Pierre Dardot Knihy

This powerful account of neoliberalism as a form of government by major French theorists Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval explores the genesis of neoliberalism-and the political and economic circumstances of its deployment- and dispels numerous common misconceptions about it. Dardot and Laval argue that neoliberalism is neither a return to classical liberalism nor the restoration of pure capitalism and show that to misinterpret neoliberalism is to fail to understand what is new about it: far from viewing the market as a natural given that limits state action, neoliberalism seeks to construct the market and use it as a model for governments. Only once this concept is grasped will the opponents of neoliberalism be able to meet the unprecedented political and intellectual challenge it poses. Historian and philosopher Philip Mirowski calls The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society the best modern realization of Foucault's pioneering approach to the history of neoliberalism. The Los Angeles Review of Books calls the book erudite and provocative.

Around the globe, contemporary protest movements are contesting the oligarchic appropriation of natural resources, public services, and shared networks of knowledge and communication. These struggles raise the same fundamental demand and rest on the same irreducible principle: the common. In this exhaustive account, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval show how the common has become the defining principle of alternative political movements in the 21st century. In societies deeply shaped by neoliberal rationality, the common is increasingly invoked as the operative concept of practical struggles creating new forms of democratic governance. In a feat of analytic clarity, Dardot and Laval dissect and synthesize a vast repository on the concept of the commons, from the fields of philosophy, political theory, economics, legal theory, history, theology, and sociology. Instead of conceptualizing the common as an essence of man or as inherent in nature, the thread developed by Dardot and Laval traces the active lives of human beings: only a practical activity of commoning can decide what will be shared in common and what rules will govern the common's citizen-subjects. This re-articulation of the common calls for nothing less than the institutional transformation of society by society: it calls for a revolution.

How do we explain the strange survival of the forces responsible for the 2008 economic crisis, one of the worst since 1929? How do we explain the fact that neoliberalism has emerged from the crisis strengthened? When it broke, a number of the most prominent economists hastened to announce the 'death' of neoliberalism. They regarded the pursuit of neoliberal policy as the fruit of dogmatism. For Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, neoliberalism is no mere dogma. Supported by powerful oligarchies, it is a veritable politico-institutional system that obeys a logic of self-reinforcement. Far from representing a break, crisis has become a formidably effective mode of government. In showing how this system crystallised and solidified, the book explains that the neoliberal straitjacket has succeeded in preventing any course correction by progressively deactivating democracy