Wendy Brown — Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution

228 published claims from this book.

• A bad ontology becomes the real when it governs the world’s institutions
• A life bound only to wealth production and accumulation is small and unrealized
• A shift from property-based to human-capital economy could diminish gender stratification.
• Adam Smith’s economic man arises from language, reason, and interdependence, not naked self-interest.
• Agamben’s bare life and Aristotle’s mere life are distinct concepts.
• Anthropologists hold that destruction of the victim defines sacrifice
• Aristotle recognized markets inevitably generate greed and tried to cap it
• Aristotle’s political anthropology was a hedge against economic determinism he himself enabled
• Austerity calls for sacrifice to the economy as an unreturned offering.
• Austerity transforms neoliberal rationality from freedom toward sacrifice.
• Austerity-era sacrifice drops the trickle-down promise that sacrifice would benefit the poor
• Austerity’s shared sacrifice redirects public rage away from banks.
• Balibar’s Equaliberty arrived too late for fuller treatment in this book.
• Benchmarking means copying the practices of industry leaders, not setting goals
• Best practices absorb political concerns into markets, eliminating the need for state interference.
• Best practices constitute a form of antipolitics that images politics itself as backwardness.
• Best practices diffuse across governance and business as a shared lingua franca.
• Best practices displace law yet also transform law itself as a Trojan horse.
• Best practices exemplify neoliberal governance’s soft power and antipolitics
• Best practices normalize existing market arrangements as the reality principle
• Both radical occupiers and police legitimacy invoke democracy’s open form
• Business schools are voluntarily privatizing by forgoing state funds for flexibility
• Capital shapes human worlds beyond its economic operations and aims
• Capital’s systemic imperatives cannot be reduced to economic rationality alone
• Capitalism governs through a technological rationality so pervasive that it no longer needs ideology
• Citizens United redefines influence as following the money and super PACS as independent speech
• Citizens United remakes the political subject as an economic one
• Citizens United turns neoliberal rationality into a constitutional hermeneutic governing law.
• Citizens United’s logical strain reveals a new set of meanings being crafted
• Claims that liberal arts education is outmoded presuppose democracy itself is outmoded
• Classical political economy presumed political sovereignty over economic activity.
• College graduate starting salaries stagnated after 2000 after booming in the 1990s
• College quality rankings now measure return on investment rather than education
• College worth is now judged almost solely by return on investment
• Competition’s logic makes inequality normative wherever it spreads.
• Congress has outsourced its policy expertise to well-funded corporate lobbyists.
• Contemporary homo oeconomicus has become financialized human capital
• Contemporary neoliberal subjects are subordinated to macroeconomic growth, not self-interest
• Corporate funders now seek direct control over university faculty hiring.
• Corporate political expenditures gained full free-speech protection in 2010
• Corporations are reframed as a disenfranchised minority deserving rights
• Correcting homo oeconomicus’s falsity leaves the governance question untouched
• Cost-cutting pressures shrink liberal arts offerings and undermine double majors
• Crises have not discredited neoliberal governance
• Crises of liberalism are not deducible from crises of capitalism.
• Democracy is not self-sustaining and may need undemocratic supplements.
• Democracy means only that the people rule, nothing more
• Democracy minimally requires popular authorization of laws and shared power
• Democracy must be deliberately cultivated rather than assumed natural.
• Democratic existence needs wealth limits, public-good citizenship, and discerning citizens
• Democratic institutions presuppose the civic spirit they are meant to create.
• Democratic liberty and equality cannot survive without an educated public
• Democratic social-justice programs reframed minority youth as investment opportunities.
• Devolved authority without resources is ghostly autonomy.
• Economic growth replaces all redistributive social policy under neoliberalism.
• Economic liberalism defines the political, collapsing the distinction between them
• Economic reason usurped political subjectivity only near the end of the twentieth century.
• Economics has replaced politics as the governing science of the state
• Economization and governance replace political contestation with managerial consensus.
• Economization displaces democratic self-rule and its supporting institutions.
• Economization has no fixed content across different political eras
• Economized liberty recasts political power as the enemy of freedom
• Economizing the principle of popular rule can finally kill democracy.
• Entrepreneurial and invested human capital coexist within the same contemporary subject.
• Even progressive political values get justified as drivers of economic growth
• Even Rousseau justifies democracy only negatively as non-violation
• Even welfare-expanding legislation retains a neoliberal institutional form
• Every dominant image of the human is defined against the possibilities it excludes
• Export-oriented monocrop farming traps debt-burdened farmers in spirals ending in suicide
• Exposing a term’s supplement can delegitimize its foundational status.
• Extreme wealth inequality makes common legislation impossible in a democracy
• Faculty have largely accepted the erosion of their university governing power
• Financialization shifts markets from calculation to speculation, destroying predictability
• For Aristotle, moral reflection and association-making generate human politicalness.
• Forcing decisions into open view with informed residents converts hopelessness into winning power
• Foucault frames neoliberalism as a remaking of liberal governmentality rather than an economic break
• Foucault ignored neoliberalism’s material politics and focused on its transformations of the subject
• Foucault saw homo oeconomicus as enabling, not resisting, governmental reason.
