Wendy Brown has produced a diagnosis of our times; Undoing the Demos offers a synthetic analysis all too rare in contemporary publishing-a book that aims for the big picture without losing meticulous care for the details and nuanced argument. Brown's strategy in the book is to focus on Michel Foucault's 1978–1979 College de France lectures that, as Brown points out, travel under the misleading title “The Birth of Biopolitics.” The subject of these 12 lectures is Foucault's articulation of an emerging form of governance or rationality—that which he calls neoliberalism. Brown begins with these lectures, and then seeks to extend them into a diagnosis of our times asserting that, “[T]he norms and principles of neoliberal rationality do not dictate precise economic policy, but rather set out novel ways of conceiving and relating state, society, economy, and subject and also inaugurate a new ‘economization’ of heretofore noneconomic spheres and endeavors” (p. 50). Foucault labeled neoliberalism a form of rationality as opposed to mere market orientation, even before its existence as an economic doctrine was clearly established. Brown builds on Foucault's lectures and paints a picture of neoliberalism in broad strokes in the first half of the book. The second half of the book takes three different areas—law, higher education, and modes of governance—and demonstrates how neoliberal rationality has been articulated in these areas and to what impact.
Brown's narrative will not surprise any leftist readers, but the pressing question is whether her analysis adds anything new to the significant corpus of academic writing that dissects our neoliberal ailments. In this, Brown's focus on the systemic dismantling of democratic citizenship, political life, and consciousness as a space outside of economic production is wise. One of the most effective segments of the text is Brown's masterful survey of the history of political thought in Chapter Three, and the variety of ways that theorists from Aristotle to Arendt related and separated the political and economic spheres of human activity. Like many leftist political theorists, I had been long accustomed to reviling classical liberalism, taking my cues from Marx's “On the Jewish Question.” Here, Brown helps us see how liberalism maintained some protections against the full scale colonization of politics by the market, and even as social contract theory provided the essential counterpart to the development of modern capitalism, it also advocated for the protection of at least certain individuals as having inherent worth and dignity. How far we have fallen. Now everyone is subject to the same withering assessment of her present and future capital. Anyone who does not take personal responsibility to maximize his productivity is potentially dispensable. Neoliberalism does not extend classical liberalism, it upends it.
Knowing that this cold logic pervades every aspect of our existence will not be news to anyone who is on a university campus and is now asked to articulate the “value added” of their curricular offerings. The Obama College Scorecard will potentially replace U.S. News and World Report ratings as the primary method by which market logic is used to value, rank, and determine the survival of educational institutions in the United States. Brown's chapter on neoliberalism in higher education, “Educating Human Capital” is a sure way of firing up her likely audience, showing that we cannot hide under our dusty books and think that our privilege makes us immune to the pressures that beset everyone.
For readers of Law and Society Review, Brown's close reading of Kennedy's decision in Citizens United will be of particular interest. While the ramifications of the ruling for campaign finance are immediately apparent and have received a lot of attention, Brown takes the collapse of the political campaign into corporate strategy as her starting, not ending point. She details Kennedy's logic, including his imagination of free speech circulating like commodities in a marketplace. The more speech there is, the more dynamic the market, and the more choices consumers have. Remarkably, Kennedy sees government regulation of speech as inherently damaging. Brown emphasizes, “Kennedy sets the power of speech and the power of government in direct and zero-sum-game opposition to one another. Repeatedly across the lengthy opinion for the majority, he identifies speech with freedom and government with control, censorship, paternalism, and repression” (p. 160).
Since I suspect many of her readers will have already accepted Brown's description of neoliberalism, the very pressing question is what is to be done. And here is where there may be a curious disjunction between her analysis of neoliberal hegemony and her point that we desperately need to revive, protect, and fight for our common political existence. Take for example, Brown's excellent discussion of the language of “best practices” and “benchmarks” and “governance”. This is a form of management that tries to eliminate the pushback against hierarchies by putting everyone in “teams”; it focuses on proper procedures instead of equitable outcomes; it sets performance goals rather than overt dictates. “Together these replacements also vanquish a vocabulary of power, and hence power's visibility, from the lives and venues that governance organizes and directs” (p. 129). These techniques of governance make it ever more difficult to have adversaries, take positions, and assert ideologies—the essential ingredients of political life. Yet the analysis of neoliberal hegemony, paradoxically, also makes accomplishing these things difficult.
After all, neoliberalism is everywhere, yet distinct in its different appearances. Neoliberalism is evolving, particular and plastic. Are those who participate in neoliberalism, like the teacher who has performance goals for herself and hence her students, guilty in the same way as Milton Friedman? Do banks originate or participate in neoliberal rationality? If we all participate in these systems, who exactly is my adversary? I am ready to go to the fight, but do not know where it is being held. This is why I found the most valuable part of her argument the articulation of other models of balancing politics and economics. Brown uses the tradition of political theory to remind us that there needs to be spaces outside of the market, a space for interior life and a space for collective determination of values that transcend mere survival. Arendt's The Human Condition was also generated by a concern that these two areas of human expression and freedom were becoming lost. It is a sad state of affairs when leftists could hoist Aristotle as an inspiration for radical politics.
And while the book is extremely current, I wished I could find out what Brown would think of the unexpected popularity of the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Somehow Kennedy's argument that the government is the enemy of the people is not resonating with a significant portion of the American electorate who thinks the state should take a much more active role in the economy and do things like provide free higher education. Perhaps the language of public good is not entirely gone after all. There are glimmers of hope on the landscape, but also real volatility. It could be that neoliberal rationality is a tool of prosperous and relatively peaceful times even if the plenty and calm is not evenly distributed. Neoliberalism has thus far fed upon insecurity, but there may be a point where it cannot pretend to have the answers if insecurity keeps accelerating. If we take the long view of politics as Brown's book enables us to do, it may be that we will be forced to rediscover the necessity of politics in even uglier circumstances than we currently inhabit.
