For Brown, nothing is now sacred or exempt from this process. Neoliberalism, then, is not simply about markets, money or social class (which is barely mentioned in this book, except to say that it has disappeared, see p.38) it is rather a condition under which a raw economic rationality is applied to all forms of human activity and becomes the basis of a certain style of political governance. Rather, the point is that neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities – even where money is not at issue – and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo economicus (p.31). To speak of the relentless and ubiquitous economization of all features of life by neoliberalism is…not to claim that neoliberalism literally marketizes all spheres, even as such marketization is certainly one important effect of neoliberalism. In the first chapter of Undoing the Demos, Brown develops a position that is broadly sympathetic to Foucault’s concerns. The starting point of this undertaking is Michel Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics, which analyses the extension of market principles into the state and beyond into civil society and, seemingly, everything ‘social’.

This is a dark, haunting text that questions the fate of democracy under a new regime of neoliberal governance that understands the value of human life purely in economic terms. There are many good books on neoliberalism but this one stands apart.

Brown undoing the demos