The state’s remaking on a firm model erases public scandal at its market-serving role

Evidence

The success of neoliberal rationality in remaking citizenship and the subject is indexed by the lack of a scandalized response to the state’s new role in prioritizing, serving, and propping a supposedly free-market economy. The economization of everything and every sphere, including political life, desensitizes us to the bold contradiction between an allegedly free-market economy and a state now wholly in service to and controlled by it. As the state itself is privatized, enfolded, and animated by market rationality in all of its own functions, and as its legitimacy increasingly rests in facilitating, rescuing, or steering the economy, it is measured as any other firm would be. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of the neoliberal transformation of the state is that it is remade on the model of the firm while compelled to serve and facilitate an economy it is not supposed to touch, let alone to challenge. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 68

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core paradox — a state remodeled as a firm while formally barred from touching the market — is the kind of terse, paradigm-level tension that rewards rereading.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s notion of biopolitics and the state as enterprise, and to the reader’s democratic theory work on how state legitimacy reorients. — connects to: The market replaced law as the source of state truth and legitimacy — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 98

Broader Connections

• The market replaced law as the source of state truth and legitimacy #corroborates (0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 98