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Neoliberalism involves significant state interventions in the economic, social, and cultural spheres—but not in the way embraced by classic liberals and socialists (external planning and administration); neoliberalism instead bases its legitimation on the myth that institutions that escape the rigors of the market and competition induce a new serfdom. This article examines, through the writings of Jean Baudrillard on the cultural logics of neoliberalism as implosion, transpoliticization, and catastrophe, the thesis that neoliberalism marks not the high point of capitalism but the crucial break with capitalism, one that produces a new and ironic totalitarianism of means not ends and a new kind of serfdom not envisaged by neoliberals. The article suggests, however, that Baudrillard's theorizing occludes important aspects of neoliberalism.

Baudrillard's theories developed dramatically over his intellectual career of forty years, and throughout these years he contributed considerably to the thematic of cultural fetishism. Consistent with his conception of the consumer society, he developed the notion of sign-fetishism, and object-fetishism. These are both steps in the radicalization of Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, drawing on freud's idea of fetishism as a perverse structure. The article notes that Baudrillard provided inventories of fetishism at regular intervals in his writings, and that these remained curiously unchanging. He contrasts the structure of fetishism with that of symbolic exchange, a cultural formation which resolves fetishism. His analysis of 9/11 is shown to be a complex combination of elements of the theory of fetishism (without being named as such) with that of symbolic exchange. Although Baudrillard developed the notion of fetishism to great critical effect, he did not theorize it or apply it systematically.

Foucault announced that his lectures of 1977—78 would be on `biopolitics'; in the end, they were on governmentality: from the pastoral of souls to the raison d'état . He announced his lectures of 1978—79 would also be on `biopolitics', but then presented lectures based on textual analysis, examining the way Smith and Ferguson invented a distinctive conception of civil society from that of Hobbes, Rousseau or Montesquieu, one that opened a site of civil society. These latter lectures continued by examining the birth of neo-liberalism in the very specific conjuncture of Germany at the end of the 1930s; it subsequently migrated, in a further mutation of `anarchocapitalism', to Chicago. Foucault adopted radically opposed methods in these two lecture courses.

In his Cool Memories series (and its complementary text, America) written over almost a quarter of a century (1980—2004), Baudrillard attempted to write in an aphoristic, fragmented mode in order to grasp the world without `finding a central point, a point of interpretation'. How should these notebooks be read? Are they simply an account of a way of living, or do they provide illustrations of a doctrine worked out in Baudrillard's theoretical works? This article examines a kind of writing which was envisaged as providing a mode of access to radical modernity beyond any possibility of interpretation. It suggests that the series can be considered as Baudrillard's way of living in the world as a tension between radical empiricism and mastery in the symbolic order. This then presents the reader with an impossible dilemma between critique or jouissance.

Of Jean Baudrillard's four orders of simulacra: the natural, the commodity, the code, and the fractal the first three have been widely acknowledged, especially the importance of the theory of the third order for his analysis of the Gulf War. But the fourth order has not been accorded similar recognition and his works around this idea are not as widely known. It is clear that his essays on 9/11 drew substantially on ideas rounding out the theory of the fourth order. This article examines the emergence of the radical theory of evil of the later Baudrillard.

Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) developed a wide‐ranging foundational sociology that has often been read as lacking a theory of politics, power and violence. This article argues that this view can be contested and outlines a reading of Durkheim's work that reveals that it places power and violence at the centre of its concerns through the concept of social energy. The discussion examines aspects of Durkheim's work on education, the family, gender, suicide, politics and war. It argues that Durkheim's theory centres on the way that social energies are produced and distributed. The heart of the theory suggests that in social development social energy can be centralised and concentrated in an absolute form, and as societies become more complex and institutionally balanced energies are dispersed towards the individual and this shift is the underlying cause for the move towards the cult of the individual and human rights. But this is not an inevitable progression as societies can experience tensions that shift social energies into tyrannical forms.