In a century heavy with political ironies, there may have been none greater than this: at the end of the Cold War, as mainstream pundits hailed democracy's global triumph, a new form of governmental reason was being unleashed in the Euro-Atlantic world that would inaugurate democracy's conceptual unmooring and substantive disembowelment. Within thirty years, Western democracy would grow gaunt, ghostly, its future increasingly hedged and improbable.

More than merely saturating the meaning or content of democracy with market values, neoliberalism assaults the principles, practices, cultures, subjects, and institutions of democracy understood as rule by the people. And more than merely cutting away the flesh of liberal democracy, neoliberalism also cauterizes democracy's more radical expressions, those erupting episodically across Euro-Atlantic modernity and contending for its future with more robust versions of freedom, equality, and popular rule than democracy's liberal iteration is capable of featuring.

The claim that neoliberalism is profoundly destructive to the fiber and future of democracy in any form is premised on an understanding of neoliberalism as something other than a set of economic policies, an ideology, or a resetting of the relation between state and economy. Rather, as a normative order of reason developed over three decades into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality, neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized. In neoliberal reason and in domains governed by it, we are only and everywhere homo oeconomicus, which itself has a historically specific form. Far from Adam Smith's creature propelled by the natural urge to "truck, barter, and exchange," today's homo oeconomicus is an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues.

What happens when the precepts and principles of democracy are remade by this order of reason and governance? When the commitment to individual and collective self-rule and the institutions supporting it are overwhelmed and then displaced by the encomium to enhance capital value, competitive positioning, and credit ratings? What happens when the practices and principles of speech, deliberation, law, popular sovereignty, participation, education, public goods, and shared power entailed in rule by the people are submitted to economization? These are the questions animating this book.

These questions also challenge the Western liberal democratic conceit that humans have a natural and persistent desire for democracy. They presume instead that democratic self-rule must be consciously valued, cultured, and tended by a people seeking to practice it and that it must vigilantly resist myriad economic, social, and political forces threatening to deform or encroach upon it. They presume the need to educate the many for democracy, a task that grows as the powers and problems to be addressed increase in complexity.

Even the Greek etymology of "democracy" generates ambiguity and dispute. Demos/kratia translates as "people rule" or "rule by the people." But who were the "people" of ancient Athens? The propertied? The poor? The uncounted? The many? This was a dispute in Athens itself, which is why for Plato, democracy is proximate to anarchy, while for Aristotle, it is rule by the poor. In contemporary Continental theory, Giorgio Agamben identifies a constant ambiguity — one that "is no accident" — about the demos as referring both to the entire political body and to the poor. Jacques Rancière argues (through Plato's Laws) that the demos refers to neither, but instead to those unqualified to rule, to the "uncounted." Thus, for Rancière, democracy is always an eruption of "the part that has no part." Etienne Balibar augments Rancière's claim to argue that democracy's signature equality and freedom are "imposed by the revolt of the excluded," but always then "reconstructed by citizens themselves in a process that has no end."

Neoliberalism is a distinctive mode of reason, of the production of subjects, a "conduct of conduct," and a scheme of valuation. It names a historically specific economic and political reaction against Keynesianism and democratic socialism, as well as a more generalized practice of "economizing" spheres and activities heretofore governed by other tables of value. Yet in its differential instantiations across countries, regions, and sectors, in its various intersections with extant cultures and political traditions, and above all, in its convergences with and uptakes of other discourses and developments, neoliberalism takes diverse shapes and spawns diverse content and normative details, even different idioms. It is globally ubiquitous, yet disunified and nonidentical with itself in space and over time.

Notwithstanding these diverse instantiations, for reasons that will become clear, I will be more concerned to stipulate a meaning for "neo-liberalism" than for "democracy" in this work. However, these aspects of neoliberalism—its unevenness, its lack of self-identity, its spatial and temporal variability, and above all, its availability to reconfiguration — are important to underscore in an argument focused on its iteration in the time we may call contemporary and the place we may call the Euro-Atlantic world. Alertness to neoliberalism's inconstancy and plasticity cautions against identifying its current iteration as its essential and global truth and against making the story I am telling a teleological one, a dark chapter in a steady march toward end times.

