Samuel A Chambers. Critical Inquiry. Volume 44, Issue 4, Summer 2018.

Many theorists and political actors today conceive of the battle of neoliberalism as a death match between the figure of homo œconomicus, who transforms everything into the terms of economics, and homo politicus, the figure of democracy as popular sovereignty and the creature who just might save us from the encroaching forces of neoliberalism. This essay challenges such framings of the political stakes of neoliberal capitalism today; its goal is to reconceputalize the phenomena of neoliberalism so as to open up new avenues for politics (including antineoliberal politics). I take Wendy Brown’s recent work as representative of a broader effort to build bulwarks against neoliberalism’s onslaught. In seeking to oppose one subjectivity (political) against another (economic) such projects lose sight of how neoliberalism functions in and as the production of political subjectivity itself. Neoliberalism is not only an economic logic but also a political project whose goal is the very constitution of homo politicus neoliberalis. Those efforts to oppose economics with politics therefore tend to misapprehend the enemy and mythologize the hero, leaving us not more but less prepared to understand and to engage with the forces of neoliberalism. The battle of neoliberalism is not Manichean. Neoliberalism cannot be opposed exclusively on the basis of alternative forms of subjectivity; it can be challenged only by alternative accounts and practices of producing subjectivity—that is, by an alternative politics.

Homo Politicus

Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015) provides a crucial resource for rethinking our contemporary conjuncture. It poses timely questions in an accessible and animated form; unsurprisingly, it has already become a source point for varied and noteworthy discussions of neoliberalism. As many have previously argued, neoliberalism is made up of numerous strands: German ordoliberalism, American human capital theory, the “Washington consensus” of the IMF and World Bank, and others. Shifting her focus from the strands, Brown rightly emphasizes the distinct modalities of neoliberalism: it can be a set of public policies, an approach to governance, or even a wider “order of reason,” as she puts it (U, p. 20). Rather than choosing among these modalities, Brown deftly conceptualizes neoliberalism in such a way as to encompass all three. She first anchors her account on the idea of neoliberalism as “an order of reason” (U, p. 9). This leads her to the following implicit definition: “neoliberalism, a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms” (U, p. 17). Brown bases this claim on her particular reading of Michel Foucault, whose work analyzes the historical emergence, disappearance, and transformation of various orders of reason.

Yet an “order of reason” is more than simply one among multiple modalities, as it can both explain and encompass the others. Such a capacity makes this modality “fundamental,” not in the sense of philosophically transcendental, but in the sense of being immanent to the history in which that order of reason emerges. An order of reason can itself become a governmental rationality, which then produces concrete policy outputs. When she explicitly signs herself onto the Foucauldian project, Brown makes an implicit argument for the primacy of the “order of reason” in analyzing neoliberalism: governing rationality and economic policy become derivative of the deeper episteme that drives them. And thinking neoliberalism as a broader historical rationality does much more than trump other approaches; it also offers a sense of the multivalent and shifting nature of the discursive practices that constitute neoliberalism, while at the same time calling our attention to that lived reality that is neoliberalism. Brown’s Foucauldian approach to neoliberalism therefore has a salience that extends beyond her own project.

Brown stumbles, I submit, not in committing herself to Foucault’s project, but in her attempt to step beyond it. In particular, I want to suggest that in her efforts to combat neoliberalism Brown undoes some of the fundamental advantages of Foucault’s approach to history, reason, and above all, politics. Brown wants to defend us against neoliberalism, and for her this means constructing a protective barrier to keep out the encroaching neoliberal forces; yet in her effort to protect and defend, Brown unwittingly depoliticizes neoliberalism while falling back on an untenable conception of politics.

To unfold this strong claim I need to step back to describe Brown’s most important move in this text. That move is two-fold: just as Brown marks a substantive theoretical and historical departure from Foucault, she simultaneously establishes her overall political position vis-à-vis neoliberalism. Brown quibbles with Foucault’s specific understanding of homo œconomicus—she sees the possibility of a newer version of homo œconomicus who is now driven by something more or other than “interest”—but her break with him occurs with her introduction of a totally different figure, one foreign to Foucault’s account, but one upon which Brown will base her entire antineoliberal project—homo politicus. Here are Brown’s central contentions:

What is missing in [Foucault’s] picture … is the creature we may call homo politicus, the creature animated by and for the realization of popular sovereignty as well as its own individual sovereignty, the creature who made the French and American revolutions and whom the American Constitution bears forth, but also the creature we know as the sovereign individual who governs himself. Perhaps Foucault never took this creature seriously … it’s almost as if he forgot to cut off the king’s head in political theory. In any event, homo politicus is not a character in Foucault’s story, which is consequential both for understanding what is at stake in the ascendency of neoliberal reason and for the prospects of contesting its table of values. … I will be suggesting that homo politicus, however anemic, has existed side by side with homo œconomicus through much of modernity. [U, p. 86]

Putting aside Brown’s own aside—the unexpected and unexplained claim that the idea of the sovereign individual represents an undoing of the sovereign model of power—we can see lucidly that Brown’s major augmentation of Foucault’s account will appear in the form of homo politicus. For Brown, Foucault’s story is not so much wrong as thin: there are more characters to this play than first we thought, and when homo politicus is brought in as a new figure, the story of neoliberalism changes—or at least it could.

