The Choice of Civil War (Pierre Dardot)

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.

Pierre Dardot is a philosopher and specialist in Hegel and Marx. His previous books include Sauver Marx?: Empire, multitude, travail immatériel (with Christian Laval and El Mouhoub Mouhoud) and Marx, prénom: Karl (with Christian Laval). 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 Professor of Sociology at the Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. His other books include L'Ambition sociologique: Saint-Simon, Comte, Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Weber; Jeremy Bentham, les artifices du capitalism; L'École n'est pas une entreprise: Le néo-libéralisme à l'assaut de l'enseignement public; and L'Homme économique: Essai sur les racines du néolibéralisme. 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.

Buch (Paperback), Englisch, 272 Seiten