Most striking about the new homology between city and soul is that its coordinates are economic, not political. As both individual and state become projects of management, rather than rule, as an economic framing and economic ends replace political ones, a range of concerns become subsumed to the project of capital enhancement, recede altogether, or are radically transformed as they are "economized." These include justice (and its subelements, such as liberty, equality, fairness), individual and popular sovereignty, and the rule of law. They also include the knowledge and the cultural orientation relevant to even the most modest practices of democratic citizenship.

It is no news that European and North American universities have been radically transformed and revalued in recent decades. Rising tuition rates, declining state support, the rise of for-profit and online education, the remaking of universities through corporate "best practices," and a growing business culture of "competences" in place of "certificates" have cast the ivory tower of just thirty years ago as anachronistic, expensive, and indulgent. While Britain has semiprivatized most public institutions and tied remaining state funding to a set of academic productivity metrics that measure knowledge according to "impact," the icon of transformation in the United States is a bit different—proliferation of more informal ranking systems proximate to crowdsourcing. Older measures of college quality (themselves contestable insofar as they were heavily bound to the caliber and size of applicant pool, along with endowments) are being rapidly supplanted by a host of new "best bang for the buck" rankings. Offered by venues ranging from Kiplinger's Personal Finance to the Princeton Review and Forbes Magazine, the algorithms may be complicated, but the cultural shift is plain: replacing measures of educational quality are metrics oriented entirely to return on investment (ROI) and centered on what kind of job placement and income enhancement student investors may expect from any given institution.

While Obama called for protecting Medicare; progressive tax reform; increasing government investment in science and technology research, clean energy, home ownership, and education; immigration reform; fighting sex discrimination and domestic violence; and raising the minimum wage, each of these issues was framed in terms of its contribution to economic growth or American competitiveness.

Attracting investors and developing an adequately remunerated skilled workforce—these are the goals of the world's oldest democracy led by a justice-minded president in the twenty-first century. Success in these areas would in turn realize the ultimate goal of the nation and the government that stewards it, "broad-based growth" for the economy as a whole. More importantly, every progressive value—from decreasing domestic violence to slowing climate change — Obama represented as not merely reconcilable with economic growth, but as driving it. Clean energy would keep us competitive — "as long as countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy, so must we." Fixing our aging infrastructure would "prove that there is no better place to do business than the United States of America." More accessible mortgages enabling "responsible young families" to buy their first home will "help our economy grow." Investing in education would reduce the drags on growth caused by teen pregnancy and violent crime, put "kids on a path to a good job," allow them to "work their way into the middle class," and provide the skills that would make the economy competitive. Schools should be rewarded for partnering with "colleges and employers" and for creating "classes that focus on science, technology, engineering and math — the skills today's employers are looking for." Immigration reform will "harness the talents and ingenuity of striving, hopeful immigrants" and attract "the highly skilled entrepreneurs and engineers that will help create jobs and grow our economy." Economic growth would also result "when our wives, mothers and daughters can live their lives free from discrimination … and … fear of domestic violence," when "we reward an honest day's work with honest wages" with minimum wage reform, when we rebuild decimated factory towns, and when we strengthen families through "removing financial deterrents to marriage for low-income couples and doing more to encourage fatherhood."

Having opened with stories, I hasten to add that this is mainly a work of political theory whose aim is to elucidate the large arc and key mechanisms through which neoliberalism's novel construction of persons and states are evacuating democratic principles, eroding democratic institutions and eviscerating the democratic imaginary of European modernity.