This is more than a scholarly addition to Foucault’s historical understanding of neoliberal rationality, because Brown hangs upon the shoulders of homo politicus the hopes and dreams of all who would oppose neoliberal rationality’s “ascendency.” Hence Brown immediately follows the above account of her reworking of Foucault with this description of the very crux of today’s politics, as she sees it: “homo politicus is the most important casualty of the ascendance of neoliberal reason, above all because its democratic form would be the chief weapon against such reason’s instantiation as a governing rationality, the resource for opposing it with another set of claims” (U, p. 87). Both of Brown’s transformations—the theoretical reworking of Foucault and the political project she initiates—depend upon her introduction of homo politicus as a figure in modern thought and (if she is to parallel Foucault) in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European history. Homo politicus, she must therefore show, is a crucial figure in the same “order of reason” that Foucault describes.

How does Brown accomplish this task? Certainly not at all as Foucault does. Instead of going back to the sources for the modern European order of reason with which Foucault engages, Brown turns to a very different sort of archive: the canon of the history of political thought. Indeed, Brown’s first move is either a perverse one or a radical one (or both), for immediately after making the above bold claims about the importance of homo politicus for modernity, Brown goes back to ancient Greece. Rather than indicate through a genealogical account how homo politicus appears and transforms in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Brown instead goes where genealogy promises never to go—back to “the beginning.” This “beginning” is the beginning of the canon of political thought—or at least close to it. Homo politicus, Brown now tells us, comes from Aristotle. She opens a new section on homo politicus with these words, quoting Aristotle: “In the beginning, there was homo politicus: man was ‘by nature an animal intended to live in a polis’” (U, p. 87).

Brown means this line quite literally; she follows it with a straight-ahead reading of book 1 of Aristotle’s Politics, showing that for Aristotle man is political because he lives together with other men. Aristotle is usually taken to mean that only men live this way—that other animals live together socially, but the being together of men is political. This explains Aristotle’s claim that only a beast or a god can live outside of a political community. Brown is clear in her affirmation of Aristotle’s basic idea that there are fundamental characteristics of human beings that make them political. As she puts it, “moral reflection and association making—these are the qualities that generate our politicalness” (U, p. 88). In other words, the human creature is political because of inherent characteristics, and Brown even takes time to note that such an argument is “complicated without being undone” by the fact of Aristotle’s “political prerequisites—slavery and private property” (U, p. 88). As Brown reads Aristotle, then, homo politicus is there at “the beginning,” not simply in the sense of the history of political thought, but in the deeper ontological sense that the very nature of man, in his primary being, is political.

Brown uses Aristotle to present homo politicus to her readers, but it goes almost without saying that Aristotle did not write about “homo politicus,” since he wrote in ancient Greek, not Neo-Latin. Let me elaborate on the difference so as to measure the gap between zōon politikon and homo politicus. The words homo and politicus belong, of course, to classical Latin; the former, meaning man, is quite common in classical texts, while the latter, meaning political, proves rare. However, the phrase homo politicus is almost certainly a neologism coined in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. As the Oxford English Dictionary helpfully explains, starting in the late nineteenth century “homo” appears “in extended use with various Latin or Latinate adjectives, personifying an aspect of human life or behavior.” Even more significantly, the earliest example of this usage occurs in the phrase homo œconomicus, which first appears in Charles Devas’s textbook, Groundwork of Economics, to describe a certain limitation in the writings of John Stuart Mill: “‘Mill has only examined the homo œconomicus, or dollar-hunting animal.’” Like homo faber or (more humorously) homo idioticus, homo politicus is a part of what is now called Neo-Latin (or New Latin) and describes the postmedieval attempted revival of Latin in natural philosophy and scientific (or quasiscientific or scientific-sounding) discourses.

Already, then, we can say that the Neo-Latin neologism homo politicus emerges from and operates within the social scientific language of neoclassical economics, and this situates that phrase at a great remove from the ancient Greek philosophy of Aristotle and his zōon politikon. Still, my excursus on Neo-Latin might seem the height of pedantry if we were to find that the words used by Aristotle mean, as Brown’s terms do, “political man.” But those are not the words that Aristotle uses. His text reads as follows in the original: “anthrōpos phusei politikon zōon,” consistently translated as “man is by nature a political animal.” Aristotle is not merely aligning man and politics (or claiming them to be the same). Instead, he is offering a definition of man that depends upon establishing a certain connection between man, on the one hand, and political animals, on the other. That is, Aristotle does not say that political man lives in a polis; he says that man is a political animal. The phrase that we find in Aristotle, that has been taken from Aristotle over a long history of interpretations, is zōon politikon. Aristotle does not point to the given facticity of anthrōpos politikon; he redescribes anthrōpos as zōon politikon. Rather than assert the existence of political man, Aristotle constructs a relation (a three-way relation between human animals, other animals, and politics). In other words, Aristotle posits man as a political animal.

Surely this means that one way to read Aristotle would be to take him to be establishing the very sort of figure of homo politicus that Brown wants to invoke. But this makes it all the more significant that Brown’s presentation elides that process of establishment. Brown says “in the beginning, there was homo politicus,” as if this creature were simply there from the start, given—a brute ontological fact. The move makes strategic political sense for Brown because, for her, the real importance of homo politicus lies in her claim that he has persisted through modern history; she therefore needs him to have been there from the start. But in erasing the procedure by which Aristotle institutes/inaugurates the human animal as a political animal, Brown cuts herself (and her readers) off from a wide range of alternative readings of Aristotle.

Zōon Politikon

Brown’s reading of homo politicus in Aristotle is the hinge of her entire book, marking the turn from her account of neoliberalism’s assault to her efforts to defend against those attacks. Homo politicus functions as the theoretical core of Brown’s project, so in emphasizing this aspect of her argument, I am also making a genuine attempt to engage with Brown’s work on its own terms. Moreover, Aristotle’s discussion of the zōon politikon in book 1 of the Politics has been so central to so many different secondary literatures that one could easily find dozens of divergent interpretations. Narrowing more specifically to the terrain of contemporary political theory, we quickly locate numerous readings by a long line of famous thinkers. In a recent paper Geoffrey Bennington offers a rich overview of just some of those well-known readers of what Bennington calls “one of the most famous passages in all Western philosophy.”

