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THIS may seen far afield from a site devoted the arts, but anyone who’s read CultureCrash the blog, or the book that inspired it, knows that economics and our values are central to my concerns. They also exert a major force on how culture does and doesn’t work. Our economic assumptions give us a sense of what is — and isn’t — possible in our society.
So I’m pleased to find this excellent interview — “Neoliberalism poisons everything” — with UC Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown, whose new book is called “Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution.” The conversation is mostly about the origins and effects of radical market worship, specifically as they apply to high school and higher education. I’ll point out the obvious: The dismantling of arts education in U.S. public schools was done in part on neoliberal grounds, and the undercutting of humanities majors at universities uses similar reasoning — that these schools are there to train cogs for the workforce.
I do 
wish Brown had discussed the roots of neolib in Hayek, Ayn Rand (right) and others.
Here’s Brown about how it takes over our minds, and every other part of us:
…I argue that there is something else about neoliberalism that we really need to attend to, which is the way it operates as a whole form of reason. By that, I mean that it is an understanding of the world and of the human beings within it as nothing but markets — and an understanding of human beings as fully reducible to market actors. Everything we do and everything we are, we are simply acting as market creatures. This is what is really novel about neoliberalism, because classic economic liberalism understood us as behaving as market actors in markets but then going off and behaving differently in domains of ethics or politics or religion or family life and so on.
Looking forward to seeing this book.
I went to HS with the leader of the SV objectivists, Peter Thiel. We took German and math classes together. Oddly, I never saw him in any of my arts classes. Don’t blame our schooling. Many of our former classmates are avid consumers and producers of arts and sciences.
Glad to see this book. Americans have been incredibly slow to see the problems inherent in neoliberalism and its effects on culture. I published a lengthy article 11 years ago here on ArtsJournal discussing the very topics Wendy Brown addresses. See:
http://www.osborne-conant.org/arts_funding.htm
I agree that Rand’s objectivism fits the amoral market mentality, but if you read what Hayek says about ‘Rule of Law’, it is hard to find a more salubrious concept to benefit the demos as a whole.
And what irony to recently hear someone from the opposite ideological camp coolly drinking a glass of wine while nonchalantly discussing the market value of babies heads and body parts. Here we see demonstrated the truth that has for so long been ignored or denied by political observers; the two ends of the socio-economic / political camps are really blood brothers bonded by a common foundation, that the ends justifies the means.
But if we are all the product of evolution, then so are all of the theories that Wendy Brown correctly points out are more than economic theories but are total life philosophies. Where is the transcendent philosophy that allows us to look down and judge the virtues of one vs. the other?
Scott, have you read Jaron Lanier? He’s another person who has noticed a thought system that reduces people to less than what they are… and that system is the internet. You are Not a Gadget is the book I’m most familiar with.