Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics beyond the Age of Greed (review)

Against the Terror of Neoliberalism showcases why Henry A. Giroux is one of the most important and influential thinkers on the cultural left. Giroux begins this analysis, characteristically, with a focus on education, but does not limit this focus to what happens in the classroom. Occurring in churches, on TV, in popular culture and advertising as much as if not more than on blackboards—culture, for Giroux, functions as a pedagogical site because of its ability to produce narratives of identification and to mediate between private lives and the public roles of citizens.

Giroux critiques the present of politics, as always, eloquently and yet clearly and pointedly, with theoretical sophistication, astute insights into the structures in which power operates, a careful reading of its contemporary manifestations as well as its historical roots, and an in-depth grasp of current academic debates. He situates the current political crisis within a transformation of racial relations having to do with a public investment in “racially neutral” positions, the diminishment and depoliticization of spaces for public deliberation including schools and universities, the growing militarization of the social, and the squeezing out of utopian imaginations under the reign of a deepening cynicism and a generalized insecurity. Taking very seriously Antonio Gramsci’s claim that “[e]very relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily an educational relationship” (171), Against the Terror of Neoliberalism makes an incontrovertible demonstration of the ways that education is at the center of both how the forces of oppression gain ascendance and how the forces of dissent need to think the future of opposition.

The book begins by defining neoliberalism as part of a history of authoritarianism and as a not-so-distant cousin of fascism. Giroux argues against those who want to contain fascism within its particular historical emergence in the mid-twentieth century. He believes that fascism can be understood as part of a broader historical process categorized through particular organizational elements and forms that grounded it, like an anti-democratic ethos, incessant calls for self-reliance (generated by a saturation of faith in the market and consumerism), the diminishment of public space, and an elaborate and totalizing ideology of Messianism, mostly based in race and nation, corporatism, and a general popular mobilization of civil society organized around militarization, violence, and fear. Like fascism, neoliberalism squelches public debate, the essence of democratic culture, shifting resources to private interests while refashioning public spheres into institutions of policing and incarceration, as can be seen in zero-tolerance policies, metal detectors, and increased surveillance in schools.

In describing the material and political effects of neoliberalism, Giroux works within a developing critique that includes thinkers such as David Harvey, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Stanley Aronowitz, Wendy Brown, and Zygmunt Bauman, but his most crucial and vital innovation is in revealing the centrality of culture to these formations not just as a superstructural afterthought but as integral to their very conditions. Examples that Giroux gives are in the corporate manipulation of biopolitical discourses that create disposable populations, controlled by the state’s prerogatives over life and death, and in the corporate investment in messages formulating the “individualization of risk,” where social concerns are translated into personal failings. These exhibit “the methods through which hegemonic neoliberal pedagogies organize affective investments, desires, and identities into a web of common sense, social control, and consent” (173). In fact, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism is the first book to give a sustained treatment to the ways that pedagogy is necessary to the biopolitics that feeds neoliberalism and its connected forms of governmentality. The pedagogies that promote and naturalize neoliberalism, he says, serve to shape a governmentality that “transform(s) politics, restructure(s) power relations, and produce(s) an array of narratives and disciplinary measures that normalizes its view of citizenship, the state, and the supremacy of market relations” (170). Part of neoliberalism’s pedagogical movement, then, filters into the race-based carceral state, the rise of a punitive state, and “the lock-down...