Of the numerous other readings, I will briefly discuss just two—both of which come from authors that Brown herself cites, and both of which ought to be highly germane to her overall endeavor. In each case we see that a critical engagement with, or a creative reinterpretation of, Aristotle (working the interval that Aristotle’s original text creates between anthrōpos and zōon politikon) opens up an entirely different approach to thinking the relation between the political and the economic—just the thing that Brown needs, and we need, in order to analyze contemporary neoliberalism. Both of the interpretations of Aristotle that I will discuss here go back to “the beginning” with Aristotle, by placing the interpretation of Aristotle at the start of their texts. Indeed, at stake in these readings of Aristotle is exactly the idea of beginning, of how and where to start, of how to understand politics or the political (or politicalness) in relation to society or history.

Marx’s treatment of Aristotle is well-known and oft discussed in the secondary literature, but that literature almost always addresses Marx’s more famous engagements with Aristotle in Capital—where Marx deals with the central and utterly vexed question of value by considering Aristotle’s also-famous discussion of value in book 5 of the Nichomachean Ethics. Less well-known is Marx’s elliptical but vigorous engagement with the more famous lines from 1253a of Aristotle’s Politics. This discussion appears in one of Marx’s failed attempts to write an introduction to his major text on political economy, what would eventually become (or at least take the form of) the first volume of Capital. In his 1857 “Introduction,” Marx starts where much of classical political economy and modern thought start, with the idea of human nature. His first move is once again to overturn—as he had done in the so-called 1844 Manuscripts—modern political theory’s and classical political economy’s hypostatization of a state of nature, that fictitious place where nonpolitical, nonsocial, and ahistorical creatures somehow constitute society, history, and politics. Having debunked the idea of the autonomous individual as nothing other than a projection from within the literary genre of the Robinsonade—itself only made possible by the emergence of a bourgeois social order—Marx turns his sights on the famous quotation from Aristotle. In a line that both directly presents and radically reconfigures Aristotle, Marx writes: “Man is in the most literal sense a zōon politikon, not only a sociable animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in society.”

I have previously argued that with this one line, read in the context of the larger conceptual work done in the 1857 Introduction, Marx offers a theorization that powerfully transforms the relationship between man and the political that Aristotle sought to establish—the very same relationship that Brown herself wishes to leverage against neoliberalism. Where Aristotle meant to ground the political in ontological characteristics of anthrōpos, Marx makes the case that the form that anthrōpos takes—the characteristics that mark that creature—are themselves products of the social order that produces and sustains such a creature. Put baldly and far too linearly, politics makes man—never the reverse. In other words, in his allusive citation of Aristotle, Marx means to utterly overturn the Aristotelian conception of zōon politikon:

Marx suggests that man is a political animal because the very idea of man belongs to a particular form of historically and politically developed social formation. Only having built a society could the idea of man, of the autonomous animal, emerge. … For Marx, we are political animals because we are social creatures that recreate our own conditions of existence. This last part is, for Marx, the political part: we need a set of institutions, systems, and structures through which we reproduce our conditions of existence, and while these may arise out of nature, they are not simply given—they are not simply natural. This means that only within the particular context of bourgeois society would we, or could we, even come up with the (mythical) notion that we are autonomous individuals in “nature.” Only the separation and distance between human animals, a separation directly produced by the capitalist mode of production and the broader social formation of which it forms a part, could make us into the creatures who would think we are separated this way by nature itself.

I take the time to delineate Marx’s rereading of Aristotle not merely to oppose that reading to Brown’s—as if I were suggesting that the upshot was a certain pluralism in reading Aristotle. No, Marx’s account matters because it is targeted not just in particular at Aristotle’s famous lines but in general at the broad question of how we understand the triangular relationship between the human animal, the social order, and politicalness. Marx therefore gives us more than a critical reading of Aristotle; he provides a distinct account of how we grasp the relationship between politics and economics within the terrain of a capitalist social formation.

Panning out for one moment, we can see that Brown is indubitably right in two respects: 1) neoliberalism incessantly tries to reshape the human animal as an economic animal and to mobilize the rationality of the economic animal such that it takes over more and larger domains of human existence, and 2) Aristotle took the human animal to be a fundamentally political animal. Brown’s mistake is to think that one of those accounts (Aristotle’s) could be opposed to the other (neoliberalism’s). Both accounts are deeply flawed conceptually and historically, while proving profoundly troubling politically. The human animal, as Marx shows, is always a sociopolitical creature, constituted within a particular social formation; any social formation is itself produced, reproduced, and transformed politically—that is, through politics.

Politics here refers neither to an ultimate or decisive political level within the social order, nor to a political sphere separate from society; the point is rather that societies are (re)formed through contingency, contest, and struggle. To say this is to show that change comes not just from “politics” but also from “economics”; it is to suggest that one of the ways in which a specifically capitalist social order proves unique is that, in it, economics becomes a major terrain of struggle, such that what people do in economics is political. To the extent that Brown’s analysis loses sight of this crucial point, her presentation winds up (unintentionally, to be sure) depoliticizing economics and thereby weakening any potential challenge to neoliberalism.

