A penetrating analysis and critique of the neoliberal policies that prompted the global economic crisis of 2008.

Neoliberal Culture presents a framework for analysing neoliberalism in the United States as a culture - or structure of feeling - which shapes American everyday life. The book proposes five 'components' as the keys to any study of American neoliberal culture: biopower, corporatocracy, globalization, the erosion of welfare-state society, and hyperlegality. Carefully organized according to its central themes and adopting a case study approach in order to allow for thorough, illustrated analyses, this book is an important tool for scholars and students of contemporary cultural studies, popular culture, American Studies, and sociology.

Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures. Neoliberal rationality—ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture—remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either. In an original and compelling argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.

Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life synthesizes and extends the disparate strands of scholarship on Foucault's notions of governmentality and biopower and grounds them in familiar social contexts including the private realm, the market, and the state/military. Topics include public health, genomics, behavioral genetics, neoliberal market logics and technologies, philanthropy, and the war on terror. This book is designed for readers interested in a rigorous, comprehensive introduction to the wide array of interdisciplinary work focusing on Foucault, biopower and governmentality. However, Nadesan does not merely reproduce existing literatures but also responds to implicit critiques made by Cultural Studies and Marxist scholarship concerning identity politics, political economy, and sovereign force and disciplinary control. Using concrete examples and detailed illustrations throughout, this book extends the extant literature on governmentality and biopower and helps shape our understanding of everyday life under neoliberalism.

Examines the contemporary discourse on happiness through the lens of governmentality theory. Recent decades have seen an explosion of interest in the phenomenon of happiness, as evidenced by self-help books, talk shows, spiritual mentoring, business management, and relationship counseling. At the center of this development is the expanding influence of “positive psychology,” which places the concern with happiness in a new position of professional respectability, while opening it to institutional applications. In settings as diverse as college education, business, military training, family, and financial planning, happiness has appeared as the object of a new technology of emotional self-optimization. As such, happiness has come to define a new mentality of self-government—or a “governmentality” as the concept is developed in the work of Michel Foucault—one that Sam Binkley demonstrates is aligned closely with economic neoliberalism. Happiness as Enterprise blends theoretical argumentation and empirical description in an engaging and accessible analysis that brings governmentality theory into contact with sociological theories of practice and temporality, particularly in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. This book invites readers not only to consider the new discourse on happiness for its relation to contemporary formations of power, but to rethink many of the assumptions of governmentality theory in a manner sensitive to the mundane practices and everyday agencies of government, and the unique and specific temporalities these practices imply.

Neoliberalism, with its worldview of competition, choice and calculation, its economisation of everything, and its will to govern has ‘sunk its roots deep’ into Early Childhood Education and Care. This book considers its deeply detrimental impacts upon young children, families, settings and the workforce. Through an exploration of possibilities for resistance and refusal, and reflection on the significance of the coronavirus pandemic, Roberts-Holmes and Moss provide hope that neoliberalism’s current hegemony can be successfully contested. The book provides a critical introduction to neoliberalism and three closely related and influential concepts – Human Capital theory, Public Choice theory and New Public Management – as well as an overview of the impact of neoliberalism on compulsory education, in particular through the Global Education Reform Movement. With its main focus on Early Childhood Education and Care, this book argues that while neoliberalism is a very powerful force, it is ‘deeply problematic, eminently resistible and eventually replaceable’ – and that there are indeed alternatives. Neoliberalism and Early Childhood Education is an insightful supplement to the studies of students and researchers in Early Childhood Education and Sociology of Education, and is also highly relevant to policy makers.

Architecture and urbanism have contributed to one of the most sweeping transformations of our times. Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has been not only a dominant paradigm in politics but a process of bricks and mortar in everyday life. Rather than to ask what a neoliberal architecture looks like, or how architecture represents neoliberalism, this volume examines the multivalent role of architecture and urbanism in geographically variable yet interconnected processes of neoliberal transformation across scales—from China, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, Britain, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. Analyzing how buildings and urban projects in different regions since the 1960s have served in the implementation of concrete policies such as privatization, fiscal reform, deregulation, state restructuring, and the expansion of free trade, contributors reveal neoliberalism as a process marked by historical contingency. Neoliberalism on the Ground fundamentally reframes accepted narratives of both neoliberalism and postmodernism by demonstrating how architecture has articulated changing relationships between state, society, and economy since the 1960s.