Neoliberalism's Demons
Neoliberalism's Demons

Author: Adam Kotsko

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2018-09-04

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1503607135

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“Adam Kotsko’s premise—that the devil and the neoliberal subject can only ever choose their own damnation—is as original as it is breathtaking.” —James Martel, author of Anarchist Prophets By both its supporters and detractors, neoliberalism is usually considered an economic policy agenda. Neoliberalism’s Demons argues that it is much more than that: a complete worldview, neoliberalism presents the competitive marketplace as the model for true human flourishing. And it has enjoyed great success: from the struggle for “global competitiveness” on the world stage down to our individual practices of self-branding and social networking, neoliberalism has transformed every aspect of our shared social life. The book explores the sources of neoliberalism’s remarkable success and the roots of its current decline. Neoliberalism’s appeal is its promise of freedom in the form of unfettered free choice. But that freedom is a trap: we have just enough freedom to be accountable for our failings, but not enough to create genuine change. If we choose rightly, we ratify our own exploitation. And if we choose wrongly, we are consigned to the outer darkness—and then demonized as the cause of social ills. By tracing the political and theological roots of the neoliberal concept of freedom, Adam Kotsko offers a fresh perspective, one that emphasizes the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality. More than that, he accounts for the rise of right-wing populism, arguing that, far from breaking with the neoliberal model, it actually doubles down on neoliberalism’s most destructive features. “One of the most compelling critical analyses of neoliberalism I’ve yet encountered, understood holistically as an economic agenda, a moral vision, and a state mission.” —Peter Hallward, author of Badiou

Undoing the Demos
Undoing the Demos

Author: Wendy Brown

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2015-02-13

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1935408704

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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.

Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism

Author: Damien Cahill

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-08-31

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0745695566

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For over three decades neoliberalism has been the dominant economic ideology. While it may have emerged relatively unscathed from the global financial crisis of 2007-8, neoliberalism is now - more than ever - under scrutiny from critics who argue that it has failed to live up to its promises, creating instead an increasingly unequal and insecure world. This book offers a nuanced and probing analysis of the meaning and practical application of neoliberalism today, separating myth from reality. Drawing on examples such as the growth of finance, the role of corporate power and the rise of workfare, the book advances a balanced but distinctive perspective on neoliberalism as involving the interaction of ideas, material economic change and political transformations. It interrogates claims about the impending death of neoliberalism and considers the sources of its resilience in the current climate of political disenchantment and economic austerity. Clearly and accessibly written, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars across the social sciences.

Consuming Life
Consuming Life

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-05-08

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 0745655823

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With the advent of liquid modernity, the society of producers is transformed into a society of consumers. In this new consumer society, individuals become simultaneously the promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote. They are, at one and the same time, the merchandise and the marketer, the goods and the travelling salespeople. They all inhabit the same social space that is customarily described by the term the market. The test they need to pass in order to acquire the social prizes they covet requires them to recast themselves as products capable of drawing attention to themselves. This subtle and pervasive transformation of consumers into commodities is the most important feature of the society of consumers. It is the hidden truth, the deepest and most closely guarded secret, of the consumer society in which we now live. In this new book Zygmunt Bauman examines the impact of consumerist attitudes and patterns of conduct on various apparently unconnected aspects of social life politics and democracy, social divisions and stratification, communities and partnerships, identity building, the production and use of knowledge, and value preferences. The invasion and colonization of the web of human relations by the worldviews and behavioural patterns inspired and shaped by commodity markets, and the sources of resentment, dissent and occasional resistance to the occupying forces, are the central themes of this brilliant new book by one of the worlds most original and insightful social thinkers.