There is no homo politicus that one could beseech to save us from homo economicus because neither figure is pure, and both are historically produced and conditioned. It is exactly the emphasis on impurity that distinguishes Jacques Rancière’s rereading of Aristotle from many other interpretations but certainly from Brown’s. In her initial discussion of democracy as a contested term, Brown cites (approvingly, or at least neutrally) Rancière’s understanding of democracy as dissensus, but she seems not to have noticed how Rancière begins La Mésentente, his most well-known text on politics and democracy. The absence seems conspicuous not merely because Rancière’s book has been so much discussed in contemporary theory but because when Brown opens her section on Aristotle with the words “In the beginning” she unintentionally (I presume) echoes Rancière. He starts chapter one of his book with these lines: “let’s begin at the beginning, meaning the celebrated sentences of book I of Aristotle’s Politics.” Rancière’s reading of Aristotle focuses intensely on the lines that come immediately after Aristotle’s description of anthrōpos as a zōon politikon; these are perhaps the most famous lines from book 1, but ones that Brown’s reading skips. Brown rightly emphasizes Aristotle’s conclusion that “our political nature issues from [our] distinctly human capacities” and that these uniquely human qualities “generate our politicalness” (U, p. 88).

However, Brown leaves out the specific reasons that Aristotle gives for why the human, and only the human, has these distinctive capacities. Rancière opens his text with just those lines from Aristotle:

Of all the animals, only humans have speech [logos]. On the one hand, the voice [phōnē] falls to the other animals and is a sign [esti sēmeion] of the painful and the pleasant. (Their nature has developed to this point: they perceive pain and pleasure and can indicate these [sēmainein] to each other.) On the other hand, speech [logos] makes visible [dēloun] the useful and the harmful, so as [to make clear] the just and the unjust. This, in relation to the other animals, is peculiar to humanity.

Therefore the basis for Aristotle’s claim that man is a political animal—and hence the foundation of Brown’s homo politicus—is the distinction between phōnē (mere voice), possessed by all animals, and logos (reasoned speech), the exclusive property of humans. Logos makes man unique, providing him with those distinctively human capacities that, as Brown nicely puts it, generate politicalness. Rancière’s reading of Aristotle is subtle and complex, but for my purposes here the upshot of that reading can be stated succinctly. In response to Aristotle’s effort to found the nature of anthrōpos on the distinction between phōnē and logos, Rancière asks a simple question: on what basis, from what perspective, or through what mechanism is the distinction between voice and speech drawn?

And he provides a similarly simple answer: the only possible mechanism that could institute such a distinction is a political mechanism. To make this case Rancière first emphasizes the gap that Brown’s mobilization of homo politicus depends upon, and which it must reify—that between the human animal and all other animals. For Rancière, Aristotle’s genius lies in the capacity of his formulation to constitute anthrōpos by way of a specific property of a particular zōon. Hence Rancière’s reference to Aristotle’s “brilliant deduction of the political animal’s ends from the properties of the logical animal” (D, p. 21). Here Rancière highlights the series of steps in Aristotle’s argument: start with all animals, then narrow that set to “logical animals” (that is, those that possess logos), and finally derive the telos of anthrōpos on the basis of the capacities of those particular animals. Brilliant though it may be, says Rancière, this deduction itself is tainted because it rests upon “the false evidence of a clear-cut opposition that separates men endowed with logos from animals restricted to the sole instrument of voice (phōnē)” (D, p. 21; trans. mod.). The evidence is false and the process is tainted because the categories it seeks to establish (humans who are political animals with logos, on the one hand, and all other animals who have only phōnē, on the other) must themselves be called upon in the process. Only politics could determine the distinction between speech and voice, the very distinction that is meant to provide the ground for establishing politicalness.

Of course, one need not rely only on the respectively allusive and elliptical readings of Aristotle offered by Marx and Rancière in order to arrive at this sort of conclusion. Recent work in contemporary political theory has made the point clearly and in detail. In his significant 2014 Political Theory essay on the possible politics of nonhumans, Kennan Ferguson articulates the broad point decisively: “man may be a political animal, as Aristotle held, but an animal formed by politics as well as one which engages in it. We humans, in other words, do not have politics; politics has us.” For Ferguson, this is not only—and as I will suggest below, perhaps not even—a reading of Aristotle against the grain; it is a much more profound argument about how we might understand the essential relationship between homo and politicus—anthrōpos and politikos, the human and politicalness. Ferguson goes deeper into both the history and philosophical substance of all those arguments that would purport to demonstrate the uniqueness, the primacy of man; these run from the original Aristotelian argument for the logos/phōnē distinction, through toolmaking, on to properties of the brain, and others. None of these characteristics win the game of claiming uniqueness or originality because, as Ferguson shows, each may itself be the product, not the source, of a historical and political process. This is not only to claim that there is nothing in the human animal that makes that creature uniquely political—though it is surely to claim that too—but also to indicate the possibility that there is nothing at all in the human animal that we could mark as prior to politics. Ferguson puts it this way: “the generative presumptions of humanity and politics may be reversible: perhaps engaging in politics (defined broadly) helped determine what humanity became. That is, what humans ultimately became may be a result of politics rather than their cause” (“W,” p. 181). If even the human is a political production, then neither the human nor anything else can ground politics. This means that the beginning (or better, beginnings) turns out to be much less than straightforward; the beginning is something other than a simple starting point.

