I’ve been reading through Wendy Brown’s new book on neoliberalism in the last couple of weeks, and I’d like to jot down some thoughts on it here (hopefully in prelude to a genuine review essay further along the road).

Brown’s book gets exactly right the nature of the transformation of both states and individuals in neoliberalism into self-standing entrepreneurial units forced to compete for investment funds with other such units. This is described as the eclipse of homo politicus by the all-encompassing neoliberal figure of homo economicus. Neoliberalism, Brown argues, literally swallows the space of the demos, the democratic space in which people gather to articulate common concerns around freedom, equality, and sovereignty. Our problem is not merely (!) the wasting away of public goods, public values and public participation. It is the evisceration of the very space in which it is possible to come together and form a public, the space that, for Brown, Aristotle (and Arendt) distinguish as different from ‘mere life’, and which Marx conceived as the ‘true realm of freedom’. Neoliberalism, Brown states, in a sentence that captures a dawning awareness of where things now stand, is ‘the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity’ (p. 44).

An important passage in the book distinguishes Brown’s reading of Neoliberalism from other possibilities:

In contrast with an understanding of neoliberalism as a set of state policies, a phase of capitalism, or an ideology that set loose the market to restore profitability for a capitalist class, I join Michel Foucault and others in conceiving neoliberalism as 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).

Subsequently, Brown clarifies that, for Foucault, ‘political rationalities are world-changing, hegemonic orders of normative reason, generative of subjects, markets, states, law, jurisprudence, and their relations’ (p. 121). I am concerned to ask here whether this way of conceiving neoliberalism actually serves to obscure more than it answers. A crucial question that arises here, and which Brown herself asks, is ‘How does the distinctive form of reason that is neoliberalism become a governing rationality saturating the practices of ordinary institutions and discourses of everyday life?’ (p. 35). One way to tell this story would be to tell of a struggle among social groups, involving shifting class alignments and the capacity of different factions to capture the levers of economic and political power. Brown’s Foucauldian frame, however, turns this vital, social-historical-cultural question into a purely technical question of the implementation of ‘specific techniques of governance’. All of the interesting questions disappear, to be replaced by merely technical questions about how certain procedures and strategies are implemented. ‘Of course’, Brown assures us, ‘there are dust-ups, including protests and political altercations with police….’(p.35), but these social events seem to be irrelevant to the subterranean workings of the rationality, which continues to bring new subjects into beings regardless of what is happening on the social surface. I now want to describe a number of areas where I think the framing of neoliberalism as a political rationality in this way is deleterious to understanding its social history.

1. The claim that ‘the state itself is legitimated by economic growth’ (p.68) is supposed to distinguish the neoliberal regime from its predecessor. But it is unclear to me how it does so. Brown is aware that, if the neoliberal state were to be judged by its commitment to economic growth, it would be judged a resounding failure (p. 26). Neoliberalism has proved (by design) far more successful in restoring rates of profit than it has in generating growth. But in any case, this focus seems to obscure the social and historical continuity between neoliberalism and its predecessor regime. Brown writes that neoliberal states depart from liberal ones in a triple sense: ‘The state secures, advances, and props the economy; the state’s purpose is to facilitate the economy, and the state’s legitimacy is linked to the growth of the economy’.

One could only take this to be a departure from the postwar, Keynesian compromise by way of an exceedingly rosy and unrealistic reading of the political ambitions of the latter. Whatever moral qualities the Keynesian compromise may have had originally were gradually whittled away in the postwar period until it was pretty clear that there was nothing left but a commitment to economic growth as the sole means to remedy social problems and produce an equitable division of social resources. This argument is explicit in J.K. Galbraith’s seminal 1958 work, The Affluent Society. As Lizabeth Cohen argues in A Consumer’s Republic, the sole public responsibility that was urged of Americans in the postwar period was couched in terms of their responsibilities as consumers to spend money and thereby generate economic growth. Mass consumption and economic growth allowed postwar elites to pursue liberal goals without fundamentally challenging the class-stratified and capital-dominated social order. The postwar period brought about the very weakening of democratic habits and commitments that was the condition of possibility of neoliberalism’s eventual victory.  In short, there is far more continuity between neoliberalism and its predecessor than Brown’s account allows for.