• Foucault’s account of neoliberalism missed its transnational and postnational dimensions
• Foucault’s anti-Marxism blinded him to capital as domination
• Foucault’s core break with Marx is epistemic containment, not method.
• Foucault’s lectures were not a neo-Marxist critique of neoliberalism
• Foucault’s neoliberalism lectures abandon his own genealogical method
• Foucault’s own method failed to track the popular dissemination of the rationality he theorized
• Foucault’s political coordinates cannot capture neoliberalism’s effects on democracy
• Four Supreme Court rulings dismantle organized popular power at every level
• Free seed aid functioned as a deliberate addiction trap for Iraqi farmers.
• Free-market economic theory now functions as the logic of judicial reasoning
• Freud figureds the psyche as a conquered city, a political image, not animal subjects.
• Gary Becker attributed the gender wage gap to married women’s unpaid housework responsibilities.
• Generalized competition makes failure and death matters of social principle.
• Generalizing liberal arts education was a radical democratic event preparing the many for freedom.
• Governance analytically displaces the state as the center of rule
• Governance as a noun signifies power detached from governing agents
• Governance by incentives and benchmarks replaces top-down law and rule
• Governance displaces the rule of law with business instruments
• Governance governs through anonymous processes rather than identifiable agents
• Governance now leads with metrics to produce the practices rather than measuring established ones.
• Governance only became neoliberalism’s administrative form after converging with it
• Governance replaces free subjects with managed, responsibilized ones
• Governance replaces justice and right with efficiency and efficacy.
• Governance vocabulary displaces the vocabulary of power from organized life.
• Hobbes rejected self-regarding individuals as the natural basis of the family, unlike modern economists.
• Homo politicus was almost always expressly male across Western political thought.
• Identifying citizens with corporations converts corporate power gaps into a shared cause to defend.
• India’s cotton farmers faced the same debt-driven corporate dependency as Iraq’s wheat farmers.
• Inequality and degraded public universities are mutually reinforcing
• Instrumental reason escapes its instrumental role to dominate society outright.
• Iraq’s post-invasion orders instituted a full neoliberal restructuring of the economy.
• Kennedy’s reasoning silently drops unfunded and weak voices from politics
• Legal rulings ended a century of class-action consumer protection
• Liberal arts education is the prerequisite for democratic rule itself
• Liberal arts mass education generalizes the leisured ruler’s freedom to all citizens
• Liberal democracy’s neutral ideals mask racial and gendered domination
• Liberal democracy’s separate discursive register enables it to critique capitalism.
• Liberalism was born from market governmentality rather than capital’s dominance
• Locke’s natural man is political and moral before property makes him self-interested.
• Market metrics weaken scholars’ capacity to defend the liberal arts
• Marketized public universities have no reason to fund research fields
• Marx repurposed Aristotle’s mere-life distinction as a liberation premise.
• Marx’s early critique centered on illusory political emancipation, not class exploitation.
• Marx’s predicted universalizing class never arrived to resolve global contradictions.
• Mass higher education was meant to cultivate knowingness and humility for democratic citizenship
• Middle-income families are being squeezed out of the University of California
• Modern governmentality rules populations at a distance rather than by command.
• Modernity’s ending is the loss of belief in human control over existence.
• Most vaunted democratic goods are not inherent to popular rule
• Neoliberal ‘individual freedom’ tacitly assumes a male breadwinner and unwaged domestic labor.
• Neoliberal citizenship permits being shed or sacrificed in austerity
• Neoliberal citizenship replaces battlefield sacrifice with silent endurance of economic suffering.
• Neoliberal competition is a constructed formal game, not a natural state.
• Neoliberal deregulation replaced social protection with credit and indebtedness
• Neoliberal freedom can be a vehicle for governance and domination
• Neoliberal governability extends beyond what Foucault imagined through maximum freedom
• Neoliberal governance fuses state and capital aims, swapping their traditional roles
• Neoliberal governance reshapes scholarship to serve economic usefulness
• Neoliberal homo oeconomicus dissolves the citizen-bourgeois split that defined liberal democratic political life.
• Neoliberal policy converts every human need, even bodily ones, into profit-making enterprises.
• Neoliberal rationality discursively erases stratification and power differences among speakers.
• Neoliberal rationality makes inequality normal and normative in democracy
• Neoliberal rationality reduces the very desire for democracy
• Neoliberal reason legitimates casting off labor that fails to aid macroeconomic growth.
• Neoliberal restructuring was imposed illegitimately and shielded from future democratic reversal.
• Neoliberal states shift the cost of reproducing human capital onto individuals
• Neoliberal university defenses of the humanities reduce them to building human capital.
• Neoliberal university governance subordinates academic freedom to institutional transactions
• Neoliberal values have displaced academic vocation’s traditional disinterest in money.
• Neoliberalism activates the state for the economy rather than withdrawing it.
• Neoliberalism arose precisely when democracy was declared triumphant.
