods inaccessible to many. Comparing agrifood performance across several nations, including the NAFTA region, and correlating food access to class inequality, he convincingly demonstrates the structural character of food production and the effect of inequality on individual food choices. Resolving the global obesity crisis, Otero concludes, lies not in blaming individuals but in creating state-level programs to reduce inequality and make healthier food accessible to all.