Neoliberalism is most commonly understood as enacting an ensemble of economic policies in accord with its root principle of affirming free markets. These include deregulation of industries and capital flows; radical reduction in welfare state provisions and protections for the vulnerable; privatized and outsourced public goods, ranging from education, parks, postal services, roads, and social welfare to prisons and militaries; replacement of progressive with regressive tax and tariff schemes; the end of wealth redistribution as an economic or social-political policy; the conversion of every human need or desire into a profitable enterprise, from college admissions preparation to human organ transplants, from baby adoptions to pollution rights, from avoiding lines to securing legroom on an airplane; and, most recently, the financialization of everything and the increasing dominance of finance capital over productive capital in the dynamics of the economy and everyday life.

In contrast with an understanding of neoliberalism as a set of state policies, a phase of capitalism, or an ideology that set loose the market to restore profitability for a capitalist class, I join Michel Foucault and others in conceiving neoliberalism as an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life.

Thus, one might approach one's dating life in the mode of an entrepreneur or investor, yet not be trying to generate, accumulate, or invest monetary wealth in this domain. Many upscale online dating companies define their clientele and offerings in these terms, identifying the importance of maximizing return on investment of affect, not only time and money.

Widespread economization of heretofore noneconomic domains, activities, and subjects, but not necessarily marketization or monetization of them, then, is the distinctive signature of neoliberal rationality. However, “economization” is itself a broad term, with no constant content or force across different historical and spatial instantiations of “economy.” To say that neoliberalism construes subjects as relentlessly economic actors does not tell us in what roles.

Contemporary neoliberal rationality does not mobilize a timeless figure of economic man and simply enlarge its purview. That is, homo oeconomicus does not have a constant shape and bearing across the centuries.

Thirty years ago, at the dawn of the neoliberal era, homo oeconomicus was still oriented by interest and profit seeking, but now entrepreneurialized itself at every turn and was formulated as human capital. As Foucault puts it, the subject was now submitted to diffusion and multiplication of the enterprise form within the social body. Today, homo oeconomicus maintains aspects of that entrepreneurialism, but has been significantly reshaped as financialized human capital: its project is to self-invest in ways that enhance its value or to attract investors through constant attention to its actual or figurative credit rating, and to do this across every sphere of its existence.

As neoliberal rationality remakes the human being as human capital, an earlier rendering of homo oeconomicus as an interest maximizer gives way to a formulation of the subject as both a member of a firm and as itself a firm, and in both cases as appropriately conducted by the governance practices appropriate to firms. These practices, as Chapter 4 will explore in detail, substitute ever-evolving new management techniques for top-down rule in state, firm, and subject alike. Centralized authority, law, policing, rules, and quotas are replaced by networked, team-based, practice-oriented techniques emphasizing incentivization, guidelines, and benchmarks.

How does the distinctive form of reason that is neoliberalism become a governing rationality saturating the practices of ordinary institutions and discourses of everyday life? While neoliberal policy was often imposed through fiat and force in the 1970s and 1980s, neoliberalization in the Euro-Atlantic world today is more often enacted through specific techniques of governance, through best practices and legal tweaks, in short, through "soft power" drawing on consensus and buy-in, than through violence, dictatorial command, or even overt political platforms. Neoliberalism governs as sophisticated common sense, a reality principle remaking institutions and human beings everywhere it settles, nestles, and gains affirmation. Of course, there are dust-ups, including protests and political altercations with police, over the privatization of public goods, union busting, benefits reductions, public-service cuts, and more. But neoliberalization is generally more termitelike than lionlike … its mode of reason boring in capillary fashion into the trunks and branches of workplaces, schools, public agencies, social and political discourse, and above all, the subject.

Another difference, underscored by Foucault, is that in neoliberal reason, competition replaces exchange as the market's root principle and basic good. (As we will see in Chapter 2, Foucault also argues that neoliberal reason formulates competition as normative, rather than natural, and thus requires facilitation and legal support.) This subtle shift from exchange to competition as the essence of the market means that all market actors are rendered as little capitals (rather than as owners, workers, and consumers) competing with, rather than exchanging with each other. Human capital's constant and ubiquitous aim, whether studying, interning, working, planning retirement, or reinventing itself in a new life, is to entrepreneurialize its endeavors, appreciate its value, and increase its rating or ranking.

