In The Ruins Of Neoliberalism (the Rise Of Antidemocratic Politics In The West)

By (author) Brown, Wendy
Short description/annotation:
Wendy Brown explains the hard-right turn in Western politics. She argues that 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.
Description:
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.
Table of contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Society Must Be Dismantled
2. Politics Must Be Dethroned
3. The Personal, Protected Sphere Must Be Extended
4. Speaking Wedding Cakes and Praying Pregnancy Centers: Religious Liberty and Free Speech in Neoliberal Jurisprudence
5. No Future for White Men: Nihilism, Fatalism, and Ressentiment
Notes
Index
Review quote:
Wendy Brown is the great radical theorist of democracy of our time, in the grand tradition of Sheldon Wolin. This book is the best treatment we have of the aftermath of the high moments of our neoliberal age and the descent into antidemocratic darkness. Yet Brown''s profound analysis and mature vision give us a glimmer of hope!
Review quote:
In this fascinating book, Wendy Brown demonstrates that neoliberal rationality, more than merely economistic in spirit, also contains a reactionary moralism. The two elements dovetail in curtailing every form of equality. This has devastating effects, as we can observe in the world from Trump to Bolsonaro to Erdogan.
Review quote:
Wendy Brown is our most astute and far-reaching political anatomist. Here, she deepens and revises her prior, influential excavations of neoliberal reason, demonstrating how the global resurgence of far-right authoritarianism, white nationalism, and neofascism is less a reaction to economic distress or a return of repressed hatreds than a political mutation born of a long, steady corrosion of social capacities, public goods, democratic subjectivities, and information ecologies. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism exposes a novel and deadly symbiosis of neoliberal policy and reactionary politics in our time; in doing so, it provides essential orientation for all of us working to salvage democratic politics.
Review quote:
Brown attends to the perceived puzzles of neoliberalism that have baffled other analysts and solves them outright. In t