Brown’s work is a clarion call to democratic action. Advanced democracies today have always tried to think rationally about the neoliberal government. The article seeks to explore the nature of transformation for both an individual and state in neoliberalism into self-standing entrepreneurial units which may be compelled to contend for investment in other such units. Therefore, this is defined as the eclipse of homo politicus by the all-encompassing political figure of homo economicus. The primary aim of the book as the title indicates is to explain that neoliberalism has continued to render the democratic and independent political agency unmanageable increasingly.
Somewhat the independent or democratic political organization, individuals are increasingly construing themselves as economic actors or rather as entrepreneurs of themselves as Foucault refers to it in the Birth of Politics. The book’s three chapters try to delineate the author’s conception of neoliberalism while the latter try to examine the effects and impacts of neoliberal rationality upon the institutional structure of politics education and the judiciary. In the end, the author summarizes the arguments by making a case for what is lost when the practices of political and democratic subjectivity have little more than official or formal implication and scrutinizes the part that detriments and sacrifices play in neoliberal governance.
Brown also intensely explores how the judiciousness of neoliberalism is scraping out the modern subject and, with it, our modern, open-minded liberal democracies. With the foundation and basis of the lectures by Foucault on neoliberalism in 1978-79 which were published as The Birth of Biopolitics, her hypothesis or proposition is an argument that raises significant questions and should be explored and examined with great insight and caution. She proposes that we try to envisage the world in which economic and cost-effective examination has substituted all conflicting logic of authority and power.
She argues that what differentiates Neoliberalism is not merely a commitment or obligation to markets or capitalism, but more so the efforts and determination to transform all scopes of human life in ways that make them acquiescent to economic calculation. Brown discusses that neoliberalism swallows the democratic space in which people meet to express their concerns about sovereignty, equality and freedom; this space is what she describes as the demos. When we try to examine and study deep into the logic of neoliberalism across the range of neoliberal practices, from benchmarking to higher educational policies, Brown offers a new persuasive and captivating new dimension to the outstanding effort of neoliberalism.
Foucault argues that homo economicus becomes the only model for all forms of association and action. It is for this reason that human beings or democracies, to be precise, have existed with constant attention to necessity, measurements, and outcomes (Read 26). Foucault’s research argues expounds the connection between a particular formation of subjectivity, a particular political ideology and the production of a particular conception of human nature. He asserts that homo economicus and the society were two features that were inseparable, and they belonged to the typical collaborative of the advanced or technological liberal governmentality. Foucault did not consider this to be a coincidence but rather but a political viewpoint exposition of fixed reality. Homo economicus shreds the autonomous power in as much as it divulges the ultimate and essential major incapacity to master the entirety of an economic field. Foucault’s view is that the human capital philosophies have the part of intensifying the neoliberal ideal of homo economicus and of becoming a fortunate partner for a type of governmentality that works on the environment (Cotoi 116).
The theories of politicians and neoliberal economists often give rise to the study and analysis of successive and simultaneous democratic governments. However, Brown in her work doesn’t engage with the likelihood that neoliberal rationality is well-matched with that of identity politics in any important way. While concluding the fifth chapter of her work on law and legal reason, Brown argues that rendering government limits and guidelines as the opponents of free markets in all places. She focuses on Foucault’s argument about the role of law and the legal structure or framework in neoliberalization and concludes that law and legal reasoning not only gives form to the economy but also reins in on the scopes and practices of governance.
The court balances the movement of capital and discourse into a single channel, sharing features and rights against a typical antagonist, which is described as the state. As a result, an effective legal instrument that enables the citizens to challenge the economic power has been neutralized. In a captivating and conjectural argument, she expounds why and how legal reason disengages the political practice and the political imagery it deceptively promises to safeguard and strengthen. Through the careful examination of the neoliberal law, governance and political practices Brown forge a new sense that asserts the fact that the future of democracy depends upon the law and legal reasoning that will become an object of struggle and rethinking.
When the government is confronted with the truth about the markets, the state of law and legal reasoning is articulated and compels the .government to explain the ratings of credit, the rate of growth and the status of the investment position. Current democratic governments’ needs freedom of legal reason, therefore, the freedoms of the market don’t have limitations on politics but rather a fundamental component of its policy and strategy. Through legal reasoning, Brown tracks the recoding of relations between the state, subject, economy, and society by replacing neoliberalism with best practice for politics and governance. Legal reforms are crucial and should be formulated before even a state is formed or rebuilt, and Brown gives Iraq as an example.
Work cited
Cotoi, Calin. “Neoliberalism: A Foucauldian Perspective.” International Review of Social Research 1.2 (2011): 109-124. Print.
