Book Review: Liberal arts professors of the world,Unite

the last force within universities potentially sustaining the ideal of the well-educated citizen, the liberal arts professoriat itself, will be dramatically diminished in both size and power to exert its vision.

(pp. 194–95)

There’s an intellectual inferiority complex unique to university-based business school occupants. Since you’re reading a review of this book, in this journal, I wager you’ve probably already encountered—if not experienced—some of its symptoms. I date its onset in me back to those critical hours when the formal process of becoming educated ceased and the informal expectations of acting the educated subject commenced: the viva exam. Like many of my peers, I recall the PhD defence as both a professional achievement and a personal affliction. We’ll remain forever marked for having entered the ivory tower through its pigeon shit encrusted hole-in-the-side-wall. Our predicament calls to mind the melancholy spectacle of a recently un-canned cherry, mock-ceremonially perched upon a shake and bake cake.

It’s an inferiority complex which we’ve been conditioned to internalise. We’re experienced by others—and have come to experience ourselves—as having reached the pinnacle of an education of sorts. We’re not proper academics though. Our claim to contemporary university citizenship isn’t guaranteed by a canon, a curriculum or a sense of calling. It rather derives from the opportunities for departmental cross-subsidization which the cash-cow courses we preside over facilitate. We’re not really expected to contribute to interdisciplinary debates either: our responsibility to the life of the contemporary mind is primarily economic. Observed practices have regularly diverged from their expected patterns, of course, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves about what we’re presumed to be here for.

Wendy Brown’s book implies that the evaluation of the university-based business school—and demonstrates that the evaluation of much more besides—is now predicated upon a rampant, democratically impoverished economic reductionism. Access to food and education? Beneath all these are economic matters! Access to healthcare? Beneath all this is an economic matter! Access to justice? You guessed it. ‘Economization’, Brown’s chronologically comparative analysis suggests, has become the very basis upon which politics, the collective adjudication over the good for all, is increasingly undertaken. ‘Homo politicus’, according to Brown’s evocative imagery, has become ‘anemic’ (p. 35). Such is our collective illness.

Undoing the Demos is, quite deliberately, another book written by a non-economist which takes ‘neo-liberal’ economics as its object. It is another book indebted to the coincidence of the translation of Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics lectures into English, on the one hand, and the global financial crisis, on the other. And it is another book which claims to diagnose these times when ‘neoliberalism’ is incompletely understood as a solely economic doctrine. As Brown’s prophecy suspecting first part of the book long critical commentary on Foucault’s 1978–1979 College de France lectures proclaims,

More than merely saturating the meaning or content of democracy with market values, neoliberalism assaults the principles, practices, cultures, subjects and institutions of democracy understood as rule by the people…a normative order of reason developed over three decades into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality, neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavour, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. (pp. 9–10)

While transmogrification (p. 183), adumbration (p. 54) and imbrication (p. 59) sound like metaphysically highfalutin processes, we’re each already attuned to them, so the argument goes, because neoliberalism can be tracked in its becoming hegemonic. Brown’s presumed audience will be particularly attuned to these transformations because the neo-Foucaultian guide to neoliberalism after the crisis genre has already stabilised a series of terminological, analytical, methodological and normative conventions. Generously elaborating upon how many of these conventions have been debated, the book’s comparative lists and bibliographic overviews alone necessitate its consideration from Foucaultians and anti-Foucaultians alike. Here are 10 examples, selected randomly from a much greater pool of potential candidates:

1. How ‘neoliberalism’ has been understood (Preface & Fn. 6, p. 224);

2. The deleterious effects of neoliberalism (pp. 28–30);

3. The consequences of rendering human beings as human capital (p. 37);

4. How, according to Foucault, neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism (pp. 62–70);

5. Post-Foucaultian developments within neoliberalism (pp. 70–72);

6. How homo oeconomicus has been analysed (Fn. 2–5, p. 239);

7. An overview of the feminist critique of economics (Fn. 66, p. 245);

8. A primer on debates around governance and governmentality (Fn. 15, p. 248);

9. Analyses of higher education with respect to neoliberal governance (Fn. 1, p. 259);

10. Perhaps the most generous gesture of all: a reading list offered to those who would, unlike Brown herself, suggests there are more significant casualties of neoliberalism to bemoan than democracy (Fn. 1, p. 272).

The first part of the book stages what could become the definitive settlement of the debt which this genre still owes to Foucault (p. 121). The second part then sets about applying the earlier part’s authoritative synthesis of these to a series of empirical developments within political governance (Chapter 4), law (Chapter 5) and higher education (Chapter 6). By way of stark contrast to the didactically analytical orientation of the book’s first part, these later chapters, rhetorically speaking, are much more pathos and much less logos. In Chapter 4, for example, Brown succumbs to an instance of glib sensationalism entirely out of keeping with the precision which characterised the book’s first part:

The U.S. government handout of genetically modified seed in 2004 was like offering heroin to a desperate single mother out of a job, facing eviction, and despairing of the future. Not only did it promise relief, but the first bag was free. (p. 145)

