“Wendy Brown vividly lays bare neoliberalism’s perverse rationality, the ‘economization of everything,’ documenting its corrosive consequences for public institutions, for solidaristic values, and for democracy itself. Costas Douzinas, Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and author of Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis After reading Brown, only bad faith can justify the toleration of neoliberalism.” The premier radical political philosopher of our time offers a devastating critique of the way neoliberalism has hollowed out democracy.

“This is a book for the age of resistance, for the occupiers of the squares, for the generation of Occupy Wall Street. John Clarke, Professor Emeritus of Social Policy, The Open University Tracing its antipolitical and antidemocratic impulses, she challenges us to defend and extend the possibilities of a popular politics that makes the promises of democracy come true.” “With this passionately incisive critique of neoliberal (ir)rationality, Wendy Brown delineates the political stakes of the present. Undoing the Demos is a much-needed, passionate defense of political autonomy.” “A trenchant critique of the piecemeal neoliberal destruction of democratic politics by one of the most powerful political theorists of our time. “Essential reading not only for academics but for anyone concerned with our collective political future.” - Pop Matters Undoing the Demos makes clear that, far from being the lodestar of the twenty-first century, a future for democracy depends upon it becoming an object of struggle and rethinking. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. In an original and compelling theoretical argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Radical democratic dreams may not either.

Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations.

The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital concerns with justice cede 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. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In vivid detail, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. Neoliberal rationality - ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture - remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus.

Undoing the demos