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Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution. Brown Wendy . Cambridge, MA : The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press 2015. 296p. $29.95
The Politics of Advanced Capitalism. Edited by Beramendi Pablo , Häusermann Silja , Kitschelt Herbert and Kriesi Hanspieter . New York : Cambridge University Press 2015. 472p. $94.99 cloth, $39.99 paper.
Book Reviews: Comparative Politics
Both of these books look to explain recent and ongoing transformations of capitalism (although Brown, like Michel Foucault, is wary of the term capitalism); however, they reach different conclusions and draw on different theories. This presents a challenge for the reviewer, but an interesting one--to use the arguments and presuppositions of each book to rub the other against the grain, and see what sparks ignite.
Wendy Brown's book is part of an ongoing conversation on the left about the implications of neo-liberalism for democracy. The book is written both with and against Foucault--with Foucault in that it adopts much of his characteristic mode of inquiry, and further develops his fragmentary thoughts on neo-liberalism; and against Foucault, in that it is far more specifically and directly critical of neo-liberalism than Foucault was, and grounds its critique in a qualified defense of the institutions of liberal democracy and society. Brown is elegiac for the liberal institutions that she believes we are losing, not because she herself is a liberal, but because she sees these institutions as accommodating more radical modes of inquiry. For example, she laments how universities have difficulty in recruiting students who are interested in discovering their true passions through a liberal arts education. In a world where neo-liberalism sets the rules, students cannot easily afford to think about their passions, since they instead have to focus on competing with other students for scarce jobs and opportunities.
For Brown then, neo-liberalism 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). The 'every dimension' part of that formulation is important--for Brown, much of what is objectionable about neo-liberalism lies in its totalizing tendencies, to extend and insinuate itself into areas such as politics and education. It is not so much the logic behind the...