It’s certainly a provocative image of Monsanto’s role in Iraq, but it’s neither a very elegant nor a very apt one. Only the most unforgiving of readers, however, would derive a general weakness of the book from this uncharacteristic instance of literary carelessness. Unfortunately, as the book’s progression through its author’s ‘convictions … nothing more’ (p. 11), gathered momentum, this reader’s earlier secured good will was almost broken. Chapter 5, an extended analysis of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission within which the Supreme Court Justice Kennedy recognised the US constitutionally sanctioned right of corporations to fund democratic election campaigns is, to my mind, a deeply regrettable interlude. It describes law as ‘a medium for disseminating neoliberal rationality beyond the economy, including to constitutive elements of democratic life’ (p. 151), with Justice Kennedy’s judgment interpreted as a particularly poignant case in point:

Neoliberal rationality constitutes the hermeneutics through which constitutional principles are read and applied in Citizens United and in this way enacts the economization of politics through law. (p. 164)

I don’t doubt for a moment that many of Brown’s intended readership will go in for the intended implication of the above, namely, that a Supreme Court judgment’s determination by neoliberalism’s hermeneutics can be generalised into an allegation of a concealed bias at the very heart of the law itself. Even more won’t go in for this sort of analytical leap, however. If you wanted to make the sort of case which Brown is trying to make here convincingly, you’d need to consider ‘the question of precisely which politicians, corporations, and banks are in bed with one another’ (p. 150). This is a question which the previous chapter has already ruled out as less important than the structural assertion that there’s been a general shift to neoliberal modes of governance, however. Sympathy for this de-prioritisation of specific political agents, alongside sympathy for the implied idea that a general critique of the law as such is even possible, is sought by Brown not by arguing against an opponent credited with intelligence but rather through a calculated play to the parlour. So either you’re already with Brown in her suspicion that the law as such has become increasingly rigged, or else you’re already cavorting alongside the politically naive, the economically conservative and the fecklessly prosperous. I, for one, am now less hostile to the notion that legal representatives might play an important role in the re-politicization of neoliberalism after having read this book, than I was beforehand.

To the extent that Chapter 6 considers higher education and the damage recently done to it by the reduction of politics to neoliberal economics, it brings us right back to the question of why the book’s account of Foucault, of neoliberalism, and of the disintegrating demos, does matter to Brown and should matter to us. These historical processes, as Brown diagnoses them, have been more or less synchronous with the demise of the view that there’s more to the pursuit of a higher education than the speculative investment in a risk taker’s would be future (pp. 184–85). But, as Brown points out, to say this sort of thing today is to potentially subject oneself to refutation, if not ridicule: ‘[w]e can no longer speak this way about the public university, and the university no longer speaks this way about itself’ (p. 187).

What, then, are the prospects for reversing these malevolent trends, given the alleged demise of the law, on the one hand, and the fleetingly acknowledged disintegration of popularly organised resistance, on the other (pp. 35–36)? What stands in the way of the complete reduction of democracy to economisation, of the complete reduction of all political questions of democratic citizenship to practical questions of technology and capital, of the complete vanquishing of homo politicus by homo oeconomicus (pp. 41, 87)? What, if anything, can stop humanity from entering what Brown, in another moment of hyperbole, calls ‘its darkest chapter ever’ (p. 188)? It requires an author not afflicted by the intellectual inferiority complex unique to those educated within and/or employed by university-based business schools to pronounce something like the following, in earnest:

To preserve the kind of education that nourishes democratic culture and enables democratic rule, we require the knowledge that only a liberal arts education can provide. Thus, democracy hollowed out by neoliberal rationality cannot be counted on to renew liberal arts education for a democratic citizenry. (p. 200)

Brown’s erudite, compelling and heartfelt manifesto reads very much like the deeply nuanced outcome of a variety of productive encounters, with a variety of highly intelligent academics, which its author readily acknowledges it to have been (pp. 11–13). Somewhat ironically, however, for a theorist who has done so much to warn Leftist intellectuals away from the trappings of nostalgia and melancholy, it is a book written without a sense of humour and for those still beholden to a progressive idea of the university which has been largely superseded. Its intended audience—critics of ‘neoliberalism’ for whom Foucault’s legacy casts both a dark shadow and a penetrating light upon contemporary political-economic predicaments—will find much to commend within it. Non-academics and not-proper academics will learn much from its analysis but find little in its proposals. Brown is probably right to point out the following to those fearful of the consequences of a disappearing demos:

In letting markets decide our present and future, neoliberalism wholly abandons the project of individual or collective mastery of existence. (p. 221)

She is almost certainly wrong, however, to point this out by way of a seemingly self-evident forewarning. Friedrich Hayek, one of Brown’s book’s antagonists it neglects to take seriously, capitulated to a market-based epistemology not because he thought it would be infallible but because he believed it would be less fallible than goal-oriented expert-based political programmes. You surely don’t need to be an advocate of neoliberalism to suspect that, when more politics is your headline solution, you’ve probably misdiagnosed at least some parts of the problem. And you also surely don’t need to be an academic with an over-conditioned intellectual inferiority complex to thank Brown for her pedagogy while apologising, in hushed tones, that there’s never ever been an economically unconditioned liberal arts professor.

Stephen DunneUniversity of Leicester, UK