In other words: governance is not born of neo-liberal rationality, but once articulated to it, gives rise to novel ways of managing and disciplining subjects, states and firms.
This dissemination is made easier by contemporary governance practices (discussed in Chapter 4), which are ‘not identical with or exclusive to neoliberalism’ (p. When the economic subject reigns, what is vanquished is the form of subjectivity that animates democracy – a member of a demos, a democratic citizen, an autonomous, sovereign, Kantian subject.Ĭhapters 4, 5 and 6 – which make up the second part of the book – map the different ways in which neo-liberal rationality is disseminated through legal reason (Chapter 5) and through higher education (Chapter 6). 87–99) – is finally usurped by homo oeconomicus. 87), theorised first by Aristotle, whose morphology changes continuously throughout her odyssey through occidental thought – via, inter alia, Locke, Smith, Bentham, Marx and Freud (see pp. Homo politicus, referred to as the ‘demotic subject’ (p. This last feature is related to what Brown takes to be the biggest flaw in Foucault’s analysis: it is not attentive towards homo politicus and its subsequent extinction by neo-liberal reason. These include the rise of finance capital, permanent financial and social crises and crisis-fuelled austerity politics, the rise of governance, and, for Brown perhaps most profound, a number of changes within the neo-liberal subject, who is now tethered to competitive markets in such a way that she has lost all remnants of protection against brutal and impersonal market forces. Importantly, Brown signals no less than 12 features of the contemporary neo-liberal landscape that Foucault could not account for because they either did not yet exist or were still only nascent (pp. Chapters 2 and 3 offer a systematic reading of Foucault’s lectures on neo-liberalism (later published as The Birth of Biopolitics) and lead to a number of significant insights that expand the Foucauldian approach beyond his own groundwork.
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