2. I have a deeper reservation about Brown’s description of neoliberal policies as implemented through ‘techniques of governance’. I accept the point that neoliberalism has depended on ‘soft power’ as much as hard, punitive power (although there’s plenty of the latter, too). But it seems to me that what these descriptions of techniques are really describing are the downstream effects of ongoing class conflict. Changes in modes of governance, best practices, etc. happen when social struggle generates a shift in class alignments, necessitating the development of new modes of power. This means that Foucauldian readings of shifts in techniques of governance are really describing the secondary effects of shifting class configurations whose logic and history lies outside the scope of whatever counts as ‘governance’. I want to illustrate what I mean here with two examples:

a) One of the major techniques of neoliberalism’s political rationality, according to Brown, is devolution. She argues incisively that devolution is really about sending problems ‘down the pipeline to small and weak units unable to cope with them technically, politically, or financially’ (p. 132). She notes that her own university system, the University of California system, decided to devolve responsibility for paying employee benefits to academic departments several years ago. The result, she claims, ‘incentivized’ departments to hire ever larger numbers of part-time academic and office staff who do not qualify for benefits.

The problem here is that it describes the end result of a class realignment in Academia as though it were entirely the product of the technique used to implement it. ‘Devolution’ can only work as a political strategy to ‘responsibilize’ academic departments once the governance role of faculty has been comprehensively replace by the administrative university. The AAUP’s 2014-15 Annual Report, ‘Losing Focus’, exhaustively documents this class shift, through the disproportionate growth in both the salaries, budgets, and the sheer numbers of administrative employees. According to the report, ‘disproportionate salaries at the top also reflect the abandonment of centuries-old models of shared campus governance which have increasingly been replaced by more corporate managerial approaches that emphasize the “bottom line”’. Universities have been restructured as corporate entities with corporate-style managers. This has seriously weakened the capacity of university faculty to resist the capture of wealth and resources at the top of the hierarchy. What I am describing here is the social history of the conflict that has made devolution a powerful tool of the exercise of class power within Universities. It makes no sense, as I see it, to emphasize the mere technique, and to miss the broader history of class struggle that explains how and why that technique works.

b) Another area where ‘governance’ looks distinctly like the mere after-effect of successful class insurgency is in the restructuring of corporations in the neoliberal era. This is linked to Brown’s treatment of financialization, which is one weakest aspects of this book. Finance capital and financialization, Brown asserts, ‘bring about a new model of economic conduct’ for nonfinancial firms (p. 34). But, again, unless one is content with the language of a new political rationality ‘generating’ new subjects and institutions to do its bidding, it is very difficult to be satisfied with this explanation. Again, the result is simply to describe the social history of class conflict in terms of neutral, political technique. What, exactly, is involved in the dominance of finance over productive capital?

