On the eve of the assault on Iran by the United States and Israel in February 2026, I had the chance to talk to Wendy Brown. This interview explores the transformation of the state under finance capital and the intensification of social nihilism. Brown’s analyses of the “global construction” of the Iranian predicament and the “privatization of the state” remain strikingly prescient and conceptually vital for understanding the current crisis. Ranging from what Brown calls “the equal right to inequality” to the planned profiteering from the destruction of Gaza, the conversation offers a rigorous materialist map of the neoliberal ruins we inhabit.¹

Mohammad Hadi: The timing of this conversation coincides with the unfolding of a tragic situation in Iran and the killing of many innocent people—a disaster that casts a shadow over our thinking, or at least my own. I have been grappling with a stifling force that shrinks the space for reflection. A voice from both inside and outside tells me that I should only think of what is happening in Iran. This position not only converges, however uneasily, with the logic of identity politics; it also leaves us with a more fundamental question: What does an inquiry into neoliberalism offer us at this particular historical juncture?

Wendy Brown: To understand Iran’s predicament, one has to move outside of Iran and think about the long practices of imperialism that precede this moment. We must look at least as far back as the U.S. positioning the Shah as a puppet power, and its role in a larger Middle East politics that has changed over the course of the Cold War and the post-Cold War period.

In recent times, the place of neoliberalism in setting these conditions is significant. In the past fifty years, nothing on the globe has been unaffected by neoliberal globalization, deregulation, privatization, and states and international institutions aiding and abetting corporate and finance capital. Neoliberalism brought about a fundamental transformation of the international order, recently brought to something of an end in the squaring off between China, Russia, and the U.S. and the resurrection of a “spheres of influence” foreign policy by the hegemons. Neoliberalism matters as a way of understanding parts of what has happened to the global order and parts of what has happened in Iran itself: making life unaffordable, the economy tanking, and the currency plunging. While it doesn’t explain everything, it has intensified the immiseration of the Iranian people and state repression.

The graves of the Minab schoolchildren killed on February 28, 2026, when the U.S. Armed Forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School. Photo credit: tabnak.ir.

Mohammad Hadi: You have argued that neoliberalism is not just an economic program, but also a governing rationality that reshapes how we understand freedom, responsibility, and even ourselves as political subjects. How would you explain this entire project?

Wendy Brown: This is an idea that Michel Foucault formulated. Foucault grasped that neoliberalism was not just a set of economic policies, though it does comprise deregulation, privatization of public goods, regressive taxation and the stripping out of the social state. But these policies are part of a larger order of political reason or political rationality.

Foucault helped us understand the shift from liberalism to neoliberalism as one involving a transformation of the state, society, and the individual subject. With neoliberalism, the state becomes a more overtly constructivist actor; it constructs and supports markets and does not just get out of the way like the “night watchman” state of classical liberalism. It is actively engaged in the facilitation of capitalist accumulation. Unlike the Keynesian or social state, which is redistributive, the state supports capital accumulation and becomes increasingly entwined with that project.

Neoliberal reason also involves an assault on the very idea of “the social.” Margaret Thatcher famously declared that there is no such thing as society, and Friedrich Hayek referred to the social as a “dangerous fiction.” Individual subjects are changed from citizens into bits of “human capital” in every aspect of their lives. This transformation disintegrates labor into individual entrepreneurial units and society into the same. In short, it is not just that neoliberalism breaks the social contract of liberal democracy; it breaks the social itself.

There are many effects that the original neoliberal intellectuals had not counted on. They did not anticipate the extreme inequality and precarity that would produce a highly activated, angry population: what we call populism on both the right and the left. They did not foresee financialization, the growth of the finance sector and its enormous power, one that now reaches into the state itself. The financialization of the state—the overtaking of state projects by private finance—effectively privatizes the state itself.  We might see this as neoliberalism’s ultimate coup in its ambition to dismantle all public goods.

Mohammad Hadi: Ideals such as freedom, tolerance, rights, and individual choice appear not only as democratic achievements but also as sites where power operates in subtle ways. How do these values become detached from democratic equality and redirected toward exclusion or authoritarian forms of politics?

Wendy Brown: One way to answer this is to note the extent to which neoliberalism has intensified a nihilism already quite developed in Western modernity. Nihilism, theorized by thinkers like Nietzsche and Weber, suggests that once science and reason displace the authority of God, values lose their foundations. Reason and science only explain how things work; they do not explain what things mean or how to value them. Neoliberalism intensifies this nihilistic trajectory with its notion that humans are only economic actors, nothing more. We are reduced to homo economicus across every aspect of life, weighing every action according to its price or enhancement of economic value.

What this economization does to politics, and more specifically democratic principles, is significant. Consider the principles of “liberty, equality, fraternity” that are heralded as the emblem of modern democratic revolutions. Equality is reduced to the “equal right to win or lose in a market”—the equal right to inequality. Liberty becomes the right to do or say anything that enhances your competitive positioning, including the right to be egregiously anti-social. Fraternity simply doesn’t exist in a neoliberal order. That is the principle of social solidarity the neoliberals attacked.

