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

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

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781804296189
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	01/20/2026
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Pierre Dardot is a philosopher at the University of Paris Nanterre. He has worked on the thought of Hegel and Marx and on the genealogy of western state. He published with Christian Laval The New Way of the World and Never Ending Nightmare.

Haud Guéguen is a philosopher at the Conservatoire des arts et métiers in Paris. She works on the epistemology of the possible in the social sciences and the genealogy of neoliberal anthropology. She is the author, with Laurent Jeanpierre, of La perspective du possible, Paris, La Découverte, 2022.

Christian Laval is a sociologist at the University of Paris Nanterre. He has worked on the genealogy of utilitarianism, the history of sociology, the thought of Marx and neoliberalism and education. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval jointly published The New Way of the World and Never Ending Nightmare.

Pierre Sauvêtre is a sociologist at the University of Paris Nanterre. He works on Michel Foucault, Murray Bookchin, the commons and communalism. He is the author of Foucault, Paris, Ellipses, 2017.

Editorial 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

From the Publisher