Undoing the Demos

Neoliberal rationality — ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture — remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. 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. 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. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either. 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. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. 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.

溫蒂‧布朗 Wendy Brown 美國政治理論家，現為UPS基金會社會科學學院主席、曾任加州大學柏克萊分校政治學榮譽教授。 布朗的研究領域涵蓋政治思想史、政治經濟學、歐陸哲學、文化理論和批判理論。近年的研究重點則在新自由主義及其所造成的價值空洞與虛無主義現象。 作為美國知名的公共知識分子，布朗撰寫和發表過許多關於言論自由、公共教育、政治抗議、LGBTQ權利、性侵犯、保守主義、新自由主義、以色列和巴勒斯坦等書寫與演講。她也積極關注並抵禦大學私有化的種種政策。 布朗的知名著作除了本書外，尚包括States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity （受傷的國家：晚期現代性的權力與自由，1995）、Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire （調節反感：身分與帝國時代的寬容，2006)、Walled States, Waning Sovereignty （牆國，弱主權，2010）、 In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West （新自由主義的廢墟：西方反民主政治的興起，2019）。 譯者簡介 申昀晏 高雄人，譯有《世界體系分析引論》、《戰爭的框架》、《危脆生命》、《言論自由》。