I can imagine my reader poised to retort, "That was precisely Foucault's point!" Power is not simply exercised between the ruler and the ruled; it has been integrated directly into the makeup of modern agency, it fills up the pores of our most unremarkable day; it is the default option of our reflex assumptions about what others think and do. It gets under our skin; which is one way to try to understand what Foucault meant by his seductive term "biopolitics." Yet, as I have already hinted, leaning on Foucault as a guide to everyday neoliberalism can be a treacherous proposition, at best.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 262