Die neoliberale Hegemonie als Gefahr für die Demokratie

Neoliberalism and the racialized critique of democracy

“…Neoliberalism, on this view, mounts a two‐pronged assault on the democratic imaginary. First, it discursively reconstructs democracy by assigning it a series of alternative meanings, casting it as a “marketplace of opinions,” for instance (Brown, 2015; Lösch, 2008), or as a purely utilitarian means of electing governmental officials (Dardot & Laval, 2019). This strips the concept of democracy of even its most basic connotation—that is, the “rule” of the “people”—even as it redefines it in strictly transactional terms.…”

“…F. A. Hayek, on the other hand, was not content with such measures, as he believed that democratic rule impinged not just on economic policy but on the integrity of the rule of law as such. He accordingly spent the last decades of his life articulating what he termed a “model constitution” (Hayek, 2013) that, if implemented, would drastically restrict the people's influence on the legislature, effectively cutting it off from the law and divesting it of its sovereignty (Lösch, 2008). 2…”

“…Although the problem of democracy has been approached by neoliberal thinkers in myriad different ways (Biebricher, 2015, 2019; Lösch, 2008), the one solution they most commonly theorized (and that has arguably proved the most influential) is the establishment, through legislation or even constitutional design, of strict limitations to the influence and reach of the citizenry (Cornelissen, 2017). The neoliberal critique of democracy is, as one recent study puts it, “ultimately a matter of assigning non‐negotiable limits to representative democracy itself” (Dardot & Laval, 2019, p. 33).…”

“…Without it, however, we lose the language and frame by which we are accountable to the present and entitled to make our own future, the language and frame with which we might contest the forces otherwise claiming that future” (Brown, 2015, 210). This explains why so much critical scholarship on neoliberalism is animated by a profound concern for its antipathy toward democratic imaginaries (e.g., Biebricher, 2015; Bonefeld, 2017; Brown, 2006, 2019; Dardot & Laval 2019; Irving, 2018; Kiely, 2017; Lösch, 2008; Olssen, 2018; Slobodian, 2018).…”