Mohammad Hadi: I have been struck by the thought that neoliberalism is a great plunderer, but its theft is not limited to the rights of its own citizens. It operates through a profound deception: While it dispossesses its own citizens of welfare and rights, it presents a veneer of legitimacy elsewhere, promising “freedom” to other lands while actually expropriating the possibility of citizenship and democratic capacity.

Wendy Brown: If I understand your comment correctly, you are suggesting that under the guise of freedom, neoliberalism strips human beings of every other aspect of survival. The U.S. experiment in Iraq in the early 2000s is a superb example. After toppling Saddam Hussein, the U.S. led the effort to neoliberalize the country. This involved denationalizing banks and state owned industries, privatizing the social state, and making all of Iraq’s assets available for external investment. This was all done under the sign of freedom, but it intensified long-simmering conflicts, brought the Taliban to Iraq, and cast many Iraqis into poverty and debt. Indebtedness is one of the great tricks of neoliberal austerity; it locks humans, cities, and countries into debts from which they can never climb out.

Mohammad Hadi: In your book In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, you write that the neoliberal critique of social justice in the name of traditional moral norms has become “common sense.” Figures like Trump, Orbán, or Musk, and even Iranian monarchists, pursue a form of authority that promotes traditional values—family, hierarchy, masculinity—in constant interplay with the fluidity of the market. What does this coexistence between a rigid command structure and market fluidity mean to you?

Wendy Brown: This is an interesting problem because in the U.S. there has long been a strong tension between the right-wing endorsement of traditional values and endorsement of unregulated capitalism. Irving Kristol, a founder of neoconservatism, offered two cheers for capitalism, withholding the “third cheer” because he understood it had a terrible effect on morality and traditional structures. Commodification and commercialism more generally tears at the moral fabric. Thus, today’s right wing “post-liberals” want to affirm capital while using the state to attenuate its effects. They want to use the state to support families, transform education and allow a post-secular religious order to unfold. You see this in Modi’s India, the U.S., Orbán’s Hungary, and Iran. The task is to use the state to offset capital’s effects, restore traditional values, shore up the heteronormative family, and organize ethnonationalism.

Mohammad Hadi: Neoliberal rationality systematically outsources political judgment and responsibility to market metrics and technocratic governance. I would suggest further that to preserve its legitimacy, this order also outsources its “negative residuals”—violence, failures, and ethical debts—onto other actors or distant abstractions. Morality itself is removed from the center of political life and reassigned to distant humanitarian spectacles.

Wendy Brown: I wonder if “disavowal” is a better word. The quintessential example is the original neoliberal experiment in Chile. The tremendous violence—thousands shot and tortured—was disavowed by the “Chicago Boys” for years. Neoliberalism prefers “soft power,” managerial language, and “slow violence”—sinking people into despair through debt and impoverishment, or uprooting lives through transformation. Quotidian neoliberalism also has a language of intense disavowal. This disavowal permits scapegoating; when life becomes unaffordable, people point to what is near, blaming immigrants, feminists, or elite politicians for their suffering rather than, say, the jacked-up prices of housing and healthcare resulting from private equity’s takeover of these sectors.

Mohammad Hadi: When it comes to violence, I still prefer the word “outsourcing.” I am thinking of Mary Kaldor’s distinction between “old” and “new” wars, where conflicts are defined by fragmented constellations of state, non-state, and private actors. Violence is dispersed and contracted out. In Iran, the cost of war is effectively transferred to the people themselves. Civilians are mobilized through calls and incitements from outside—the U.S., Israel, or the son of the Shah—to go to the streets, and this results in more repression. War is displaced onto intermediaries; populations and bodies carry the cost.

Wendy Brown:  War is now disseminated throughout political and economic spaces; it is no longer just sovereign nation versus sovereign nation. We see this in trade and tariff wars that intermingle national security with economic advantage. I would add “terror” to this specter of war. Protesters struggling against state power in both Iran and the U.S. are declared “terrorists” by the very military regimes enacting terror against their people. The people are recast as illegal combatants.

Mohammad Hadi: Finally, neoliberalism can even derive benefit from failure, injustice, and terror. We see “predatory wolves” excited to rebuild the “Riviera of Gaza” out of a nightmare of destruction and genocide. Finally, neoliberalism can even derive benefit from failure, injustice, and terror. Trump’s posture toward Iran shows this: His hesitation before open war was never a hesitation about harm—sanctions, threats, and covert strikes were already extracting their toll—but a delay for calculation, a search for how to convert the circulating violence and fear into advantage. When that calculation resolved, it resolved into war, and the same people who excitedly look to Gaza’s ruins for reconstruction profits will not be far behind in Iran.

Wendy Brown: The excitement of the “predatory wolves” about the prospect of rebuilding the “Riviera of Gaza” was a perfect expression of this. There was grotesque enthusiasm about the lucrative opportunities coming out of the nightmare of genocide and ecocide. Neoliberalism is exceptional at extracting every last bit of profitability from destruction. You see this in the work of asset managers who drive industries into the ground to extract what they can in the industries’ death throes.  However, a great many people in the world have had it with this order. There are signs all over the place—not just in the turn to fascism, but in the effort to build futures that have a different order of things at their heart.

Mohammad Hadi: Thanks a lot.

1. An earlier version of this interview was published on the YouTube channel Rhizastance. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. [↩]