Politics and Knowledge in Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber - “Politics”

Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Chair at UC Berkeley, where she teaches political theory. Drawing from Freudian, Weberian, Marxist, and Foucauldian angles of vision, she writes about the powers operating beneath the surface of liberalism and generating many of its limits and predicaments. She is best known for her interrogation of identity politics and state power in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995); her analyses of contemporary discourses of tolerance in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006); her account of the inter-regnum between nation-states and globalization in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010); and her analyses of neoliberalism’s assault on democratic values, institutions, and citizenship in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015) and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (2019). Her work is translated into more than twenty languages, and she has held a number of visiting professorships as well as Guggenheim, ACLS, and Institute for Advanced Study fellowships. She credits her thinking life to the excellent, accessible public universities of her youth and has worked in recent years to prevent their extinction.