Homo Politicus Neoliberalis

Perhaps it comes as no surprise, as it surely is not unreasonable, that Brown wants a champion to vanquish homo œconomicus. But before discussing the potential hero, we should first reconsider the enemy. What sort of creature is homo œconomicus? In her reading, Brown makes it clear that the figure of homo œconomicus changes, both across the period that Foucault studies (the seventeenth to twentieth centuries) and over the past few decades—the time that most interests Brown (see U, pp. 31-32). Brown consistently describes homo œconomicus as a “figure of the human” and most of the sources she cites as authorities on homo œconomicus also treat it as a figure in this way (see U, pp. 79, 238-39). In other words, for Brown, the character homo œconomicus expresses and reflects the very sort of “governing rationality” that is central to her understanding of neoliberalism (U, p. 30). Brown’s sophisticated account cannot be reduced to the idea that the rationality of neoliberalism is simply a product of, an enunciation of, homo œconomicus. Of course not; it is the overall rationality, along with the attendant social and political practices that constitute and sustain that governing rationality, which brings homo œconomicus to life. Yet this surely means that one can challenge the hegemony of this rationality only through the production of a distinct rationality, not merely by proffering a distinct figure who would “possess” a different rationality.

And by placing homo politicus, a figure initiated by or derived from Aristotelian ontology, on the same plane as homo œconomicus, Brown muddies the waters. Where do these figures come from, and how do they operate? Foucault tracks the changing rationality of homo œconomicus, but it is prudent to stress that, for Foucault, this figure is neither a real, empirical subject nor a general politico-philosophical type. Homo œconomicus is a subject position that belongs to a definite set of discursive practices within a specific historical context. By pointing to the historical location of this figure I stress a point that Brown leaves out of her story: homo œconomicus is not just a philosophical construction, so Foucault does not need to make him or her up (as the philosopher or economist would do) but can merely uncover him or her (as the archaeologist does). As I mentioned briefly above, this figure emerges first in late nineteenth-century political economy critiques of Mill’s work, and the idea of homo œconomicus then retroactively expands backwards, such that it comes to refer to Mill’s predecessors in classical political economy, particularly Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Homo œconomicus thus has a discursive, historical, archival existence that Foucault tracks in some detail. When he then uses that figure to describe transformations in twentieth-century economics, he continues to operate on the same terrain—the space of theoretical accounts within the changing field of political economy and economics.

Moreover, in the time period that Foucault is studying, there is no such corollary figure of homo politicus. This is why Brown must lurch so abruptly from one period to another—shifting awkwardly from Foucault’s focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries all the way back to Aristotle. Brown’s attempt to retrieve homo politicus from Aristotle, so that she might then oppose him to homo œconomicus, requires an untenable conflation of a political ontology (her reading of Aristotle) with a genealogical account of history (Foucault). Homo politicus cannot be our champion in the struggle against homo œconomicus because the two do not share the same terrain; the former cannot win for the very simple reason that there is no field of battle on which the two could meet. Brown attempts to pull the thread of homo politicus back through modernity, to show that the “emergence of homo œconomicus may not mean that homo politicus vanishes or even becomes subordinate,” and further, to prove that “the rise of political economy in the eighteenth century remains compatible with a presumed sovereignty of the political over the economic” (U, pp. 92, 93). Yet as I have shown in the preceding section, the Neo-Latin neologism homo politicus does not precede but rather follows homo œconomicus. Brown’s homo politicus is a philosophical hypostatization, derived from a reading of Aristotle and then projected across modernity.

We cannot say, as Brown does, that “there was homo politicus” at the beginning because only politics—that is, a historical and sociopolitical process, a series of mechanisms of seeing and hearing, a whole distribution of the sensory realm—could tell us whether the creature that was there from the start was a logical animal or a phonic animal. Rancière formulates a related version of this point and puts it this way: “the simple opposition between logical animals and phonic animals is in no way the given on which politics is then based. It is, on the contrary, one of the stakes of the very dispute that institutes politics” (D, p. 22). Here Rancière shifts politics from the realm of ontology (as derived from the nature of human being) to the realm of concrete history (as dynamic process). This transfiguration of politics is the context for what one might call, for lack of a better term, Rancière’s alternative account, which appears in Disagreement in rather elliptical form: “the modern political animal is first a literary animal” (D, p. 37). The idea of literarity can help to make sense of this line, as that concept suggests that all animals are caught up in a circulation of words—surrounded by an excess of words, one that precedes and haunts every distinction drawn between the phonic and the logical.

Literarity, this excess of words that marks the human condition, makes homo politicus—as Brown, through Aristotle, conceives him or her—nothing less than an impossibility. We cannot first answer the question “what is man” so as to then derive his political nature; only politics can tell us in the first place (which is never really the first place) what anthrōpos is or will be. Brown’s articulation of homo politicus has the temporality of politics all wrong: her logic presumes that we could start with a homo that was already politicus (see U). What we have instead, what we always face, is the appearance of various zōa, only some of which/whom emerge as anthrōpos—an emergence that itself cannot occur except through politics.

And perhaps one need not go against Aristotle to make this claim. Richard Mulgan’s detailed philological work on this topic shows that, taking the broad view of Aristotle’s corpus, it appears that Aristotle means to emphasize that man is an animal (see “W,” p. 184). Returning in the mid-1970s to the passage from 1253a of the Politics, Mulgan begins by pointing out that “it is often forgotten that Aristotle uses the phrase [politikos zōon] of animals other than man.” Mulgan suggests that the famous passage from book 1 of the Politics could be translated/interpreted to suggest either that only man is political, or that many animals are political, even if in certain ways “man is more [politikos] than other animals.” For Mulgan, the former reading—though it surely has been the dominant one in the history of political thought—is far less tenable. To uphold it would require us to take Aristotle to be contradicting what he writes in other texts—an unnecessary interpretation since Aristotle’s original Greek easily accommodates an interpretation of the Politics not as giving man the exclusive property of politicalness but instead as showing that many animals are political. The distinguishing mark of anthrōpos lies not in politicalness per se but elsewhere. Aristotle thereby does distinguish anthrōpos, but the ground for that distinction is not politikos. Numerous animals are political, including man.

