CRSP/RCPS VOL 78 2019: Book Review
Book Review Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. By Wendy Brown. New York: Zone Books, 2015. 292 pages. ISBN: 978-1-935408-54-3.
Reviewed by: Heidi Zhang PhD candidate, School of Social Work, York University
Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution is an insightful study that seeks to interrogate the political ideology known as neoliberalism as a particular form of reason that transforms all domains of life, including democracy's constituent elements in contemporary times. I posit that this book is valuable and illuminating for scholars and practitioners invested in critical and social justice-oriented social work; it offers a theoretically rich entry point into examining the features of neoliberalism and its pervasiveness. This book provides a critical analysis of the effects of neoliberal mentality and how its various manifestations infiltrate and shape how we practice social work, as well as what counts as social work knowledge. Practitioners are increasingly trained to assess and locate risk and moral deficit, and to problematize the populations that they work with in the name of helping (Rossiter, 2001). As neoliberal rationality has infiltrated social work and guided its values such as the heightened importance given to professionalization, accountability, and self-responsibilization, it becomes ever more crucial to study how the profession has been eroded and altered to pursue an economic priority. Brown's extended analysis goes beyond addressing the economic disparities between the haves and have nots, articulating how the constitution of the neoliberal subject as a purely economic subject came to be. Brown's critique of neoliberalism is valuable for critical social workers and scholars to become familiar with if we wish to destabilize and unsettle the “soft power” (p.35) that neoliberal knowledge production governs through, allowing us to interrogate its extensions within social work practice, research, and advocacy. Brown constructs her arguments of neoliberalism as political rationality by drawing theoretical connections to Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality. In chapter one, Brown engages in a careful reading of Foucault's idea of economic rationality while asserting that it is not her aim to examine the destructive forces of the free market or to focus on elites and the rich. Rather, Brown is interested in looking at neoliberalism's political reasoning. Brown traces how neoliberalism's rapid growth in the contemporary political landscape has produced the state in a distinctively economic sense – the economy as a model, object, and project for the state. Drawing on Foucault's ideas on neoliberalism from his 1978-1979 lectures at the Collège de France, neoliberalism is situated as “a distinctive mode of reason, of the production of subjects, a 'conduct of conduct', and a scheme of valuation” (p.21). Brown speaks to concerns that neoliberalism, when understood as a particular mode of reasoning, has been extended into all Canadian Review of Social Policy/RCPS 78 2018
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