Second, inequality, not equality, is the medium and relation of competing capitals. When we are figured as human capital in all that we do and in every venue, equality ceases to be our presumed natural relation with one another. Thus, equality ceases to be an a priori or fundament of neoliberalized democracy. In legislation, jurisprudence, and the popular imaginary, inequality becomes normal, even normative. A democracy composed of human capital features winners and losers, not equal treatment or equal protection. In this regard, too, the social contract is turning inside out.

Third, when everything is capital, labor disappears as a category, as does its collective form, class, taking with it the analytic basis for alienation, exploitation, and association among laborers. Dismantled at the same time is the very rationale for unions, consumer groups, and other forms of economic solidarity apart from cartels among capitals. This paves the way for challenging several centuries of labor law and other protections and benefits in the Euro-Atlantic world and, perhaps as important, makes illegible the foundations of such protections and benefits. One instance of this illegibility is the growing popular opposition to pensions, security of employment, paid holidays, and other hard-won achievements by public-sector workers in the United States. Another measure of it is the absent sympathy for the effects of life-threatening austerity measures imposed on Southern Europeans amid the 2011–2012 European Union crises.

The success of neoliberal rationality in remaking citizenship and the subject is indexed by the lack of a scandalized response to the state's new role in prioritizing, serving, and propping a supposedly free-market economy. The economization of everything and every sphere, including political life, desensitizes us to the bold contradiction between an allegedly free-market economy and a state now wholly in service to and controlled by it. As the state itself is privatized, enfolded, and animated by market rationality in all of its own functions, and as its legitimacy increasingly rests in facilitating, rescuing, or steering the economy, it is measured as any other firm would be. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of the neoliberal transformation of the state is that it is remade on the model of the firm while compelled to serve and facilitate an economy it is not supposed to touch, let alone to challenge.

As the province and meaning of liberty and equality are recalibrated from political to economic, political power comes to be figured as their enemy, an interference with both. This open hostility to the political in turn curtails the promise of the modern liberal democratic state to secure inclusion, equality, and freedom as dimensions of popular sovereignty. Again, as each term is relocated to the economy and recast in an economic idiom, inclusion inverts into competition, equality into inequality, freedom into deregulated marketplaces, and popular sovereignty is nowhere to be found. There, compressed to a formula, is the means by which neoliberal rationality hollows out both liberal democratic reason and a democratic imaginary that would exceed it.

Moreover, in their newly economized form, neoliberal states will shed as much as possible the cost of developing and reproducing human capital. Thus, they substitute individually debt-financed education for public higher education, personal savings and interminable employment for social security, individually purchased services for public services of all kinds, privately sponsored research for public research and knowledge, fees for use for public infrastructure. Each of these intensifies inequalities and further constrains the liberty of neoliberalized subjects required to procure individually what was once provisioned in common.

For Aristotle, Arendt, and Marx, the potential of the human species is realized not through, but beyond the struggle for existence and wealth accumulation. We need not even reach outside liberalism for this point: for John Stuart Mill, too, what makes humanity "a noble and beautiful object of contemplation" is individuality, originality, "fullness of life," and above all, cultivation of our "higher nature." Neoliberalism retracts this "beyond" and eschews this "higher nature": the normative reign of homo oeconomicus in every sphere means that there are no motivations, drives, or aspirations apart from economic ones, that there is nothing to being human apart from "mere life." Neoliberalism is the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity—not only with its machinery of compulsory commodification and profit-driven expansion, but by its form of valuation.

Neoliberalism is a specific and normative mode of reason, of the production of the subject, “conduct of conduct,” and scheme of valuation, yet in its differential instantiations and encounters with extant cultures and political traditions, it takes diverse shapes and spawns diverse content and normative details, even different idioms.