The ‘economization’ of American corporations was carried out by way of a political struggle within corporations, resulting in a shift in class alignment. As J.W. Mason has argued, this conflict resulted in a restructuring of the firm. From a ‘managerial’ model, where firms were ruled by a professional class of managers, political conflict resulted in the emergence of the ‘rentier dominated firm’, whose primary purpose is not investment and growth, but rather returning wealth to the alleged ‘owners’ of corporations, viz. shareholders (http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/disgorge-the-cash/). The power shift that led to the dominance of the rentier model occurred in the 1980s, when corporations and their ‘fat, dumb and happy’ managers were being disciplined by the use of hostile takeovers, the point and purpose of which was to compel managers to run corporations strictly in the interests of shareholders. As Dumenil and Levy argue in The Crisis of Neoliberalism, the result was a shift in class alignment, in which senior managers have been pulled into an alliance with the owners of capital, leaving the popular classes exposed to countless rounds of cost saving and job cutting. Hidden in this social history is the answer to Brown’s question: ‘How does the distinctive form of reason that is neoliberalism become a governing rationality saturating the practices of ordinary institutions and discourses of everyday life?’ (p. 35). Instead, we are left with the unsatisfying sense that governmental techniques somehow themselves create the disparities in wealth and power, i.e. the class configurations, which are the condition of possibility of their operation. Only once managers have been disciplined by hostile takeovers, once laws have been rewritten to empower shareholders, and once workers have been disciplined by high unemployment and the withdrawal of the supports of citizenship, in other words, only when social struggle has (temporarily) run its course, does it become possible to speak of a ‘new model of economic conduct’.

3) There is another sense in which the failure to understand neoliberalism’s ‘incubation’ in the postwar period hurts the explanatory power of Brown’s account. The depiction of neoliberal rationality as imposed from above by way of techniques of governance gives little scope for Brown to address the question of why neoliberalism is, in some quarters, actually quite popular. Why do voters vote for austerity? Why do they cheer along when public unions are attacked? We do not learn much here about how neoliberalism is experienced as meaningful by individuals themselves. This is where, I think, the specific way in which neoliberalism has ‘undone’ the demos requires an understanding of the social and political conflicts that marked its genesis in the crisis period of the late-sixties to early nineteen-eighties.

The notion of the ‘demos’ and associated notions of citizenship and rights were the subject of constant contestation in the postwar period. The civil rights movement, subsequent disputes over ERA (the Equal Rights Amendment), abortion, and rights for gays and lesbians, all raised the question of the scope and limits of the demos. Far from being simply assumed, the demos was the object of fierce contestation in the postwar period.

The demands to enlarge and expand the demos coming from the left, and to write those expansions into the definition of the rights of citizenship, were aggressively opposed and eventually (partially) defeated by a unifying and strengthening conservative movement. The eventual political victory of conservative family values and what Robert O. Self, in All in the Family, calls ‘breadwinner conservativism’ (as distinguished from New Deal ‘breadwinner liberalism’), is an essential part of the story of how neoliberalism came to make sense in the lives of ordinary citizens. It was breadwinner conservatism, Self argues, that ‘legitimated the transition to a neoliberal ethos in American life’ (p.399). Conflict over the demos, as Self’s study shows, is at the heart of the cultural politics of neoliberalism. And it continues to be so to this day, as demonstrated by the continual conflict over the rights and status of undocumented immigrants, the efforts to strip rights from felons, the recent conflict over expanding marriage rights, and the ongoing opposition of religious groups to LGBT rights. Brown’s description of neoliberal ‘responsibilization’ as a technique for burdening the entity at the end of the pipeline does not capture the strong moral undertone that this idea has acquired through its origins in breadwinner conservatism.

What all this amounts to, I suggest, is that the demos was not dismantled by a stealth form of normative reason that swooped in to take an iron grip on the polity. The postwar liberal vision of the demos was rather directly rejected by a conservative movement that realized its vision of family values could only succeed by crippling the capacity of the state to enshrine, extend and guarantee the rights of citizenship to its citizens. Once reframed in this way, it was clear that rights, implying state obligations, would have to give way to free market orthodoxy. Here again, it is impossible to understand neoliberalism without understanding the history of social and political conflict through which it emerged. The rejection of the demos was not a stealth product of neoliberal rationality, it was rather a specific response to a situation of social struggle that portrayed expansive liberalism as damaging the nation.

To understand the demos’ ‘undoing’, then, it is necessary to delve into the social and political history of postwar conflict. What Brown calls ‘neoliberal reason’ and its typical techniques of governance, are then simply ways of describing the results of that conflict in technical and politically neutral terms.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).