But this means that Aristotle’s own texts might be rendered compatible with the notion, derived in different ways from my readings of both Marx and Rancière, that politicalness is not a property of any given creature. In this way we see that there is no homo politicus because “homo” is not the ground of “politicus.” Another way of putting this point, one that speaks both to Brown’s reading of Aristotle as well as to Brown’s and our grasp of the current neoliberal conjuncture, is to say that there has never been just homo politicus. History does not produce for us one single genus that has endured throughout time. Rather, there has been homo politicus athenikos, homo politicus republicanus, homo politicus liberalis, homo politicus democraticus, homo politikus communistus—and obviously the list could go on and on. Political existence is not given in or by nature. The mode of political being is not a fixed ontological secret to be discovered; it is a distinct phenomenon of—produced and sustained by—a larger social order. Hence Brown’s question—how can homo politicus fight back?—is misplaced or malformed. The questions should be: what is our mode of being political today and how we might become political in other ways in the future?

This analysis makes clear that Brown is right to turn our attention to the plight of political animals—both historically and today. The problem with her formulation lies in thinking we could have, we could locate, we could call on, the pure species, homo politicus—or worse, that we could find it at “the beginning.” In the beginning there was not homo politicus, because in the beginning there was not. Each of the various kinds of homo politicus is itself the outcome of a dynamic and ongoing process but never the starting point. Homo politicus cannot appear in the abstract but only in specific concrete historical forms—in particular guises. It is only in this sense that, like homo œconomicus—who appears first as partner of exchange and then as entrepreneur—homo politicus also has a history.

To say this is to rethink the struggle at the heart of Brown’s project. To reiterate, Brown sets up a long-running battle between homo œconomicus, on the one hand, and homo politicus, on the other. Moreover, she strongly suggests that we are near the end of the struggle, or at least near an inflection point, since homo politicus seems to be close to death. But if there is no homo politicus at the beginning; if there is no pure species of homo politicus at any moment in history; if homo politicus always has a history and always only appears as a specific subspecies within history, then we must insist today that homo politicus has not been vanquished, nor could it be. Only the form of homo politicus has changed. The question we ought to ask is not whether homo politicus is still strong enough to save us, but what form homo politicus has taken today and how we might reshape it.

I have tried to show that Brown’s projection of homo politicus proves untenable, unviable, or ill-conceived. But the issue is more subtle than a mere refutation of Brown’s construction. It cannot be a matter of simply saying, against Brown, that there is no such thing as homo politicus. On the contrary, homo politicus surely exists today, but it takes the specific form of homo politicus neoliberalis. For better or worse, neoliberalism is not just an order of reason; neoliberalism is itself a series of historical processes and practices that lead to the production of a particular form of political subjectivity. But to say that neoliberalism itself brings about forms of subjectivity means that one cannot challenge neoliberalism merely by postulating alternative forms of subjectivity. Rather, any meaningful or robust challenge to neoliberalism will depend upon alternative theories and practices that themselves produce and sustain new forms of subjectivity.

Beyond Neoliberal Subjectivity

In an effort to unpack this crucial last claim, let me pivot in this final section by turning from the conceptual analysis of politics and subjectivity in the various (deconstructive) readings of Aristotle’s zōon politikon, to the relative terra firma of the history of economic thought. One simple way to grasp the history of economics is to view it as a narrative of articulations of subject positions in relation to power—that is, as a history of theories of subjectivity and subjectivation. To start, we can say that the classical political economists loosely yet still largely agreed on which forms of subjectivity were present with the erosion of feudal society and its replacement by bourgeois society: the landowner whose significance was on the wane, the bourgeois whose productive powers were seen as the cause of social transformation, and the worker without whom those transformations would not have been possible. Across their dramatic differences, the classical economists also concurred in their diminution of the landowner and their critique of rent. Hence the strange alignment of figures as radically distinct as François Quesnay and Ricardo: the former advocated an agrarian capitalist revolution in eighteenth-century France, arguing that only (capitalist) farmers were productive and asserting that industrial capitalists were “sterile”; the latter railed against the early nineteenth-century British state’s support of agriculture (in the form of the Corn Laws) and “stood as a leader of the industrial bourgeoisie.” Despite these differences, they still agreed on a decisive point: landowners (and rent) were the problem, and capitalist productivity was the solution. All of which means that for classical political economy (particularly in its mature, representative form in the figures of Smith and Ricardo) economics was a sphere of exchange populated by two primary species of subjectivity: capitalists and laborers.

This lens can render lucid a famous line of Marx’s that has often been taken as obtuse. Describing exactly that which unites the field of classical economy, Marx writes in a biting tone: “the sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.” But this is more than a sarcastic jab (though it is surely that too), as Marx is trying to get at something essential about classical political economy’s account of the power relations between subjects within a bourgeois social order. Marx is arguing that classical political economy’s theory of the sphere of circulation leads it to dissolve differences between persons that are otherwise obvious, even to the classical economists themselves: in the sphere of circulation everyone is an equal individual freely pursuing his own interest by exchanging his property. In other words, in the domain of exchange the capitalist who offers money and the worker who offers labor-power are the same; each is a “partner of exchange” (as Foucault puts it) whose rights are protected by law (B, p. 226). Marx specifically frames this element of his critique of political economy in terms of subjectivity and subjectivation. He claims that when we shift from the sphere of exchange to the domain of production, we appear to transform the very “physiognomy of our dramatis personae”: the buyer (of labor-power) becomes a capitalist and the seller (again, of labor-power) becomes a worker. Marx insists on the difference in these forms of subjectivity (which the theory of exchange diminishes) so as to call attention to the power relations that both hold them together and separate them. Hence Marx’s rhetorical flourish: “The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but—a tanning” (C, 1:280).

