Neoliberalism's Uneven Revolution: Reflections on Wendy

Brown's Undoing the Demos

Patchen Markell

Theory & Event, Volume 20, Number 2, April 2017, pp. 520-527 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

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Neoliberalism’s Uneven Revolution: Reflections on
Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos

Patchen Markell

W
endy Brown’s Undoing the Demos1 tells a big, ambitious, and
unfamiliar story about what neoliberalism is, and about
what its ascent means for us. Unlike a lot of lesser books and
articles on the subject, its sweep does not come at the cost of being
vague, hasty, or gestural. It is, to the contrary, theoretically precise,
deliberately paced, and carefully rooted in rich and detailed accounts
of our present and our recent past. And, most of all, it is a book that
is more than the sum of its individual arguments: to read it is to be
drawn into a space and a perspective that will change how you look at
the world. In that, I think it is a masterpiece of political theory.
The questions and comments posed here about Undoing the Dem-
os are meant to be internal to its space—that is, they are meant to be
questions and comments of the kind that, on my reading anyway, the
book means to provoke or invite. Before posing these questions, then,
I need to say something about how I understand Brown’s rhetorical
stance in Undoing the Demos, which, if I’m right, may also help avoid
a possible misunderstanding of the book. One of the striking features
of Undoing the Demos is its deliberate refusal of the rhetorical form of
the programmatic political manifesto: as Brown says, the book is “an
effort to comprehend the constitutive elements and dynamics of our
condition,” which “does not elaborate alternatives to the order it illu-
minates and only occasionally identifies possible strategies for resist-
ing the developments it charts” (28). Another striking feature of the
book, and particularly of its first and last chapters, is its use of lan-
guage that could be characterized as “totalizing”—though, I hasten to
add, that word implies a criticism that I actually mean to deflect rather
than to press. Neoliberal rationality, Brown says, configures human be-
ings “always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus” (31); neolib-
eralism is the “rationality through which capitalism finally swallows
humanity” (44); neoliberalism replaces democracy’s unruliness by “a
form of governing that is soft and total” (208); neoliberalism “conse-
crates” and “deepens” a general “exhaustion and despair in Western
civilization” (222).

Theory & Event Vol. 20, No. 2, 520–527 © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press
 Markell | Reflections on Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos 521

Someone might respond to these features by charging that they

amount to defeatism—that the book forecloses the very possibility of
elaborating an alternative precisely because it trades so heavily on the
ominousness of its sweeping picture of the present as thoroughly and
uniformly colonized by neoliberal rationality.2 But this would be a seri-
ous misreading. Not least because such a charge would attend only to
a handful of sentences from the framing chapters of the book, while ig-
noring the detailed central chapters, which show again and again that
Brown knows perfectly well that neoliberalism’s effects are neither
seamless nor uniform across a social space riven by, for example, divi-
sions between the advanced capitalist economies of the Euro-Atlantic
world and those of the Global South (20), or by gendered divisions of
labor (106). Nor would it be right simply to conclude that the book con-
tradicts itself, offering sweeping pictures of neoliberalism that are un-
dermined by its own acknowledgment that neoliberalism is (as Brown
puts it at one point) “inconstant, differentiated, unsystematic, impure”
(20). Instead, I take these two characterizations of neoliberalism to be
meant to work together in a specific way. The apparently “totalizing”
language captures a real tendency in neoliberal rationality’s reconfig-
uration of the world; it captures the sense of inescapability that is one
of its symptoms (and also one of its instruments); and in provoking the
protest that this picture is or must be too simple, the book activates
and mobilizes a desire for an alternative that—since Brown refuses the
genre of the programmatic manifesto—can only be pursued by attend-
ing more carefully to, and following the example of, the detailed inves-
tigations Brown offers of neoliberalism in its “inconstancy and plastici-
ty” (21). In short, this is not a contradiction: it’s a way of summoning
the desire for, and providing some of the rudiments of, an education
in our present—an education of the kind Brown so eloquently defends
in chapter 6, one that aims less at providing “career bang for the buck”
than at cultivating a “people” that is “modestly knowing” about the
“enormously complex global constellations and powers” that affect it,
that has “capacities of discernment and judgment in relation to what it
reads, watches or hears about a range of developments in the world,”
and that is “oriented toward common concerns and governing itself”
(198–200).
If, rather than tell her readers what to do, Brown invites her read-
ers to share the burden of identifying alternatives to or routes out of the
neoliberal present, and if she invites us to do so (as indeed she herself
does) partly by complicating some of Undoing the Demos’s most sweep-
ing characterizations of that present, then my questions and comments
here can be understood as taking up that invitation. I begin with the
question of the historical novelty of neoliberalism, understood as a
“new form of governmental reason” (9) that has become hegemonic
522  Theory & Event

