Bloomsbury Adorno and Neoliberalism: The Critique of Exchange Society (Critical Theory and the Critique of Society)

In order to understand neoliberal capitalism, Adorno and Neoliberalism advances a new approach to criticizing contemporary capitalism as a process of mediation that integrates individuals into the totalizing rule of money and finance. Critics of neoliberal capitalism tend to focus on its speculative departure from the real economy. Financialization, critics argue, has encouraged a virtual, parasitic form of capital that fails to reflect underlying value. The politics of neoliberalism can either be understood subjectively, as a form of economized rationality that reduces all aspects of life to economic investments, or objectively, as a strategy by capital to restructure class power. But why does neoliberalism persist as the dominant form of capitalism despite its failure to resolve its crises? By applying the critical theory of Adorno, Charles Prusik uncovers the form of social coercion that emerges from neoliberalisms epistemology of markets. Through an engagement with the concepts of neoliberal economic theory, Prusik criticizes markets by recovering their social genesis in the real abstraction of value. As a result of its appearance as a natural, objective, and rational mode of economic organization, neoliberalism has constructed a new form of domination. It demands the sacrifice of the future to the preservation of capital. By grounding the critique of a market system in a dialectical analysis of society as a contradictory unity, Prusik provides the basis for a novel approach to grasping this form of economic domination that characterizes the capitalist present.