Our winter break rebroadcasts continue this week with Wendy Brown from May 2019. Wendy's work on neoliberalism and democracy is worth revisiting as we consider how much the Biden administration will adhere to the neoliberal order established by previous administrations, and how those dynamics might change in the post-Trump era.
Neoliberalism is one of those fuzzy words that can mean something different to everyone. Wendy Brown is one of the world’s leading scholars on neoliberalism and argue that a generation of neoliberal worldview among political, business, and intellectual leaders led to the populism we’re seeing throughout the world today. But is it mutually exclusive to democracy? Not necessarily.
Brown joins us this week to help make sense of what neoliberalism is, and where things stand today. We were lucky enough to get an advance copy of her book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, which will be released in July. It’s a follow up to her 2015 book, Undoing the Demos, and you’ll hear her talk about how her thinking has changed since then.
Brown is the Class of 1936 First Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches political theory.
Wendy’s books: In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, Undoing the Demos
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