Universa. Recensioni di filosofia Anno V, Vol. 2 (2016)
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Zone Books, 2015, pp. 296, $ 29.95, ISBN 9781935408536 Valentina Moro, Università degli Studi di Padova Wendy Brown is one of the most celebrated American political theorists, and with good reason. She is also a major voice defending the public demonstrations against the privatization of the University of California. In her works, she has critically analysed neoliberal rationality from multiple perspectives: as a feminist, an educator, a philosopher. In Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, as a political theory work, Brown attempts to embrace all of these perspectives to highlight the ubiquity of neoliberal rationality today. Her work aims to produce a radical critique, while engaging with an eminent reference, among others: Michel Foucault and his critical analysis of governmentality in the 1978-1979 lectures at the Collège de France, published as The Birth of Biopolitics. Brown’s urgent claim is that neoliberalism is not just an extension of liberalism as a form of economic rationality. Instead, it is an order of normative reason, politically performative both in silently altering all major features of democracy (institutions, political practices, values) and in strongly conditioning individual conduct. Insofar as all the institutions, the concepts and the collective and individual actors belonging to the public democratic frame have already undergone a process of economization, Brown primarily aims to “challenge commonplace notions that democracy is the permanent achievement of the West and therefore cannot be lost” (p.10). The book is divided into two parts. In the first, the author points out what neoliberalism is (“an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life”, p.30) and introduces her political critique against the dissemination of the model of the market. In the second, she explains how neoliberal reason is disseminated through an administrative and political form (namely, governance), the law, and education. In chapter 1, Brown reclaims Plato’s homology between city and soul to highlight how neoliberal reason has increasingly shaped