ABSTRACT
The opening claim of this book is that “a spectre is haunting Europe”, the spectre of an anodyne public governance regime that combines an unshakable belief in the virtues of neoliberal market regulation for organizing the production and distribution of individual and collective wealth with horizontally networked, inclusive and participatory public-decision procedures and institutions that permit an idyll of pluralistic governance to be staged as the eternal guarantee for social cohesion and democratic accountability. Throughout this book, the cracks, ruptures, aporias, and critiques of this depoliticizing configuration have been surgically dissected and intellectually scrutinized. Of course, no consensus has emerged – or could have emerged – with respect either to the theoretical and empirical diagnosis of the displacement of the political or to the prophylactic qualities of potentially re-politicizing discourses and/or strategies.