in the Euro-Atlantic world over roughly the last three decades. One of
the things about neoliberalism that is decisively new, Brown argues, is
that it goes beyond simply reconceiving the proper relationship or re-
locating the appropriate boundary between politics and the economy,
as earlier forms of liberalism did, but reconceives the nature of both of
these in a way that collapses any remaining difference between them.
In its classical and liberal versions, the picture of the human being as
homo oeconomicus presupposed the parallel existence of homo politicus:
Aristotle’s free man ruled over a household whose unfree labor freed
him for citizenship; Smith’s agent of commerce was not reducible to
his trucking and bartering and remained subject to the sovereignty of
a state that was still distinct enough from the economy to intervene in
it. But neoliberalism’s version of homo oeconomicus, as an individual
subject responsible for maintaining and maximizing its “portfolio val-
ue in all domains of its life” (35), is a figure of the human being that
no longer presupposes or respects fundamental divisions among those
domains. Thus, neoliberalism does not just subordinate politics to
economics but refigures it, like every other sphere, in the image of an
economics that has itself been newly refigured along neoliberal lines.
That erasure of every language, every domain, and every figure of the
person that might in some way prove irreducible to and therefore po-
tentially “disharmonious with capitalism” (111) is the real tendency
the book’s totalizing formulations are rightly meant to capture.
But exactly how novel, how distinctive to the neoliberalism of
the last three decades, is this tendency? Reading Brown’s analysis of
Obama’s 2013 State of the Union, for example, I was convinced by the
claim that Obama’s invocations of jobs, skills, competition, invest-
ment, stimulus, and so on, were not just moves in a political competi-
tion with the GOP, but evidence of “the way that economic growth has
become both the end and legitimation of government” and the way
that “the state’s table of purposes and priorities has become indistin-
guishable from that of modern firms” (26–27). Yet I also heard power-
ful resonances between that speech and the recasting of growth, pros-
perity, and consumption as both the substance and the instruments of
“freedom” in the American political imaginary of the early Cold War.3
Similarly, as a Berkeley alumnus from late in the era of $600-a-semester
tuition and generous-enough Pell Grants, I’ve watched the eviscera-
tion of liberal arts education in public universities that Brown traces
so powerfully here with acute distress. Yet I also wanted to hear more
about the material basis of the public university in its twentieth-cen-
tury heyday, and also about the conception of education that helped
sustain massive state and federal funding for campus construction,
research, and teaching, which was not only a conception of education
as “a medium for egalitarianism and social mobility” (184), but also a
conception of education as a way of providing appropriately creden-
 Markell | Reflections on Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos 523

tialed white-collar labor and research for the technocratic amalgama-

tion of government agencies and private corporations that made up the
wartime and postwar defense-industrial complex.4 (By the same token,
a few generations earlier, leaders of West Coast land grant schools like
Berkeley had justified the public provision of liberal arts education, as
opposed to utilitarian agricultural research, by tying it to the project of
opening Far Eastern markets and ruling what they proudly referred to
as its racially inferior populations.5) To recall this is not at all to deny
the democratic and democratizing accomplishments of public higher
education in the liberal arts, but it may be to emphasize, more strongly
than Brown does, that these accomplishments have always stood in a
fraught, even antagonistic relationship to their institutional and mate-
rial matrices.
Most of all, I wonder what to make of the fact that precisely the
kind of claim that Brown makes here—that a new rationality has not
only subordinated homo politicus to homo oeconomicus but subsumed
one into the other—was already audible among social critics observing
an earlier and very different configuration of state, citizen, and econo-
my: not the neoliberal configuration, in which the responsibilized citi-
zen is left alone to maximize his market value in a precarious environ-
ment, but the Fordist configuration, in which the deployment of expert
knowledge to sustain an ever-growing and ever-more efficient cycle of
production and consumption seemed to promise enough prosperity
to make political conflict obsolete. One could think here of Hannah
Arendt in 1958 on the dystopic scenario of a “society of laborers with-
out labor,” which “no longer know[s] of those higher and meaningful
activities for the sake of which this freedom [from toil] would deserve
to be won”;6 or of Sheldon Wolin in 1960 on “the age of organization
and the sublimation of politics,” writing, in a gloss of Philip Selznick,
that “the organization is the dominant and ubiquitous phenomenon of
society, and whether it carries the adjective ‘business’, ‘government’,
‘military’, or ‘educational’ is largely irrelevant.”7 Or think, finally, of
Students for a Democratic Society’s Port Huron Statement of 1962, in
which (to quote its first lines) “people of this generation, bred in at
least modest comfort, housed now in universities” indicted the insti-
tutions of their time for foreclosing precisely the sorts of deliberation
about common ends and purposes that Brown associates with homo
politicus. “All around us,” they wrote, “there is astute grasp of meth-
od, technique—the committee, the ad hoc group, the lobbyist, the hard
and soft sell, the make, the projected image—but, if pressed critically,
such expertise is incompetent to explain its implicit ideals.” Such inar-
ticulacy contributed to the prevailing sense that “there simply are no
alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of
Utopias, but of any new departures as well.”8
524  Theory & Event

