Liberal Democracy in Crisis: Rethinking Resistance Under Neoliberal Governmentality

ISBN-13: 9783030074234 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 214 str.

Alen Toplisek

Spis treści

1. Introduction

2. Understanding the crisis of liberal democracy and rethinking democratic politics  

2.1 Democracy’s governability crisis

2.2 The tension between liberalism and democracy: the structural explanation

2.3 The critique of aggregative and deliberative models of democracy

2.4 Abandoning the rationalist view of politics: antagonism and hegemony

2.5 Challenging the neutrality of liberal democracy

2.6 Repoliticisation and radicalisation of democracy: post-2011 protest movements and populism   

3. Understanding (Neo)Liberalism: The Relationship between the Liberal State and Free Market Capitalism

3.1 Constructing a political economy analysis after Marx       

3.2 Conceptualising liberal governmentality   

3.3 The emergence of liberal governmentality: self-limitation, political economy and bio-politics     

3.4 The contradictions of the self-regulating market and the double-movement         

3.5 The emergence of neoliberal governmentality and the hollowing out of democracy

4. Crisis: Critique, Temporality and Trauma   

4.1 A brief analysis of conceptions of crisis   

4.2 Crisis and critique 

4.3 Crisis as an event and temporality

4.4 Crisis as trauma and the possibility of resistance  

5. Politics and Resistance as Power

5.1 The relationship between politics and power: Arendt and Foucault          

5.2 How to think power differently    

5.3 Thinking the relationship between counter-conduct and conducting power through institutionalisation   

5.4 Interplay between politics and resistance as a vicious circle         

6. Challenging Neoliberal Governmentality: Social Movements and the New Radical Left    

6.1 Neoliberal governmentality after the 2008 financial crisis

6.2 Social movements and populism in times of austerity      

6.3 From movement to party: the case of the Slovenian United Left  

6.4 The challenges for the new radical left in Europe 

7. Conclusion

O autorze

Alen Toplišek is Teaching Fellow at SOAS, University of London, UK. His research examines the impact of social movements and political ideas on the political and economic governance structures in contemporary democracies. He has published in a variety of academic and popular outlets.  

Blurb

This book rethinks resistance against neoliberalism in the context of the crisis of Western liberal democracy and the rise of new radical left parties in Europe. Drawing upon a wide range of methodological approaches in contemporary political and social theory, it explores how the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis represents the opening of possibilities for resistance and examines the structural hurdles facing radical politics in effectively challenging neoliberalism. The author challenges the dominant conceptions of democratic politics by critically interrogating the role of liberalism in the depoliticisation of governing and the neoliberal restructuring of the democratic role of the state. The trajectory of new radical left parties in Slovenia, Greece and Spain is used to demonstrate the need to overcome the binary divide between institutional politics and resistance in radical political theory and practice.