For Brown, who is more attentive to the impact of neoliberalism on politics, the rise of neoliberal economism is a fundamental threat to democracy and rights. Neoliberalism constitutes subjects who are indifferent to democratic political values and positively antagonistic to egalitarianism, she argues. Consequently, political problems are transformed into individual ones with market solutions, while civil liberties, the rule of law and fair elections are 'wholly desacralized'. Paradoxically, she argues, this provides fertile ground for neoconservative attempts to bolster the foundations of family, religion and state, partly through a civilisational discourse that moralises 'a certain imaginary of the West and its values'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 17