Wendy Brown Quotes on Politics
Wendy Brown’s States of Injury (1995), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010), and Undoing the Demos (2015) develop one of the most influential contemporary critiques of the political conditions of late liberal democracy. The central project is the genealogical analysis of how neoliberal governmental rationality — extending market metrics from the economic sphere to every domain of social life — systematically erodes the demos and the substantive political subjectivity democratic self-rule requires, with the corresponding attention to walls, sovereignty, and identity politics framing the symptomatic responses of failing nation-states. The framework, drawing on Foucault, Nietzsche, and the Frankfurt School, has shaped the contemporary critique of neoliberalism and the broader American left’s political-theoretical engagement with the late-democratic predicament.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Wendy Brown:
“Neoliberalism is the political form in which homo oeconomicus comes to displace homo politicus.”
-
Attributed to Wendy Brown:
“Walls are built where sovereignty is felt to be slipping.”
-
Attributed to Wendy Brown:
“Identity is haunted by the historical wounds it cannot quite name.”
-
Attributed to Wendy Brown:
“Politics out of history is politics that has not yet found the courage to look back.”
-
Attributed to Wendy Brown:
“Democracy survives only as long as we are willing to rule and to be ruled in turn.”
-
“Neoliberalism is essentially a form of governing that sees democracy as an obstacle, at best, or as an illegitimate intervention into the rule of the market, at worst. For neoliberalism, rule by markets is understood as a form of governance that should be applied everywhere, not just to marketised goods, but to education, prisons, the organisation of state, and so on. So neoliberalism treats popular sovereignty, or decisions based on human agreement and deliberation, as inappropriate interference with the efficient market and the price mechanism.”
Neoliberalism Has Eviscerated the Fabric of Social Life , interview with Wendy Brown by Adam Ostolski, Green European Journal , March 2017