An Invitation to Recover Our Imaginations

/Review: Brandon Absher, The Rise of Neoliberal Philosophy: Human Capital, Profitable Knowledge, and the Love of Wisdom (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021), 196 pages./ This review explores Brandon Absher’s (2021) The Rise of Neoliberal Philosophy: Human Capital, Profitable Knowledge, and the Love of Wisdom. Rise offers an accessible breakdown of Neoliberalism, its cultivation of the Neoliberal University, an argument for the claim that academic philosophy has contracted neoliberal predilections, and some thoughts about what should be done as a result. The book is, by all accounts, a strong critical deconstruction of institutionalized philosophy and the role academic philosophers often play in perpetuating many of its exclusionary practices. Absher’s work is rigorous and often echoes Herbert Marcuse’s 1937 claim that the imagination is the rational faculty of freedom.