Marx and Marxism are famous for emphasizing the relation of domination between worker and capitalist, but less well known is the extent to which the so-called marginalist revolution in the 1870s—which marks the transformation from classical political economy to the neoclassical paradigm—preserves the same subjectivities even as it subtly seeks to unravel the Marxist account of exploitation. The marginalists overturn and displace—or suppress, as the case may be—the classical conception of value by arguing that “value depends entirely on utility.” The neoclassical equilibrium model thereby refuses Marx’s retreat to the “abode of production” based on the key claim that value is not created in production but only established in exchange, by utility provided “at the margin” (that is, by the next increment of a good purchased or sold) (C, 1:279). Marginalism thereby putatively unravels the idea of exploitation or domination by agreeing with the literal text of Marx’s ironic statement that the sphere of exchange is the realm of freedom, equality, property, and Bentham (that is, interest). This is all a standard telling of the neoclassical paradigm’s establishment, and of its eclipse of classical political economy, but here I want to emphasize an element of the story often overlooked: the marginalist revolution does not really change economic subjectivity. The dramatis personae remain the same—capitalist and worker; they merely wear slightly different costumes, as the neoclassicals return these subjectivities to the realm of exchange.

I trace this thumbnail sketch of the history of nineteenth-century economics in order to throw into sharper relief the point with which I ended the last section: neoliberalism produces a new economic and political subjectivity. More specifically, the neoliberal economic theory of the Chicago school explicitly theorizes and advocates a unique form of subjectivity, and, in this respect, the human capital theory of the mid-twentieth century proves far more revolutionary than the so-called marginalist revolution. While operating from within the basic terms of the neoclassical paradigm, Gary Becker and other human capital theorists ultimately moved against the marginalists by implicitly yet utterly undoing the distinction between worker and capitalist that had been taken as a given—not just by classical political economy, not just by Marx’s critique of political economy, but also by the neoclassical paradigm itself. In his lectures on American neoliberal economic theory, Foucault focuses on the way in which neoliberal thought shifts from an analysis of historical logics and processes (of exchange but also of production) to “the analysis of the internal rationality, the strategic programming of individuals’ activity” (B, p. 223). This distinct approach to economic activity entails a transfiguration of our understanding of labor and its role in economics; to shift from tracking the historical logic of capital to analyzing “internal rationality” is to alter the fundamental meaning of wages. For classical political economy, wages were the price of labor-power; for neoclassicals wages were the price of one factor of production as determined by a market in labor. In either case, wages were paid by a capitalist to a worker; the former started with capital and used it to buy the unique capitalist commodity of labor-power, while the latter started with nothing and sold all that he or she had to sell, that selfsame commodity, labor-power.

As Foucault powerfully illuminates, the neoliberal analysis of wages looks completely different. He unpacks the structure of that analysis with a series of questions and answers:

Question: What is a wage?

Answer: It is an income.

Q: What is an income?

A: It is a return on capital.

Of course, the conclusion is obvious, even if human capital theorists never say it quite this starkly: if by earning a wage a person is actually receiving a return on capital, then it seems quite clear that there is no difference between “workers” and “capitalists” for the precise reason that within a free market (capitalist) economy, everyone is a capitalist. The difference between capital and labor is erased by the sheer fact that “from the worker’s point of view labor comprises a capital,” and therefore there is really no such thing as labor-power that would be sold by the worker to the capitalist, as labor is just a sort of “capital-ability” (B, pp. 224, 225). The worker becomes nothing less than an “enterprise for himself”; hence it proves essential not to leave out the last bit of Foucault’s famous declaration that within neoliberalism homo œconomicus changes from a partner of exchange to “an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself” (B, pp. 225, 226; my emphasis).

Untwisting this tight knot of analysis we can say that for both classical political economy and the neoclassical paradigm the figure of economic man as partner of exchange underwrote two distinct forms of subjectivity: the partner in exchange could either be a worker or a capitalist. But for neoliberalism—specifically for human capital theory and the Chicago school—economic man as an entrepreneur is singular. Workers and capitalists are the same because they are both entrepreneurs, a term that emphasizes the work-like activity of the former capitalist and the capital-like investment of the former worker. Jason Read puts it succinctly: “the difference between labor and capital is effaced through the theory of ‘human capital’” (see also U, pp. 38, 65). The entrepreneur may, of course, pursue a wide variety of different activities—from using an inheritance to invest in commercial real estate, to funding an internet startup company on Kickstarter, to taking out student loans to go to community college—but fundamentally, in terms of economic rationality and subjectivity, every entrepreneur is the same.

The above analysis indicates the limitations in and of Brown’s initial, implied definition of neoliberalism (quoted earlier) as a force that “configures all aspects of existence in economic terms” (U, p. 17). Neoliberalism does not so much make everything economic as it alters the form of subjectivity so as to elide entirely the political relation of domination that the worker/capitalist relation had previously merely effaced. As Read shows, this means that neoliberal economic theory is not just ideology masking economic reality; neoliberalism must be understood in the way that it “create[s] subjects,” in the extent to which its theory both depends upon and brings about a distinct “mode of subjection, a new production of subjectivity.” Hence neoliberalism is not an “economics” founded on the subjectivity of homo œconomicus; neoliberalism is itself a politics aimed at producing (and quite successfully) a new form of subjectivity—homo œconomicus as entrepreneur of him- or herself. Ivan Ascher’s analysis of the “portfolio society” produced by financialization in late capitalism proves similarly lucid and insightful on the way such a social order “require[s] the refashioning of individuals”—for example in the form of the contemporary “borrower,” who has to be “bred.” It should go without saying that this new subjectivity is produced not by the definitional fiat of human capital theory, but by the institutional and discursive transformations that such a theory underwrites. Herein lies the illuminating power of Brown’s book, as her final three chapters all closely track and subtly detail the concrete workings of neoliberal reason through university administrative practices, legal rulings, and contemporary governmentality.

