August 19, 2004
Henry Giroux sees that neo-liberalism is not just about the governing free markets with the light hand of regulation. He rightly sees it as a political philosophy. He says that neo-liberalism:
".... is also a political philosophy and ideology that effects every dimension of social life. Neoliberalism has heralded a radical economic, political, and experiential shift that now largely defines the citizen as a consumer, disbands the social contract in the interests of privatized considerations, and separates capital from the context of place. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism portends the death of politics as we know it, strips the social of its democratic values, and reconstructs agency in terms that are utterly privatized and provides the conditions for an emerging form of proto-fascism that must be resisted at all costs."
He gives no acknowledgement of community as a counter force to the market. Instead he focuses on the state, education, critique in order to "link the matters of economics with the crisis of political culture and to connect the latter to the crisis of democracy itself." He counterposes democracy and citizenship to the market and consumers.
If democracy has no roots in community, then are the roots of democracy today? They used to be in the nation-state during modernity. Is it in the socal contract? Is that looking back to Locke?
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