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worstarchitect's review against another edition
I finally understand neoliberalism.
Will forever remember this book as the one that I was reading when I decided I didn't want to go into academia anymore. Reading it wasn't not a factor in my decision. Oscillates between incisive discussions on neoliberalism as it's understood today and wildly myopic/banal comments on how to surpass it.
The sections on Foucault's lectures are excellent, I really came out with a comprehensive understanding of what neoliberalism is, and more importantly, what it isn't, seeing as it's the cool term to use when something is bad in contemporary society. Brown lays it out extremely clearly, and the examples she used like the Bremer orders and the Citizens United decision do a lot to set it in an understandable context. Great stuff.
Where she totally loses me is her positive argument, which is what we should do about it. And her answer seems to be... the liberal arts? It's a hilarious non-sequitur that reveals how single-minded Brown's worldview is as a tenured university professor at Berkeley. She somehow identifies these global trends working in concert to reduce our understanding of democratic society, and then she also throws in there that it's fucked up that US News ranks schools on "Best Value" and how sad it is that professors who prioritize teaching over research are seen as "losers" by their peers (she actually uses that word in the book). There's a really awesome part where she suggests that if we lose the liberal arts, "humanity will have entered its darkest chapter ever". EVER. In the HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Luckily this part of her argument is not a huge part of the book so it doesn't sink the whole thing. While myopic, her critiques of the professionalization of universities are actually pretty spot-on, including a section where Amherst gets a little shout-out: "what is taught or learned (or not) at Princeton or Amherst is largely irrelevant to the prestige obtained and the networks accessed and reproduced... the truth is that what students learn at these institutions is mostly irrelevant to their futures in worlds of business, finance, and tech, which is where most of them are going." So true! Another critique I have is that it barely even bothers to talk about why democracy is inherently important, which is annoying but standard fare in political theory. She weirdly even admits that democracy is not a safeguard against bad outcomes but insists that it's important and does not elaborate. ok.
Will forever remember this book as the one that I was reading when I decided I didn't want to go into academia anymore. Reading it wasn't not a factor in my decision. Oscillates between incisive discussions on neoliberalism as it's understood today and wildly myopic/banal comments on how to surpass it.
The sections on Foucault's lectures are excellent, I really came out with a comprehensive understanding of what neoliberalism is, and more importantly, what it isn't, seeing as it's the cool term to use when something is bad in contemporary society. Brown lays it out extremely clearly, and the examples she used like the Bremer orders and the Citizens United decision do a lot to set it in an understandable context. Great stuff.
Where she totally loses me is her positive argument, which is what we should do about it. And her answer seems to be... the liberal arts? It's a hilarious non-sequitur that reveals how single-minded Brown's worldview is as a tenured university professor at Berkeley. She somehow identifies these global trends working in concert to reduce our understanding of democratic society, and then she also throws in there that it's fucked up that US News ranks schools on "Best Value" and how sad it is that professors who prioritize teaching over research are seen as "losers" by their peers (she actually uses that word in the book). There's a really awesome part where she suggests that if we lose the liberal arts, "humanity will have entered its darkest chapter ever". EVER. In the HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Luckily this part of her argument is not a huge part of the book so it doesn't sink the whole thing. While myopic, her critiques of the professionalization of universities are actually pretty spot-on, including a section where Amherst gets a little shout-out: "what is taught or learned (or not) at Princeton or Amherst is largely irrelevant to the prestige obtained and the networks accessed and reproduced... the truth is that what students learn at these institutions is mostly irrelevant to their futures in worlds of business, finance, and tech, which is where most of them are going." So true! Another critique I have is that it barely even bothers to talk about why democracy is inherently important, which is annoying but standard fare in political theory. She weirdly even admits that democracy is not a safeguard against bad outcomes but insists that it's important and does not elaborate. ok.
ralowe's review against another edition
4.0
wendy brown got me thinking i need to read friedrich hayek after she gave a lecture at the university of california because i was worried that hayek's intense conviction as a progenitor of neoliberalism to disavow the social and replace it with the market might be inadvertently bolstered by (or otherwise be related to) my own jaded understanding that dialogue with one's oppression is impossible. at first blush there might be a number of jumps and false equivalences involved in that train of thought. however consider that neoliberalism is the precondition of our current historical moment, at that its arrival consists, as wendy brown carefully elaborates, the utter evisceration of politics from the sign of the political so that the scene of dialogue is wholly illusory if the power dynamics can never be meaningfully acknowledged or remedied as an crucial requirement for dialogue to ever truthfully occur: so my jaded understanding lives or just barely lives in the wake of hayek's intense convictions. hayek writes massive books decrying the social extensively and i was hoping that brown in *undoing the demos* would offer some clue as to which works were essential, expecting a continuation of the lecture i saw. unfortunately, i was given no clear recommendation; but importantly, after reading brown's book, i no longer thought it necessary to consult hayek, so thorough is brown's description of neoliberalism in a number of relevant spheres. it's interesting that i read eva cherniavsky's *neocitizenship* before this book of brown's, since it now appears to me at least that cherniavsky was writing primarily in response to brown's text here. cherniavsky overreaches through a brisk inquiry into the occupy movement as a straw proxy for a counter to neoliberalism that was ultimately deeply unsatisfying; brown wisely limits mention of occupy to a sentence or two in the concluding chapter: the net effect is that *undoing* is more encouraging of resistance than *neocitizenship*. across the reading of these two books recently, and i would say more emphatically with brown's book, a clearer denomination of what on multiple fronts and in various forms i've been fighting against for years. also: the important yet imperfect analogy that suggests that human capital might be haunted by chattel enslavement (thereby imbuing perspectives on the arrival of neoliberalism as novel with a degree of unavoidable antiblackness) is something brown never explores, although cherniavsky leaves the ready to infer some possible association (perhaps) with a seemingly random excursion through afropessimism. sometimes less is more.
davidutslott's review against another edition
5.0
Ypperste klasse av deilig sosialistisk propaganda, akkurat slik jeg liker det ❤️ Tar opp viktige bevegelser i vårt syn på verden og mennesker. Hadde vært en enda bedre leseropplevelse hvis jeg forstod mer enn halvparten av ordene haha!
mattleesharp's review against another edition
3.0
Wendy Brown is a brilliant lecturer and writer. This book, unfortunately, is written with a philosophical and political vocabulary I'm just not that familiar with. And trust me, I'm like... a smart person. What I got, I enjoyed. I'm just going to have to come back to it to really appreciate it, I guess.
mergito's review against another edition
4.0
great on the theory, slightly less impressive in the case studies/examples. But still a most read for anyone interested in contemporary political questions.
ratthew86's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
sad
medium-paced