Authoritarianism

"A brilliant and urgent assessment of democracy's current crisis and capitalism's increasing authoritarianism. Channeling the insights of Nietzsche, Marcuse, Adorno, and Tocqueville with clarity and moral force, this trilogy of essays inaugurates a new mode of critical political theory while offering a profound diagnosis of this moment's political ills."-- "Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone" "Three penetrating essays which dazzle both in substance and style. Brown, Gordon, and Pensky give us an insightful analysis of the dialectics and dynamics of authoritarianism, neo-liberalism, and democracy. This book is a must read for all those concerned to understand the predicament of our times."-- "Seyla Benhabib, Yale University" "In this slim volume, three authors bring critical theory to bear on the swelling, confounding conjuncture of neoliberal, market fundamentalism and right-wing, nativist, racist, reactionary populist authoritarianism. Brown braids together Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Herbert Marcuse to give an account of aggrieved power and anointed wounds. Gordon revisits Theodor Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality, showing that Adorno would read the contemporary authoritarian culture industry as (following Leo Lowenthal) an exercise of psychoanalysis in reverse, finding a play-acting mob enjoying a simulacrum of desublimated repression that permits the economic status quo to persist unchanged. Pensky, via Alexis de Toqueville and Adorno, reads a cultural-functional numbing via legal-bureaucratic authoritarianism that gently infuses contemporary psychic structures, displacing and hollowing out the political potential for the powers of subjectivity. Is such a pallid life always already implicit in the functioning of liberal democracy under capital as its subjects vote in authoritarianism? Can critique act as a bulwark against authoritarianism? Recommended."-- "CHOICE" "If you are concerned by this political moment, first of all, --organize and vote. Then read these sharp critical reflections. In dialogue with each other, they give welcome new life in particular to Hayek, Adorno, and Tocqueville as they think through the possible futures of the rationality, culture, and habitus of democratic life."-- "Bonnie Honig, Brown University"

Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent books are Walled States, Waning Sovereignty and Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution. Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent books are Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, and Adorno and Existence. Max Pensky is Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University. He is the author of MelancholyDialectics and The Ends of Solidarity.