This dappled, striated, and flickering complexion is also the face of an order replete with contradiction and disavowal, structuring markets it claims to liberate from structure, intensely governing subjects it claims to free from government, strengthening and retasking states it claims to abjure. In the economic realm, neoliberalism aims simultaneously at deregulation and control. It carries purpose and has its own futurology (and futures markets), while eschewing planning. It seeks to privatize every public enterprise, yet valorizes public-private partnerships that imbue the market with ethical potential and social responsibility and the public realm with market metrics.

Neither a stage of capitalism nor formulated in response to crises of capitalism, neoliberalism for Foucault was an intellectually conceived and politically implemented “reprogramming of liberal governmentality” that first took hold in postwar Germany and was increasingly in evidence in other parts of Europe at the time of Foucault’s lectures on the subject in the late 1970s. Understood as a distinctive form of reason that, when it becomes ascendant, will remake liberal governing and government, neoliberalism may comprise a variety of local instantiations and a range of different policies or techniques while hewing to discernible norms and principles that consistently distinguish it from classical economic and political liberalism, as well as from Keynesianism, social democracy, or state-owned and state-controlled economies. In other words, the norms and principles of neoliberal rationality do not dictate precise economic policy, but rather set out novel ways of conceiving and relating state, society, economy, and subject and also inaugurate a new “economization” of heretofore noneconomic spheres and endeavors.

Here is Foucault formulating neoliberalism not as a 1980s political rebellion by new-Right populists, not as a vision heralded by a specific set of political leaders and economic craftsmen in the century’s final decades, but rather as an “emergence” over the second and third quarters of the twentieth century, already “the program of most governments of capitalist countries” at the time of his lectures.

Against the conventional story, Foucault’s formulation of neoliberalism as a remaking of the liberal art of government is able to reveal the slow transformation of liberal into neoliberal formations, neoliberalism’s continuities with and modifications of liberal political and economic theory; neoliberalism’s nonunified character, even at its inception; the commonalities that nonetheless bind this modality of thought, governance, and reason into an identifiable and nameable one; and neoliberalism’s cohabitation with certain other political rationalities, what he calls “a series of governmental rationalities [that] overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each other: art of government according to truth … according to the rationality of the sovereign state … according to the rationality of economic agents … and according to the rationality of the governed themselves.”

This last feature challenges genealogy’s aim to offer a “history of the present,” diverting it to discernment of a specter or adumbration in thought and thus contributing to something more like a history of the future.

The lectures on neoliberalism have another odd feature. Despite their prescience and rich insights, they largely comprise partial and speculative intellectual histories. As such, they do not abide by Foucault’s own rules for grasping the complex emergence of governing rationalities and subject formations. With one or two small exceptions, they do not study popular or political discourses contributing to, carrying, or disseminating neoliberal reason. They do not explore the polyvalence of discourses generating neoliberal rationality and, again with a minor exception or two, they do not explore how other discourses compromise, modify, or transform neoliberal reason.

Thus, rather than tracking “substitutions, displacements, disguised conquests, and systematic reversals” played out as “a series of subjugations” on the body “as the inscribed surface of events” — exemplified in his genealogies of sexuality, punishment, and madness and formulated methodologically in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” — Foucault offers a quieter, less complete biographical, historical, geopolitical story of the emergence and dissemination of neoliberal reason.

And while I consider overstated the claim that Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism was driven by his deep attraction to it, I also reject the common perception that Foucault is offering a neo-Marxist critique of neoliberal rationality in these lectures, even if some of us draw on his work for such purposes.

