A Characterization Of Neoliberalism From Wendy Brown

I have been reading Brown (2015). She acknowledges neoliberalism is difficult to define:

"Three decades out, rich accounts by geographers, economists, political theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and historians grappling with these questions have established that neoliberalism is neither singular nor constant in its discursive formulations and material practices. This recognition exceeds the idea that a clumsy or inapt name is draped over a busy multiplicity; rather neoliberalism as economic policy, modality of governance, and order of reason is at once a global phenomenon, yet inconstant, morphing, differentiated, unsystematic, contradictory, and impure, what Stuart Hall calls a 'field of oscillations' or Jamie Peck calls 'unruly historical geographies of an evolving interconnected project.' Neoliberalism is a specific and normative mode of reason, of the production of the subject, 'conduct of conduct,' and scheme of valuation, yet in its differential instantiations and encounters with extant cultures and political traditions, it takes diverse shapes and spawns diverse content and normative details, even different idioms.

Thus the paradox of neoliberalism as a global phenomenon, ubiquitous and omnipresent, yet disunified and nonidentical with itself. This dappled, striated, and flickering complexion is also the face of an order replete with contradiction and disavowal, structuring markers it claims to liberate from structure, intensely governing subjects it claims to free from government, strengthening and retasking states it claims to abjure. In the economic realm, neoliberalism aims simultaneously at deregulation and control. It carries purpose and has its own futurology (and futures markets), while eschewing planning. It seeks to privatize every public enterprise, yet valorizes public-private partnerships that imbue the market with ethical potential and social responsibility and the public realm with market metrics. With its ambition for unregulated and untaxed capital flows, it undermines national sovereignty while intensifying preoccupation with national GNP, GDP, and other growth indicators in national and postnational constellations."

Brown's emphasis is on how neoliberalism remakes the self. Under neoliberalism, people are all regarded as independent entrepreneurs, each trying to increase their human capital. This conception extends to areas that do not necessarily have anything to do with money. How much time should invest in relationships? What best practices should parents adopt in raising their children?

This way of thinking about people contrasts with an older notion of the utility-maximizing consumer. Our preferences form a field that we move around in through exchange. I think John Stuart Mill is important for articulating a pre-marginalist view of economic man. Homo economicus has a history and has varied over the development of political economy.

Brown and Marcuse both share a concept about how capitalism corrupts our non-working time. In One Dimensional Man, Marcuse deplores the prevalence of instrumental reason. For Brown, the neoliberal concept of the self is not a member of a social class. In the neoliberal view, we no longer have workers and capitalists. We are longer examples of homo politicus. I think of Hannah Arendt as an idealized picture of political man, what we could be reasoning together in the public square, in the agora. Brown also mentions homo legalis, the subject of right and an emphasis of Foucault and his concept of governability.

Reference

• Wendy Brown. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution. Zone Books.