Neo-liberalism Archives - Public Seminar

Feature

How Utopia Became a Real Estate Leaflet?

Discursive formation of branded housing projects in Turkey

December 14, 2017 • by Bilge Serin

When it comes to gated communities, recurrences of similar everyday life images and spatial representations in mass media form a discourse of the future everyday life. It depicts an ideal living environment that aligns neoliberalization with an idealization of private urban services, commodified forms of housing production, enclave living and ...

Feature

The Death of Homo Economicus

A review of Peter Fleming’s latest book

November 22, 2017 • by Vince Carducci

Fleming takes up the metaphor of the tsunami to describe the 2008-2009 financial crisis and its aftermath. The tsunami metaphor has been invoked, particularly in the media, Fleming notes, as a way to frame discussions of the economic devastation and subsequent austerity that the crash has wrought on economies around the world. ...

Feature

Feminism, Capitalism, and Critique: Essays in Honor of Nancy Fraser

A book excerpt from Banu Bargu and Chiara Bottici

November 7, 2017 • by Banu Bargu and Chiara Bottici

What has followed is a veritable revival of research on different aspects of capitalism (see, for example, Piketty 2013; Stiglitz 2013). While the movement away from the predominantly culturalist perspectives toward the register of materiality has been welcomed by many, this turn to the material sphere has not exactly been ...

Feature

Neoliberal Horizons in Subjectivity

An excerpt from Jorge Alemán’s latest book

October 20, 2017 • by Jorge Alemán

It’s definitive to admit that when it comes to the symbolic order of language, in its distinct variants and modes of appearance, we must always distinguish two different dimensions. Firstly, we must indicate the “dependence and subordination” of the speaking being, with respect to the structural and ontological order of ...

Feature

Speculation and Counter-speculation

From value to price, from labor to debt, from revolution to disruption

October 12, 2017 • by Joshua Simon

Finance is speculation on debt. In the past decades, finance has replaced production, while debt has replaced waged labor as the main generator of profit in the contemporary economy. Under the reign of production, labor-time aimed to semiotize value. In other words, each terrain of human activity was assigned a ...

Feature

How We Got Here

Transition failures, their causes, and the populist interest in the constitution

October 11, 2017 • by Andrew Arato

The answers to these questions are related. In the following, in the form of six theses, I start with what I mean by “populism”. Next, I wish to point to the two deficits of liberal democracy that provide the context for the rise of populist politics. These deficits have been ...

Feature

American Idiot

Rethinking Anti-Intellectualism in the Age of Trump

August 25, 2017 • by Nicholas Baer

“On my arrival in the United States I was surprised to find so much distinguished talent among the subjects, and so little among the heads of the Government.” We may fairly assume that Alexis de Tocqueville would be even more surprised if he were to visit today. For while Tocqueville ...

Feature

How to Rescue ‘The People’ from Populism

Reviving the law to reclaim liberal democracy

July 24, 2017 • by Alessandro Ferrara

Can Rawls's paradigm of “political liberalism” help us understand populism and cope with it? Should this question sound surprising, think of how much water has flown under the bridges of democracy since the time when advocates of participatory, “strong” democracy like Barber intimated that “the survival of democracy depends on ...

How to Rescue ‘The People’ from Populism

Feature

The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization

Poetry, Art, and the New Spirit of Capitalism

July 16, 2017 • by Vince Carducci

Updating Walter Benjamin -- whose famous essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' on which the title of his book riffs -- poet and critic Jasper Bernes seeks nothing less than a complete reconsideration of poetry and art over the past 50 years, coinciding with the ...

The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization

Feature

On Adivasi Development and Resistance in India

Existential questions faced by the subaltern

June 9, 2017 • by Aabid Firdausi

Existential questions faced by the subaltern When accepting the 2004 City of Sydney Peace Prize, Arundhati Roy remarked, “there's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” This quote aptly captures the persecution and repression faced by people marginalized by society’s relentless ...

On Adivasi Development and Resistance in India

Feature

On Theorizing Neoliberalism

The Problems and Politics of a Critique

April 20, 2017 • by Bryant William Sculos

In a recent piece for Public Seminar, Jeffery Goldfarb explores the problems of the term and concept of neoliberalism, specifically its inconsistent application by those on the left. He claims that neoliberalism is used to describe a wide range of policy positions from public-private ventures up to the complete deregulation of ...

Feature

Three Futures for the Democratic Party

The Party Beyond Hillary and Bernie

April 13, 2017 • by Macabe Keliher

The electoral defeat of the Democratic Party last November, coupled with a lackluster resistance to Trump and the Republican agenda, has exposed a political party long in decay. Having lost nearly one thousand seats in local and national elections over the past eight years, and then the presidency, the Democratic ...