The Prince of This World
The Prince of This World

Author: Adam Kotsko

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2016-10-26

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1503600211

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“Kotsko goes beyond the biography of an icon to a provocative investigation of the devil’s many lives and effects in cultural and political ideologies.” —Laurel C. Schneider, author of Beyond Monotheism The most enduring challenge to traditional monotheism is the problem of evil, which attempts to reconcile three incompatible propositions: God is all-good, God is all-powerful, and evil happens. The Prince of This World traces the story of one of the most influential attempts to square this circle: the offloading of responsibility for evil onto one of God’s rebellious creatures. In this striking reexamination, the devil’s story is bitterly ironic, full of tragic reversals. He emerges as a theological symbol who helps oppressed communities cope with the trauma of unjust persecution, torture, and death at the hands of political authorities and eventually becomes a vehicle to justify oppression at the hands of Christian rulers. And he evolves alongside the biblical God, who at first presents himself as the liberator of the oppressed but ends up a cruel ruler who delights in the infliction of suffering on his friends and enemies alike. In other words, this is the story of how God becomes the devil—a devil who remains with us in our ostensibly secular age. “This diabolically gripping genealogy offers a stunning parable of western politics religious and secular. It tracks as has never been done before the dramatic shifts of the relation between God and the Devil—conflict, rivalry, game of mirrors, fusion. With the ironic wisdom of a postmodern Beatrice, Kotsko guides us through the sequence of hells that leads to our own.” —Catherine Keller, author of On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process

The Political Theory of Neoliberalism
The Political Theory of Neoliberalism

Author: Thomas Biebricher

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-02-19

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1503607836

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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.

Foucault and Neoliberalism
Foucault and Neoliberalism

Author: Daniel Zamora

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-01-06

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 1509501800

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Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left. However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called new philosophers? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism? This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.

Realm of Lesser Evil
Realm of Lesser Evil

Author: Jean-Claude Michea

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2009-07-27

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 0745646212

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Winston Churchill said of democracy that it was ‘the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ The same could be said of liberalism. While liberalism displays an unfailing optimism with regard to the capacity of human beings to make themselves ‘masters and possessors of nature’, it displays a profound pessimism when it comes to appreciating their moral capacity to build a decent world for themselves. As Michea shows, the roots of this pessimism lie in the idea – an eminently modern one – that the desire to establish the reign of the Good lies at the origin of all the ills besetting the human race. Liberalism’s critique of the ‘tyranny of the Good’ naturally had its costs. It created a view of modern politics as a purely negative art – that of defining the least bad society possible. It is in this sense that liberalism has to be understood, and understands itself, as the ‘politics of lesser evil’. And yet while liberalism set out to be a realism without illusions, today liberalism presents itself as something else. With its celebration of the market among other things, contemporary liberalism has taken over some of the features of its oldest enemy. By unravelling the logic that lies at the heart of the liberal project, Michea is able to shed fresh light on one of the key ideas that have shaped the civilization of the West.

Karl Polanyi
Karl Polanyi

Author: Gareth Dale

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2010-06-21

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0745640710

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Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century ‘market fundamentalism’ it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi’s daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own published and unpublished writings in English and German. This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thinking will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current economic crisis.

Crisis
Crisis

Author: Sylvia Walby

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-10-30

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 150950320X

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We are living in a time of crisis which has cascaded through society. Financial crisis has led to an economic crisis of recession and unemployment; an ensuing fiscal crisis over government deficits and austerity has led to a political crisis which threatens to become a democratic crisis. Borne unevenly, the effects of the crisis are exacerbating class and gender inequalities. Rival interpretations – a focus on ‘austerity’ and reduction in welfare spending versus a focus on ‘financial crisis’ and democratic regulation of finance – are used to justify radically diverse policies for the distribution of resources and strategies for economic growth, and contested gender relations lie at the heart of these debates. The future consequences of the crisis depend upon whether there is a deepening of democratic institutions, including in the European Union. Sylvia Walby offers an alternative framework within which to theorize crisis, drawing on complexity science and situating this within the wider field of study of risk, disaster and catastrophe. In doing so, she offers a critique and revision of the social science needed to understand the crisis.