Wendy Brown is an American political theorist, born in 1955, who is professor emerita of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and who joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2021 as UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science. Her work spans the history of political thought, political economy, continental philosophy and critical legal theory; one description of it names its subject as the "subterranean powers shaping contemporary Euroatlantic polities" and the political identities they produce. Her first book, Manhood and Politics, appeared in 1988.
States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995), which won the American Political Science Association's Benjamin E. Lippincott Award, examined how woundedness became a basis for political identity and how identity politics was translated into rights claims addressed to the liberal state. Its publisher describes it as a sympathetic critique that tries to "free Left politics from its own snares." Later books include Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire and Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010).
Her most widely read work treats neoliberalism as a form of reason as much as a set of economic policies. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2015) argues that neoliberal rationality, spread through statecraft, the workplace, law, education and culture, "remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus." On her account the democratic public breaks into bits of human capital, questions of justice give way to growth rates and credit ratings, liberty bends to the appreciation of human capital, equality dissolves into market competition, and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Neoliberal reason, she concludes, undoes the democratic form it claims to secure.
In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press, 2019) addresses hard-right leaders who came to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity and traditional family values. Reading the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Brown traces an ambition to replace democratic orders with ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality, a project that, in the book's description, "sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family." She has since written Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber, and a foreword to a new English translation of the first volume of Marx's Capital.
Wendy Brown is associated with Democratic Socialist. See the archetype