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June 8, 2008
Pierre Bourdieu in his Acts of Resistance (New York: Free Press, 1989), describes neo-liberalism thus:
A new kind of conservative revolution [which] appeals to progress, reason and science (economics in this case) to justify the restoration and so tries to write off progressive thought and action as archaic. It sets up as the norm of all practices, and therefore as ideal rules, the real regularities of the economic world abandoned to its own logic, the so-called laws of the market. It reifies and glorifies the reign of what are called the financial markets, in other words the return to a kind of radical capitalism, with no other law than that of maximum profit, an unfettered capitalism without any disguise, but rationalized, pushed to the limit of its economic efficacy by the introduction of modern forms of domination, such as ‘business administration’, and techniques of manipulation, such as market research and advertising. (p. 35 )
The core belief is that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social, and economic decisions, neoliberalism wages an incessant attack on democracy, public institutions, public goods, and non-commodified values. Under neoliberalism everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit.
A democratic resistance to neo-liberalism holds that democracy in this view is not limited to the struggle over economic resources and power; since it also includes the creation of public spheres where individuals can be educated as political agents equipped with the skills, capacities and knowledge they need to perform as autonomous political agents.
One institution that provides such a space is the university, a site that, incompletely and imperfectly, sought to educate individuals to be self-critical and independent thinkers as well as participants in a just and democratic society. However, things have changed.
As Henry A. Giroux observes in his Higher Education under Siege:Implications for Public Intellectuals theory is now treated
less as a resource to inform public debate,address the demands of civic engagement, and expand the critical capacities of students to become social agents, theory degenerates into a performance for a small coterie of academics happily ensconced in a professionalized, gated community marked by linguistic privatization, indifference to translating private issues into public concerns, and a refusal to connect the acquisition of theoretical skills to the exercise of social power....This retreat from public engagement on the part of many academics is increasingly lamentable as the space of official politics seems to grow more and more corrupt, inhabited by ideologues and a deep disdain for debate, dialogue, and democracy itself.
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