Pierre Dardot, Haud Guéguen, Christian Laval

The Choice of Civil War

Neoliberal Strategy and the Politics of the Enemy
Übersetzung:Bliss, Andrew James

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Why do neoliberal policies continue to be implemented and supported by electoral majorities, despite their obvious economic failures and the ever-increasing tensions they produce in society?

To understand this, we need to reread the history of neoliberalism less from the point of view of its economic recipes than of the construction of its political strategy to achieve power.

From Hayek to Thatcher and Pinochet, from Mises to Trump and Bolsonaro, and from Lippmann to Macron, neoliberals have drawn on ideology, constitutional economics, labor discipline, cultural wars as well as police and military force to prevent popular resistance from organizing. And whatever their doctrinal differences, they all see the state's tight control of democracy as the most effective means of defeating egalitarian alternatives.

Margaret Thatcher's "There is no alternative" was not a historical statement, but the strategic objective of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism can therefore persevere today by its ability to defeat its opponents while deepening social and cultural regression.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Durnell MDL / Verso UK
• Artikelnr. des Verlages: 9180
• PBO
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. Januar 2026
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 234mm x 153mm x 17mm
• Gewicht: 300g
• ISBN-13: 9781804296189
• ISBN-10: 180429618X
• Artikelnr.: 72564793

Autorenporträt

Pierre Sauvêtre is a sociologist at the University of Paris Nanterre. He works on Michel Foucault, Murray Bookchin, the commons and communalism. He is the author of Murray Bookchin et l'objectif communocène, Paris, L'Atelier, 2024. Haud Guéguen is a philosopher at the Conservatoire des arts et métiers in Paris. She works on the epistemology of the possible in the social sciences and the genealogy of neoliberal anthropology. She is the author, with Laurent Jeanpierre, of La perspective du possible, Paris, La Découverte, 2022. Christian Laval is a sociologist at the University of Paris Nanterre. He has worked on the genealogy of utilitarianism, the history of sociology, the thought of Marx and neoliberalism and education. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval jointly published The New Way of the World and Never Ending Nightmare. Pierre Sauvêtre is a sociologist at the University of Paris Nanterre. He works on Michel Foucault, Murray Bookchin, the commons and communalism. He is the author of Foucault, Paris, Ellipses, 2017.

Rezensionen

Dardot et al. now paint neoliberalism as a form of political and economic warfare, claiming that what has widely been perceived as the gradual emergence of a new governmental rationality, a capillary production of economic
subjects, or a transformation in the structures of economic life, is first and foremost to be understood as a kind of civil war, a frequently one-sided class struggle that has recently taken particularly virulent forms across the globe,
from the Trump ascendancy to the juridical coup against the Partido dos Trabalhadores that brought Jair Bolsonaro to power in Brazil, from the securitarian onslaught against the gilets jaunes in France to the consolidation
of authoritarian and exceptional forms of rule in the heartlands as well as the intermundia of global capitalism. Far from constituting a bloodless technocratic rationality, neoliberalism now appears as a fundamentally political form, one that is always strategically oriented against socialism, trade unionism and the welfare state. Alberto Toscano New Left Review