Undoing the Demos

Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures. Neoliberal rationality-ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture-remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either.In an original and compelling argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.

“Political theorist Wendy Brown opens her brilliant and incisive new book, Undoing the Demos , with a clarion call: Western democracy is imperiled. According to Brown, democracy has grown gaunt as a consequence of an ascendant political rationality that, like an ideological autoimmune disorder, has assaulted its very fiber and future...Democracy is the crux of the issue...and by focusing on how it's been diminished Brown has written a book that deserves to be widely read.”

Political theorist Wendy Brown opens her brilliant and incisive new book, Undoing the Demos, with a clarion call: Western democracy is imperiled. According to Brown, democracy has grown gaunt as a consequence of an ascendant political rationality that, like an ideological autoimmune disorder, has assaulted its very fiber and future…Democracy is the crux of the issue…and by focusing on how it's been diminished Brown has written a book that deserves to be widely read.

In her important new book Undoing the Demos  (2015), Wendy Brown draws attention to the ways in which neoliberalism, like original sin, finds a home in the deepest core of our being. For Brown, that core is not the soul but democratic citizenship: our sense of belonging in a common world that we can govern together with others. In the era of neoliberalism, she writes, we are forced to translate ourselves into the inhuman idiom of entrepreneurial competitiveness, rendering our entire lives legible in the ruthless grammar of market competition.

Brown's book is theoretical yet accessible…essential reading not only for academics but for anyone concerned with our collective political future, and with the defense of democratic politics.

Draws important empirical and analytical connections between Foucault's analytical approach to governmentality and a complementary Marxist critique of the material inequality that follows from neoliberal market reforms…[and] shows how such developments are reinforced by widespread acceptance of the concept of human capital.

Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Chair of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Rhetoric and the Critical Theory Program and the author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Zone Books).

Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures.Neoliberal rationality-ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture-remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either.In an original and compelling argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.

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