• Neoliberalism claims to liberate while actually eroding political sovereignty
• Neoliberalism economizes justice, sovereignty, and the rule of law
• Neoliberalism emerged across the mid-twentieth century, not as a 1980s rebellion
• Neoliberalism extinguishes the political subject that critiques of capitalism presupposed
• Neoliberalism forces women into a double bind of either self-capitalization or invisibility
• Neoliberalism generalizes the economic form across the entire social field, unlike classical liberalism.
• Neoliberalism governs as a normative form of reason, not ideology or material force.
• Neoliberalism is a governing rationality that frames all life in market terms
• Neoliberalism is a governing rationality, not just economic policy or ideology.
• Neoliberalism is a mode of reason that is globally ubiquitous yet nonidentical with itself
• Neoliberalism is a normative mode of reason, not merely an economic policy set
• Neoliberalism is a reprogramming of liberal governmentality, not a reaction to capitalist crisis
• Neoliberalism makes competition rather than exchange the essence of the market
• Neoliberalism makes the enterprise the formative power of society, not merely an economic policy.
• Neoliberalism mirrors fascist elements through faceless rather than authoritarian power.
• Neoliberalism now governs through soft power and common sense, not force
• Neoliberalism operates through systematic contradiction and disavowal of its own practices
• Neoliberalism replaces natural self-interest with governed self-investment tied to macroeconomic growth.
• Neoliberalism reversed the state’s protective role toward shielding markets
• Neoliberalism suppresses both liberal and radical-democratic traditions.
• Neoliberalism swallows humanity through its form of valuation itself
• Neoliberalism transformed even the criteria for individual self-evaluation
• Neoliberalism was only emergent in Foucault’s time, not yet hegemonic
• Neoliberalism’s construction of persons and states is emptying out democratic principles publicly.
• Neoliberalism’s displacement of the political subject is historically unprecedented in the West.
• Neoliberalism’s intellectual history challenges the orthodox Marxist reading of it as a capitalist fix.
• Neoliberalism’s plasticity prevents treating its current Euro-Atlantic form as essential truth
• Online dating markets frame romance as return on affective investment
• Ordoliberals welcomed state intervention, unlike the Chicago School
• Participation without control over parameters is not democracy but its evisceration
• Piketty’s core inequality thesis is broadly accepted even where his remedies are contested.
• Political economy originally meant governing economically, not economy as government’s model.
• Political openings are precarious and require deliberate cultivation to survive
• Political rationality enables and legitimates governing instruments rather than serving them.
• Political rationality originates outside the state yet organizes and conditions it.
• Popular culture now heroicizes capital appreciation over developed and free citizens
• Postwar liberal thought treated economic interest as too crude a basis for democracy.
• Preventing the few from drowning out the many is anti-market
• Privatizing public goods shifts their cost disproportionately onto women
• Progressive aims are reframed through economic growth discourse
• Public discontent targets inequality but not the threat to democracy itself.
• Religious and political sacrifice differ as sacrificing ‘to’ versus ‘for’
• Responsibilized individuals remain disposable when economic exigencies require it
• Rousseau held that bounded wealth inequality is required for democratic law
• Rousseau held that unbridled self-interest produces self-enslavement and domination, not freedom.
• Sacrifice displaces a community’s internal violence onto an outside victim.
• Sixty-five percent of recent US income growth went to the top one percent
• Some scholars argue the term neoliberalism has become analytically useless.
• State-capital imbrication without compensation avoids the predicted legitimation crisis.
• Thatcher saw economics as a means to change national culture
• The “end of history” moment produced civilizational despair rather than triumph.
• The distinction between intentional and compelled sacrifice fails for holy war
• The economy as a distinct objective domain emerged only in the mid-twentieth century
• The economy functions as model, object, and project of neoliberal state rationality.
• The figure of homo oeconomicus changes shape across centuries
• The identity of the demos was contested even in ancient Athens
• The liberal arts originated as an education exclusive to free men, not the many.
• The liberal subject of right derives from state sovereignty, not natural drives.
• The market replaced law as the source of state truth and legitimacy
• The market’s veridiction closes the political universe by erasing alternatives to economic rationality.
• The neoliberal state governs for the market, not because of it.
• The neoliberal subject must constantly self-invest across all life domains
• The ordoliberal art of government seeks an enterprise society, not a supermarket one.
• The political rationality framing extends Foucault beyond what he himself wrote
• The public-versus-private debate reduces citizens to investors and consumers
• The rhetoric of shared sacrifice operates ideologically without requiring belief
• The state becomes responsible for growth it cannot control or offset.
• The state’s remaking on a firm model erases public scandal at its market-serving role
• The University of California grew tenfold in enrollment across seven decades
• Too big to fail has the complement too small to protect
• Too-big-to-fail bank concentration worsened after the 2008 crisis
• Traditional seed-saving produced over 200,000 wheat varieties over nine millennia.
• Under Ordoliberalism the state itself is defined and supervised by the market.
• Universities aggressively recruit federally funded students as revenue sources
• US education officials framed college rating by comparing higher education to consumer appliances.
• Value-neutral technique claims foreclose contestation over norms and ends.
• Voters function merely as a medium for corporate political influence
• War and sanctions created the crisis that opened farmers to corporate dependence.
• When everything is capital, labor and class become illegible categories