Wendy Brown — In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West

32 published claims from this book.

• Academic contestation over a concept’s definition does not negate its world-making power
• Conscience operates as inward self-cruelty, not mere restraint
• Crisis pregnancy centers deliberately disguise their antiabortion mission to lure clients
• Crisis pregnancy centers impersonate abortion clinics to intercept their clients
• Crisis pregnancy centers operate through deception and misinformation
• Everyday tiered pricing makes modern society subjectively feudal
• Expanding the personal protected sphere lets tradition recolonize formerly democratic space
• Free speech claims now undermine most democratically enacted regulation.
• Goodhart divides politics into rooted somewheres and rootless anywheres
• Hayek defines coercion so narrowly that only self-serving constraint counts
• Hayek faulted conservatives for embracing coercion when used for their purposes
• Hayek makes private property, gender norms, and tradition supervenient over government
• Hayek rejects sovereignty as a false theological concept
• Hayek roots markets and morals in one ontology of spontaneously evolved tradition
• Hayek’s frame pairs liberalism against totalitarianism, not authoritarianism
• Hayekian freedom means coercion-free endeavor within tradition, not emancipation from norms
• Neoliberal globalization crashed white working-class fortunes in the Global North
• Neoliberalism’s blindness to politics deformed its institutional project
• Neoliberalism’s defeat of its own aims produced states yanked by capital and popular zeal
• Neoliberalism’s founding intellectuals aimed to immunize markets against fascism
• Nihilism frees the will from the very values meant to discipline it
• Nihilism is value-unmooring, not value-absence, dissolving truth and fake news distinctions
• Patriotism as love of tradition makes racial-justice protest read as unpatriotic
• Political power takes its shape from a distinct rationality, not from social structures
• Schmitt derives contrasting civilizations and ethics from land versus sea
• The EU’s democratic deficit is intrinsic to its ordoliberal design
• The ordos invented the economic constitution to secure market liberalism politically
• The Right’s liberal-and-traditionalist mix is coherent in Hayek’s doctrine
• The wedding cake, not the baker, is held to speak
• Trump’s conduct consecrates the white male supremacy entrenched in traditional values
• Universal suffrage in capitalist states inevitably produces social-democratic majorities
• Unmoored values lose force but persist as fungible instruments