Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Book reviewed:
Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution,
Wendy Brown (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2015), 296 pp., ISBN: 978-1935408536
Abstract
In Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Wendy
Brown argues that neo-liberalism has undermined democracy in a hitherto
unprecedented form. To be specific, neo-liberalism has undermined what is
at the heart of democracy: popular sovereignty, the demos – it has, in a
word, undone the demos and, hence, democracy. Analysing neo-liberalism
and its relationship to democracy, Brown draws on the works of Michel
Foucault and Karl Marx. The exchange here between the three reviewers –
Mitchell Dean, Alen Toplišek and Anne Barron – and Wendy Brown focuses
on a number of issues: the use and usefulness of Michel Foucault’s notion of
governmentality and Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism for analysing neo-
liberalism; the way that neoliberalism ‘economises’ everything including
politics and democracy; the nature of the state and of sovereignty, and how
the left should relate to these; and the nature of critique in its different
forms (Kantian, Foucauldian, Marxist and others). These are issues that are
important not only for the specific argument of Undoing the Demos, but
more generally for social and political theory today.
ver the past decades, Wendy neo-liberalism and democracy. Her cen-
ome years ago, I was inspired be a very satisfying job, which I imagine
1 For etymology throughout, I have used the Online Etymological Dictionary, www.etyomonline.com, and
cross-referenced the Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com.
References
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Note
1 Contemporary tendencies in the transformation of political rule are discussed under headings such as
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response
wendy brown
Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, University of California,
Berkeley, College of Letters & Science, 210 Barrows Hall #1950, Berkeley,
CA 94720-1950, USA