Foucault was examining something that fascinated him in the present and whose twentieth-century intellectual origins—distinctive for their antipathy to certain kinds of governmental power—also intrigued him, yet he appeared relatively uninterested in what many would call the “politics” of neoliberalism—its gestation of new inequalities and concentrations of wealth, its deracinations and destitutions of populations, its dismantling of publics and social solidarities. Rather, he was interested in neoliberalism’s transformations of the social, the state, and the subject and also in how neoliberalism brings liberalism more squarely into places, such as France, where liberal principles had heretofore nested somewhat uneasily with other governing rationalities, such as republicanism and socialism.

In the mid-eighteenth century, yet another principle of limitation arose, that of the market. Rights remained a constraint on sovereignty, but the principle of what Foucault terms “market veridiction” now animated an ontological, epistemological, and political reformulation of sovereignty, one that not only constrained, but produced a new form of the state and its legitimacy. As the market became the new site of truth or veridiction, it simultaneously became that which must be left alone by the state and what came to construct, measure, and legitimate the state, substituting for law and edict in this regard.

Foucault is not saying that in the mid-eighteenth century, capital came to dominate government or that the state became an apparatus of capital. Rather, his point is that the market (tellingly, he never says “capitalism” here) become a new limit on the state even as it began to saturate and construe the state with its distinctive form of reason and that this limit and this form of reason are at the heart of what we call “liberalism.”

Not Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, but Smith and Bentham articulate liberalism's basic problematic and principles. Put another way, for Foucault, there is no significant divergence between economic and political liberalism when they are viewed from the perspective of the economic orientation, limitation, and legitimacy of government and from the perspective of the subject of interest.

Among the most important of these is the Ordoliberals’ deep appreciation of the state’s role in facilitating competition and the Chicago School’s development of the theory of human capital. The Ordoliberals, according to Foucault, also provide more latitude for state governance of the social, for protecting “warm moral and cultural values” antithetical to the “cold mechanism of competition.”

How far can the market become the figure and the mode of rationality for state and society, the political and the social? This question did not contour the ambition of liberalism either as an economic or a political doctrine; the former sought only to free the economic subject, the latter to free the political and civil subject. Neither raised the market itself to a principle of all life or of government. 31 The distinctiveness of neoliberalism, for Foucault, is that it “generalizes the economic form of the market” or “generalizes the ‘enterprise’ form within the social body,” producing an “economization of the entire social field.”

Above all, it means uncoupling the market economy from the political principle of laissez-faire, and here lies the radicalism of Foucault’s scholarly intervention into the political debates that would unfold in the decade following his lectures. Neoliberalism is not about the state leaving the economy alone. Rather, neoliberalism activates the state on behalf of the economy, not to undertake economic functions or to intervene in economic effects, but rather to facilitate economic competition and growth and to economize the social, or, as Foucault puts it, to “regulate society by the market.”

With neoliberalism, the political rationality of the state becomes economic in a triple sense: the economy is at once model, object, and project. That is, economic principles become the model for state conduct, the economy becomes the primary object of state concern and policy, and the marketization of domains and conduct is what the state seeks to disseminate everywhere. … Again, neoliberal political rationality does not merely marketize in the sense of monetizing all social conduct and social relations, but, more radically, casts them in an exclusively economic frame, one that has both epistemological and ontological dimensions.

Competition is not the result of a natural interplay of appetites, instincts, behavior … the effects of competition are due only to the essence that characterizes and constitutes it … not to a pre-existing nature [but] to a formal privilege. Competition has an internal logic; it has its own structure. Its effects are only produced if this logic is respected. It is, as it were, a formal game between inequalities; it is not a natural game between individuals and behaviors.

If, for neoliberals, economic competition is essential (an eidos, Foucault calls it at one point) and valuable, but not natural, then it must be continuously supported and corrected from outside, and this need defines one of the crucial functions of the neoliberal state. Government intervenes to produce and reproduce competition, to facilitate or restore it. Again, nature is the province of classical liberalism, hence the importance of laissez-faire to its theorists. By contrast, convention, intervention, and even subvention are all key to neoliberalism. The “juridical gives form to the economic,” Foucault says of neoliberalism. 41 “Government must accompany the market from start to finish,” he adds. However, what distinguishes neoliberalism from liberalism here is that the state must “govern for the market, not because of the market.”

