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Finally, there is Marcuse’s account of the role of the market in intensifying the nihilism theorized by Nietzsche. Writing well before the neoliberal revolution, Marcuse argues that the market has become both reality principle and moral truth: “The people are led to find in the productive apparatus…

Not quite a century after Nietzsche wrote, Herbert Marcuse considered desublimation from a different angle to theorize the nonliberatory release of instinctual energies in postwar capitalism. What Marcuse famously termed “repressive desublimation” occurs within an order of capitalist domination, ex…

There is more. The economizing side of neoliberalism added force to the nihilism of the age and also quickened it, first in leaving nothing untouched by entrepreneurialization and monetization and then, with financialization, submitting every aspect of human existence to investor calculations about…

The above account, hewing to a neo-Marxist approach, formulates neoliberalism as an opportunistic attack by capitalists and their political lackeys on Keynesian welfare states, social democracies, and state socialism. In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Quinn Slobodian …

The fifth chapter also develops a leitmotif running through the others: as I have already noted, neoliberalism yielded effects very different from those imagined and sought by its architects. The reasons for this are several. There is, first, a kind of return of the repressed in neoliberalism reaso…