Political power takes its shape from a distinct rationality, not from social structures

Evidence

The political is inescapably concerned with plotting coordinates of justice and order, but also with security, ecology, exigency, and emergency. Distinctive forms of power—whether legal or decisionist, shared or autocratic, rogue or legitimate and accountable—are the signatures of the political, but it is specific forms of reason that give it shape in any time and place. The powers of the political are generated by the (bare) community that it convenes, but not in the methodical, traceable fashion that labor is thought by Marxists to generate surplus value. Nor are we talking about superstructure; the political is not a mere reflection of social powers, a stage on which “the real struggles” of civil society are played out. Rather, political power always materializes and is given shape by a distinct rationality, a form of reason and its occlusions, a set of norms and its generative effects. — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 92

Categorization

• DEFINE: Brown defines ‘the political’ against ‘politics’ and against Marxian superstructure thinking, giving it a distinct conceptual content drawn largely from Foucault.
• XREF: connects to: Neoliberalism’s blindness to politics deformed its institutional project — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 142; Ideologies are not what is shaped at power’s base; Power cannot self-realize but depends on societal-structural conditions for legitimacy (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Ideologies are not what is shaped at power’s base #corroborates (0.85)
• Political theories are forms determined by social content, not freely chosen options. #contradicts (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 580
• Power cannot self-realize but depends on societal-structural conditions for legitimacy #contradicts (0.82)
• Political rationality originates outside the state yet organizes and conditions it. #expands (0.80) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 223
• Ideas, not vested interests, ultimately shape political possibility. #expands (0.78) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 136
• Social background shapes politics only through its influence on psychological predispositions #qualifies (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1159