Neoliberalism is commonly understood as an amoral economic ideology that subordinates all values to an economic rationality. In a powerful instance of this critique, Wendy Brown argues that neoliberalism's 'economization' of life configures the human 'always, only, and everywhere as homo economicus'. Elsewhere she argues that, despite its pragmatic reconciliation with neoconservatism in the United States, neoliberalism is 'expressly amoral at the level of both ends and means'. This form of criticism is not new, and nor is it confined to this neoliberal form of capitalism; it resembles nothing so much as The Communist Manifesto's awe-struck descriptions of the bourgeoisie, which leaves 'no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment"'. Although the argument that capitalism drowns all values in the 'icy water of egotistical calculation' was borrowed from capitalism's earlier conservative critics, Marx and Engels were without nostalgia for feudal bonds cemented by religion and sentimentality. Contemporary critics, while largely agreeing that neoliberalism reduces all values to cash value, have been similarly divided about whether this is cause for celebration or denunciation.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 15