Like Brown, my own strategy is not to bracket the neoliberal production of subjectivity from an analysis of the force of neoliberalism as an institutional assemblage but rather to indicate the mutual entwining of the two. It is in and as a set of institutional forms, systems, codes, norms, and daily practices that entrepreneurial subjectivity is brought into being. But this means that any sort of political project that posits the goal of fighting back against neoliberal forces only hamstrings itself from the outset if it conceives of neoliberalism narrowly as an economic project grounded on homo œconomicus. Neoliberalism is a political project that produces homo œconomicus as entrepreneur of himself; challenging neoliberalism requires resisting that form of subjectivation while also striving to produce new institutional forms, new discursive strategies, and, with them, new subjectivities.

In his early and prescient critical analysis of British New Labour, Alan Finlayson offers an acute diagnosis of our own political impasse today. Writing about the Blair government’s wholesale adoption of “modernization” policies, Finlayson describes New Labour’s neoliberal politico-economic vision as a sort of Keynesianism turned inside out. Where the Keynesian project was based on the premise of using state power to overcome the problem of socioeconomic exclusion (by directly incorporating those who were otherwise excluded from society), New Labour’s neoliberal approach hinges on policies “designed not to create the conditions for social inclusion but to create the sorts of citizens who will themselves create the conditions of their own inclusion.” The state does not intervene in the economy directly but rather intervenes at the level of citizen subjectivation in relation to economic activity. At first glance, New Labour neoliberalism looks rather feeble compared to the great public works of an earlier Keynesian era, but we underestimate neoliberalism (to our own peril) if we fail to take seriously the very real work that it has done at just that level of subjectivity.

At the very least then, any antineoliberal politics worth the name must, like the neoliberal project it opposes, contain the seeds of a strategy or plan to intervene at the level of subjectivation—that is, to bring about a new form of subjectivity. Moreover, and crucially, this production of subjectivity, while necessarily political, will also need to be economic—an essential point inherently elided by the tendency within Brown’s analysis to frame the matter as economics versus politics. Therefore the invocations of an antineoliberal politics must be tied to an analysis of how groups within society might be organized in relation to their economic experience. This is one way to shed light on the contemporary politics of the rise of right populism in the form of Brexit and Donald Trump. In the UK and the US, the Left that still holds some share of national power (Labour and the Democrats) seems distinctly unable to conceive of a different form of subjectivity, of a different plan to bring such subjectivity into being. Instead, they offer only more entrepreneurship of ourselves. Of course, the campaigns to support “Leave” in Britain (particularly in England) or Trump in America left the real economy untouched, yet they did appeal directly to a subjectivity beyond the entrepreneur—in the form of race and nation. And if the political battle is between, on the one side, America First and England for the English, and on the other, “remain” and “pantsuit nation” (or homo politicus), then no one should be surprised that xenophobia, nationalism, and racism win out.

The precariat is another potential subjectivity irreducible to the entrepreneur, but it remains problematic because it names less a viable future subject and more a current victim of globalization and/or neoliberalism. It is for this reason that many diagnoses of the problems of the rising precariat class come coupled with the obvious solution of basic income. However, the debate over basic income illustrates the dire need for a viable alternative to neoliberal subjectivity. That is, if we had already established a vision for a collective political future, populated by nonentrepreneurial subjects, then something like basic income could serve as both a basis for, and augmentation of, that collective, that commons that we hope to bring about. In that context, basic income could be radically transformative as one element in a toolkit arranged to help bring into being a new subjectivity. Yet, in reality today, we lack precisely that alternative subjectivity and the strategy, plan, or vision to bring it about. Given the current hegemony of neoliberal entrepreneurship, basic income proves far too easily co-optable by Silicon Valley libertarians and other assorted neoliberals. Basic income transforms quite readily into nothing more than an entrepreneurial asset; it becomes the very thing to stand in the way of that commons, that collective future, that we (a we yet to be brought into being) still desperately need to envision and enact.

This essay offers no solution to neoliberalism. Instead, it insists on taking neoliberalism seriously as a political project that produces the very form of subjectivity that leads us to conceive the world narrowly in terms of problems and solutions. To oppose that project and to resist that species of subjectivity, we must admit that neoliberalism does not suppress politics in favor of economics, but that it mobilizes a particular political, social, and economic vision. An antineoliberal politics—or better, an alternative politics, a politics not merely against but beyond neoliberalism—must include a non-neoliberal economic model or strategy or plan (whether it be Keynesian, Marxist, socialist, or something else entirely) in order to advance its own alternative vision of a collective future—one that addresses inequality at the level of the collectivity and the commons, rather than through recourse to individualistic (entrepreneurial) tactics. Contrary to the proclamation of a recent San Francisco bus-stop advertisement, education (of individuals) is quite simply not the answer to poverty (of communities and groups). We must refuse the urge to disaggregate the data of poverty and instead insist on looking at it in the so-called aggregate—that is, at the level of the community and the neighborhood. To do so is to de-link poverty from individual education levels and to connect it instead to tax policies and lending policies, to the story of how “homeownership became the engine of American inequality” and to the history of racial “plunder.” Dealing with the entrenched and dramatically worsening issue of social and economic inequality requires the (re)building of shared public resources: from water to education to health care. And such collective renewal, in turn, helps to bring about, and also itself requires, the production of new subjectivities.