Wendy Brown, political scientist: ‘Our organization of life is unsustainable and we know it’, Interview with Mar Padilla, El Pais, 1 November 2026
The California philosopher, one of the leading figures in her field, argues for a reparative democracy centered on collective care to help repair the damage caused by neoliberalism
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Brown is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and emerita professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Brown, who was in Barcelona for the Bienal del Pensament, meets with EL PAÍS in a hotel in the city’s Eixample district.
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Question. You say neoliberalism is not only an economic system. What do you mean by that?
Answer. Michel Foucault helped us understand that beyond the economic realm, neoliberalism also shapes social life, family and values. We know this intuitively because we see its effects: each of us has to be entrepreneurial, constantly attending to our own value… Neoliberalism also reshapes concepts like freedom and equality to suit itself, casting equality as the right to compete or freedom as the right to develop as an economic individual. All this has a very powerful effect. It hollows out democracy, it de-democratizes us, it de-politicizes us, and it makes us oriented simply toward questions about economic value.
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