Of course the authors of the Port Huron Statement didn’t agree;

and their dissent and its effects may constitute one powerful illustra-
tion of exactly how much we now stand to lose in the sacrifice of public
higher education in the liberal arts (188)—though the Statement itself
(understandably but also perhaps too one-sidedly) cast their “profes-
sors and administrators” as part of the problem.9 But it is important
to notice what these students did say punctured the “complacency” in
which they were raised; and the first among the “events too troubling
to dismiss” that they list was “the permeating and victimizing fact of
human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against ra-
cial bigotry.” (The second was the “enclosing fact of the Cold War.”)10
I recall this not to romanticize the SDSers or their racial politics, but
simply to draw attention to the fact that in this earlier context, one
of the things that could have and sometimes did shatter the sense of
the contemporary social scene as a smooth, frictionless, politics-free
totality was precisely the existence both of forms of social domination
that could not be accounted for within the stylized picture of the post-
war world as a well-oiled prosperity machine and of powerful political
struggles dedicated to overcoming them. And, by the same token, my
larger point in putting a stronger emphasis on the continuities between
our moment and this earlier one is not to deny the differences be-
tween neoliberalism and its antecedents, but to generate this question:
where, today, within our broadly neoliberalized society, can we never-
theless see axes of social domination—and political struggles against
them—that also cannot be accounted for within the stylized picture of
neoliberal power as “soft and total,” and as proceeding through the
generalization of the figure of homo oeconomicus as a self-governing
portfolio-enhancer, and everything that Brown shows us goes with it?
Brown doesn’t ignore this question; far from it. It comes to the fore
most vividly in her important discussion of the “gender of homo oeco-
nomicus” (99–107) which brilliantly shows, first, how the subordina-
tion of “those positioned as women in the sexual division of labor” is
intensified by neoliberalism’s dismantling of the public infrastructure
that once helped respond to the unavowed dependence upon others
of supposedly autonomous economic man; and, second, how this sub-
ordination is transformed as women are intensively incorporated into
the neoliberal market of responsible human capitals while remaining
burdened with “provisioning care of every sort, in an out of the house-
hold”—a burden that, in neoliberal discourse, remains “divested of a
place in language, visually and discursively absent from public con-
sciousness” (104–107). “With only competing and value-enhancing hu-
man capital in the frame,” Brown concludes, “complex and persistent
gender inequality is attributed to sexual difference, an effect that neo-
liberalism takes for a cause. Consequently, an impoverished single
mother is framed to fail in the project of becoming a responsibilized
 Markell | Reflections on Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos 525

neoliberal subject, especially in the contexts of the kinds of austerities

imposed by the budget ‘sequester’ in the United States or by the Euro-
pean Union bailouts in Southern Europe” (107).
This, though, is a story of how neoliberalism makes its own incon-
stancy and unevenness invisible. Does it always do so? Would the story
become more complicated if we also asked, for example, about the race
of homo oeconomicus? Just as that impoverished single mother’s “fail-
ure” is naturalized by neoliberal rationality, the chances that her fail-
ure will also subject her to discipline, including criminal punishment,
are all the greater if she is Black or Latina.11 This is just one unevenness
generated at the complicated intersection of neoliberal rationality with
the rationality of white supremacy, which does not homogenize all sub-
jects as self-maximizing capitals, large and small, but marks out some
populations as manipulable and disposable material, fit to be ruled
through the often coercive and violent command-and-control tech-
niques that neoliberal rationality itself eschews. That does not in itself
make this unevenness and its effects visually and discursively present
to a national, cross-racial public, though the last three years of activism
under the rubric “Black Lives Matter” show how some especially con-
spicuous forms of the exercise of this power, like police shootings, can
be used by a movement to organize public attention around a larger
complex of problems.12 If what neoliberalism ultimately threatens is
the very intelligibility of a desire for democracy in the bare sense of not
being ruled by others, where better to look for the stubborn persistence
of that desire and its expression than in the places where neoliberal
rationality as Brown describes it governs least purely?
This brings me to one final comment, less about neoliberalism
and democracy than about liberalism and democracy. I said earlier, in
passing, that I wanted to emphasize that liberal education’s best aspects
have always stood in a fraught relation to its institutional and material
matrix. Brown sees this too. Her account of the origin and purpose of
a liberal arts education begins, after all, by identifying its origin in the
ancient world as “the education appropriate to free men, in contrast
to that of slaves” (184), and stresses the “radical democratic” trans-
formation of this original conception that was involved in “extending
liberal arts education from the elite to the many” (185). But did this
transformation only involve making the same education and the same
“life of freedom long reserved for the few” available to all (185)? No,
because what it was “necessary for free men to know” in a slave soci-
ety referred at once to their task of collective self-government as a body
of free citizens, and their task of ruling the unfree populations whose
labor made their leisure possible. Hannah Arendt tells a story in which
the conceptual conflation of these tasks within the tradition of political
philosophy—the idea that ruling oneself is basically just like ruling
others, only with a different arrangement of agents and objects—leaves
526  Theory & Event

