Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution

"In 2015, about a decade after Foucault’s book on biopolitics. Though not a classical liberal herself, Brown respected classical liberalism precisely for separating homo economicus from other aspects of human life. In other words, it’s one thing to analyse inputs and outputs in terms of the economic spheres of production and consumption; one had to do that in order to understand how well or how poorly an economy was working. But classical liberals also believed that there were realms of life that economic reasoning should not touch: e.g., the family, love, morality, and democracy. Healthy human relationships and democratic forms of self-government could not be reduced to a series of inputs and outputs and constant calculation of gains and losses. Adam Smith, the great Scottish political economist of the 18th century, author of The Wealth of Nations , wanted everybody to truck, barter and exchange. He thought this was the way of the world. But he also wrote a philosophical book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments . In the latter book, the realm of morality and family and education and governance lay apart from the economic realm he had analysed so thoroughly in The Wealth of Nations . In other words, there was a point in limiting the world of homo economicus to production and exchange. Wendy Brown sees neoliberalism as spreading homo economicus everywhere. Think of all the calculating of gains that we do now on a daily basis, often without really being cognizant of what we’re doing: How many people ‘liked’ my tweet or my Facebook posting? How many steps did I walk today? How many flights of stairs did I climb? In the 1990s heyday of tech utopianism, which I write about in my book, it was thought that this kind data was going to set humanity free, and allow each of us to become ‘all that we could be’. Brown writes that the drive to acquire such knowledge does not generate a path toward freedom. It is a form of un-freedom, a snare. Brown argues that this form of reasoning and analysis has infected just about everything, and it has made us worse off. The 1990s moment of neoliberal and tech utopianism is gone, but we are ever more inundated with the data that the IT revolution of those years has generated. A large scale revolt against the constant measuring of one’s self, similar in spirit that animated the 1960s counterculture, has not yet materialized. It will at some point. But it’s notable that it has not happened yet. The hegemony of the neoliberal order has cracked, but forms of neoliberal reason still deeply influence our lives. Brown sees nothing positive in neoliberalism. She wants us to recover an older notion of humanity, one that calls on us to judge ourselves by the quality of our democracy, or the quality of our morality, or the quality of our educational system. She wants us to pursue a life in which human aspirations are freed from the tyranny of inputs and outputs."