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Cover of “The Choice of Civil War: Neoliberal Strategy and the Politics of the Enemy”

The Choice of Civil War:Neoliberal Strategy and the Politics of the Enemy

by Pierre Dardot, Haud Guéguen, Christian Laval and Pierre Sauvêtre

Translated by Andrew James Bliss

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    272 pages / 20 January 2026 / 9781804296189

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    20 January 2026 / 9781804296202

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TURNING CITIZENS INTO ENEMIES, NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTS HAMSTRING DEMOCRACY

Margaret Thatcher’s mantra ‘there is no alternative’ was not a statement of historical fact but a strategic objective. She shared with Hayek, Pinochet, Mises, Trump, Bolsonaro, and Macron a commitment to utilizing ideology, constitutional economics, labour discipline, and culture wars, as well as police and military force, to prevent popular resistance from organizing. Whatever their doctrinal differences, they all see the state’s tight control of democracy as the most effective means of defeating egalitarian alternatives.

Neoliberalism persists today thanks to its ability to defeat opponents while deepening social and cultural regression.

Reviews

  • A trenchant and provocative study of the symbolic, legal and material violence that has been deployed over the past half-century to secure the rule of capital across the planet. The Choice of Civil War breaks with antiseptic images of neoliberalism as the production of docile subjects or the marketization of everyday life, revealing it as the theory and practice of class warfare.

    Alberto Toscano, author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis