undoing the undoing of the demos
Wendy BROWN, Undoing the Demos. Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York, Zone Books, 2015)
Reviewing Wendy Brown is a humbling task. Undoing the Demos pulls together a masterful expos e of Michel Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism; an incisive review of the changing relationship between homo economicus and homo politicus in political theory; and an analysis of neoliberalism in action, framed by the now ubiquitous vocabulary of governance, benchmarks, or best practices, and finally by the economization of all institutions, most prominently the law, culture and higher education. The core argument throughout is that the institutionalization of neoliberal rationality constitutes a grave political threat. For all its celebration of freedom, neoliberalism expresses no need to guarantee the kinds of freedoms we normally associate with democracy. In fact, we only need to guarantee market freedom and the rest will follow. What replaces democratic politics is thus the economic argument that the market always knows best. In other words, the neoliberal regime is stripping the popular “demos” from its moral authority, replacing it with the authority of efficiency and the best bang for the buck. And thus the core institutions of capitalism and the state have been redesigned to facilitate what Korey C xalis xkan and Michel Callon [2009]1 call “the economization of everything”—that is, the processes by which individuals are aligned with the demands of the system and become socially, culturally, physically and psychologically efficient. Homo economicus is everywhere, and homo politicus is nowhere to be found. Undoing the Demos is beautifully crafted and deeply generative for anyone working on this topic, and in many ways I could just leave it at that. Read it! Every word and every page is worth your time. But the job of a book reviewer is to critically engage its object. And so in this spirit I have one quibble, one criticism, and one regret. The quibble concerns the strange invisibility of the neoliberals themselves in this narrative. The criticism has to do with the limited engagement with neo-liberalism on its own terms, both on the social front (the failure to explore new forms of neoliberal social organization) and on the 1 Cxalisxkan Korey and Michel Callon 2009. “Economization, Part I: Shifting Attention from the Economy toward Processes of
Economization”, Economy and Society, 38 (3): 369-398.
453 Marion Fourcade, University of California, Berkeley [fourcade@berkeley.edu] European Journal of Sociology, 57, 3 (2016), pp. 453–459—0003-9756/16/0000-900$07.50per art + $0.10 per page ªEuropean Journal of Sociology 2016. doi: 10.1017/S0003975616000187
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 136.152.208.214, on 19 Jan 2017 at 02:13:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975616000187