It is necessary to adapt: a critical genealogy of the evolutionist sources of neoliberalism

Abstract

This text aims to present the book Il faut s’adapter : sur un nouvel impératif politique, by Barbara Stiegler. In the book, the author develops a critical genealogy of neoliberalism considering the evolutionary sources that underlie the political thought of Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. Thus, finding a gap in the genealogy of neoliberalism presented by Michel Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics, Stiegler seeks to show the naturalist bases that inform the North American debate in the years immediately preceding the theoretical formulation of neoliberalism. The book covers the opposing conceptions of American authors in regarding to democracy, the “new liberalism” and the idea of the backwardness of the human species in relation to the acceleration of industrial society in the early 20th century. In contrasting the two authors, Stiegler argues that Dewey's pragmatism presents itself as the first political and philosophical criticism of the coming neoliberalism. Analyzing Il faut s'adapter also in the light of the context in which the book is inscribed, the review intends to show how the work constitutes a relevant contribution to sociological research on neoliberalism, especially for Foucauldian studies on the subject.