In Undoing, Brown often implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, reverses that schema: economic conditions are not the origin of contemporary political changes but rather are the consequence of them. That is, the so-called 'vulgar' account might suggest that the economic 'base'-transformations in the mode of production, crises of profitability, and so forth-are the cause while the 'superstructure'-everything from culture to the state-is mere effect. The central premise of her account of what's going on, I posit, is a reversal of the classic Marxist base-superstructure claim. I begin, then, by unpacking some of Brown's diagnoses. I will return to the What is to Be Done? question, framing it through my own experience learning from the students of a different beset public university system, but for now I turn away from the 'Lenin question' of the manifesto and towards its too-often-neglected sibling, what a friend of mine calls 'The Marvin Gaye question': namely, What's Goin' On? After all, manifestos are not just prognostic they are also diagnostic. But it's also part of the book's method: Brown describes Undoing's argument that 'the many must be educated for democracy' as 'animated by attachment, scholarly contemplation of history and the present, and argument'-I am tempted to suspect that it is also animated by Brown's own work as a teacher, by her engagement with the students of a beset public university system (11).

This emphasis has much to do with the book's focus on transformations in higher education. More specifically, it seems powerfully committed to one particular kind of tending, naming teaching. Refuting the liberal assumption that democracy is a natural condition, Undoing asserts to the contrary that 'democratic self-rule must be consciously valued, cultured, and tended' (11). It does so by insistently and repeatedly posing the Lenin question: What is to Be Done? In Brown's book, provocatively, the answer to this question often comes down to knowledge and to teaching. I suspect that for reasons either of modesty or of political hesitation, Brown would be reluctant to describe Undoing as a manifesto, but I think it clearly sits within that genre. But the book also provides intellectual pleasures: in an era in which academics too often tend to shy away from 'grand narratives'-from descriptions of what a sort of old fashioned Marxist like myself still likes to call 'the totality'-this book is both admirable and urgently necessary.

Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos is unflinching: to read it is to confront the present in the fullness of its damage.

Undoing the demos