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Author Brown, Wendy, 1955- author.

Title In the ruins of neoliberalism : the rise of antidemocratic politics in the West / Wendy Brown.

Publication Info. New York : Columbia University Press, [2019]

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 New Britain, Main Library - Non Fiction  306.2 BRO    Check Shelf
Description viii, 248 pages ; 23 cm.
Series Wellek Library lectures
Wellek Library lecture series at the University of California, Irvine.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents Society must be dismantled -- Politics must be dethroned -- The personal, protected sphere must be expanded -- Speaking wedding cakes and praying pregnancy centers: religious liberty and free speech in neoliberal jurisprudence -- No future for white men: nihilism, fatalism and ressentiment.
Summary Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring? In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism's multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works of the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Wendy Brown traces the ambition to replace democratic orders with ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality and democratic states with technocratic ones. Yet plutocracy, white supremacy, politicized mass affect, indifference to truth, and extreme social disinhibition were no part of the neoliberal vision. Brown theorizes their unintentional spurring by neoliberal reason, from its attack on the value of society and its fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality. Above all, she argues, neoliberalism's intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white male supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which this supremacy disappears.
Subject Democracy -- Social aspects -- Western countries.
Neoliberalism -- Political aspects -- Western countries.
Right-wing extremists -- Western countries.
Populism -- Western countries.
Right and left (Political science) -- Western countries.
Political culture -- Western countries.
POLITICAL SCIENCE / General.
Democracy -- Social aspects. (OCoLC)fst00890110
Political culture. (OCoLC)fst01069263
Populism. (OCoLC)fst01071658
Right and left (Political science) (OCoLC)fst01097849
Right-wing extremists. (OCoLC)fst01097938
ISBN 9780231193849 hardcover alkaline paper
023119384X hardcover alkaline paper
9780231193856 paperback alkaline paper
0231193858 paperback alkaline paper
9780231550536 electronic book
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