Homo oeconomicus x homo politicus: considerations about neoliberalism and changes in the democratic imaginary

Abstract

This article intends to analyze the implications of a hypothesis that extends Foucault's analysis of neoliberalism from its effects on modern democracy. For this purpose, Wendy Brown's recent work examines how neoliberal rationality affects democracy, transforms its imaginary and even its main subject, namely the demos. Brown points to two problems of the "neoliberalism's stealth revolution," namely that the neoliberal rationality transforms and undoes democracy by directly affecting its fundamental principle of popular sovereignty. Such transformation is made from the change produced in the democratic imaginary and, mainly, from the transformation of the economic subject from a subject of interest to human capital, as well as the political subject, relegated to the background. From this first problem, we examine how they happen and what are the consequences of changing the democratic imaginary and its central political subject. The second problem pointed out by Brown deals with the interference of neoliberal reason in sovereign autonomy. The second part of this article seeks, therefore, to analyze the relationship between the sovereignty of the nation-state and the notion of popular sovereignty from the problem of the expansion of capital and the vulnerability of the frontiers and territory where citizenship is exercised.