that tradition unable to distinguish between the practice of political

freedom and something like the forms of the soft governance of our-
selves whose various iterations Foucault tracks. From this perspective,
the radical democratic aspect of the history of liberal education was
not just its extension to all, but also the resulting and ongoing struggle
over its content and aims, which Brown mentions in a note (265 n. 27),
but which is more central to the story than that.
As with liberal education, so with liberal democracy. Although
Brown regards liberal democracy as limited and anemic, she simulta-
neously holds it out as an example of a political form that, since “its
emergence in the late eighteenth century,” has “harbor[ed] an ideal
in excess of itself” (206), and which at least institutionalized a differ-
ence between homo oeconomicus and homo politicus that could be and
has been employed to push liberal democracy in more radically dem-
ocratic directions. Yet, importantly, this description of the history of
liberal democracy is retrospective, and perhaps even anachronistic. If
Bernard Manin and others are right, then the regimes established in
the eighteenth-century revolutions in France and North America were
not understood at the time as “liberal democracies,” but as republics or
representative governments as opposed to democracies.13 This is not just
a terminological point. If we think of liberal democracy as a regime
in which the underlying principles are democratic but they are con-
strained and contradicted by their form of concrete social expression,
and if emancipatory democratic politics has consisted in the mobiliza-
tion of these principles against those social constraints, then the pas-
sage from liberalism to neoliberalism will look, as it does in Brown’s
story, like the catastrophic destruction of the only ground democratic
aspirations had on which to stand. But what if these regimes were not
just imperfectly realized democracies, but actively antidemocratic, and
have only subsequently come to be thought of as varieties of democ-
racy thanks to the occasionally successful struggles of actors to alter
them, struggles that couldn’t rely simply on the logic of holding a re-
gime accountable to its own principles, but were sustained by an an-
tipathy to being ruled, and perhaps by a fugitive tradition of popular
power? At the very least, that alternative story might soften the sharp
contrast between a liberalism that was internally fractious enough to
harbor political possibilities, and a neoliberalism too smooth to give
traction to any alternatives. Of course, that would not leave us any-
where other than where Brown’s epilogue does: facing difficult work
that “bears no immediate reward and carries no guarantee of success”
(222). But there might be something sustaining in the thought that our
predicament is not quite as different as we might initially think from
those that faced the generations before us.
 Markell | Reflections on Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos 527

Notes
1. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New
York: ZONE Books, 2015). This essay is a lightly edited version of comments
on Undoing the Demos presented at the 2015 Critical Theory in Critical Times
Workshop, sponsored by Northwestern University’s Program in Critical The-
ory; I’m grateful to the organizers, Dilip Gaonkar and Cristina Lafont, for the
invitation to participate, and to Annie McClanahan, Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo,
and especially Wendy Brown for a terrific conversation.
2. For a consideration, in another context, of the ways in which the theoreti-
cal sweep of a critical diagnosis of the present may “consign political activity
to failure even before it has begun,” see Patchen Markell, “The Moment Has
Passed: Power After Arendt,” in Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory,
ed. Romand Coles, Mark Reinhardt, and George Shulman (Louisville: University
Press of Kentucky, 2014), 132.
3. See e.g. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consump-
tion in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 114–129.
4. For a classic account of the changing situation of the postwar university
from the President of the University of California system, see Clark Kerr, The
Uses of the University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); for a
case study focused on Stanford’s (especially enterpreneurial) construction of
a triangular relationship with the state and private enterprise during the Cold
War see Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation
of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); for a study of the
University of Wisconsin in the same period see Matthew Levin, Cold War Uni-
versity: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2013), esp. chap. 1.
5. On Berkeley in this period see Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban
Power, Earthy Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), chap. 7 and
esp. 290–95.
6. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958), 5.
7. Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western
Political Thought, (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 419–20.
8. Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (New York:
Students for a Democratic Society, 1962), 3–5.
9. Ibid., 5.
10. Ibid., 3.
11. For a rich account of the complex intersection between neoliberalism and
the racialized politics of social welfare in America see Joe Soss, Richard C.
Fording, and Sanford S. Schram, Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism
and the Persistent Power of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
12. See Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).
13. See e.g. Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–3.