Passionately argued, it leaves no room to be misunderstood as anything other than a frontal attack on neo-liberalism, or, as she defines it, “neo-liberal rationality”. In this blog, Ton Groeneweg reviews this fundamental study, highlighting religion as a key gap in Brown’s work, but an issue that may provide a way through the apparent political impasse between neoliberalism and participatory democracy.Īt times, Wendy Brown’s new book reads like a pamphlet. The historical burden and the profound implications of this struggle between a participatory democratic politics and the neoliberal economic matrix are spelled out in Wendy Brown’s latest book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. This is becoming an all-too-familiar story, with similar previous clashes between socially progressive participatory democratic visions and neoliberal economic formulas observable in Portugal, Spain, the US and globally (think of the Indignados, the Occupy Movement and the World Social Forum, to name a few). On the other, there is the depoliticized matrix of economic pragmatics, as represented by the Eurozone. On the one hand, there is the vision of a democratic politics, represented (in a historical irony of sorts) by its presumed birthplace in Greece and the anti-austerity protesters taking to the streets of Athens.
The present crisis unfolding around Greece is, among many other things, a clash between political imaginaries.
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