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.


목차

Preface

NEOLIBERAL REASON AND POLITICAL LIFE

I Undoing Democracy:
  Neoliberalism's Remaking of State and Subject

II Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics Lectures:
  Charting Neoliberal Political Rationality

III Revising Foucault:
   Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus

DISSEMINATING NEOLIBERAL REASON

IV Political Rationality and Governance

V  Law and Legal Reason

VI Educationg Human Capital

Epilogue: Losing Bare Democracy
and the Invention of Freedom into Sacrifice

Notes

Index