The virtue of competition is that it generates economic growth, the promotion of which is “the only one and true fundamental social policy.” Foucault elaborates: In neoliberalism, “social policy must not be something that works against economic policy and compensates for it” or that “follows strong economic growth by becoming more generous.” Instead, economic growth by itself should enable individuals to prosper and to protect themselves against risk, so economic growth is the state’s social policy. Competition is a means facilitating an end; the state primes this means so that the economy can generate the end.

Neoliberal states thus depart from liberal ones as they become radically economic in a triple sense: The state secures, advances, and props the economy; the state’s purpose is to facilitate the economy, and the state’s legitimacy is linked to the growth of the economy—as an overt actor on behalf of the economy, the state also becomes responsible for the economy. State action, state purpose, and state legitimacy: each is economized by neoliberalism. The Ordoliberals carried this even further: the market economy should also be the principle of the state’s internal regulation and organization. Reversing the liberal formulation in which a free market is defined and supervised by the state, for them, the state should be defined and supervised by the market. In short, the state itself should be economized.

In neo-liberalism, competition replaces the liberal economic emphasis on exchange as the fundamental principle and dynamic of the market. 47 This is another of those seemingly trivial replacements that is a tectonic shift, affecting a range of other principles and venues. Most importantly, equivalence is both the premise and the norm of exchange, while inequality is the premise and outcome of competition. Consequently, when the political rationality of neoliberalism is fully realized, when market principles are extended to every sphere, inequality becomes legitimate, even normative, in every sphere.

Although Foucault himself does not explore the point, this is a knife cut across the body of liberal democracy, where the enshrinement of equality in the rule and application of law is the promise of the social contract. Competition as the central principle of market rationality also means political subjects lose guarantees of protection by the liberal state. Competition yields winners and losers; capital succeeds by destroying or cannibalizing other capitals. Hence, when market competition becomes generalized as a social and political principle, some will triumph and some will die … as a matter of social and political principle.

What is sought is not a society subject to the commodity effect but … to the dynamic of competition. Not a super-market society but an enterprise society. The homo oeconomicus sought after is not the man of exchange or man the consumer; he is the man of enterprise and production…. The art of government programmed by the ordoliberals around the 1930s, and which has now become the program of most governments in capitalist countries involves … obtaining a society that is … oriented toward the multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises.

As a subject becomes a field of enterprises, society is oriented “toward the multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises,” rather than toward the exchange of commodities. Foucault adds that multiplying “the enterprise form within the social body is what is at stake in neoliberal policy” and what makes neoliberalism much more than a set of economic policies. Rather, “it is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society.”

The veridiction of the market has two dimensions in neoliberal reason: the market is itself true and also represents the true form of all activity. Rational actors accept these truths, thus accept “reality; conversely, those who act according to other principles are not simply irrational, but refuse “reality.” Insofar as rational-choice theory expresses this equation and becomes the hegemonic model for social-science knowledge, it represents a further development of what Herbert Marcuse termed the “closing of the political universe” — the erasure of intelligible, legitimate alternatives to economic rationality.

The state must support the economy, organizing its conditions and facilitating its growth, and is thereby made responsible for the economy without being able to predict, control, or offset its effects. Hence, far more than a campaign mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid!” defines political life in the neoliberal state.

While the state facilitates capital, it does not intervene at the level of exchange (access, opportunity), distribution (income inequality) or collateral damages (ecological, social, political). This aspect of neoliberalism is significant for understanding why the growing imbrication of the state with capital today does not generate the kind of legitimacy crisis predicted by 1970s Marxist state theorists — Jürgen Habermas, Claus Offe, Nicos Poulantzas, Ralph Miliband, among others. The state is not neutral with regard to capital, nor, however, does it compensate for the infelicities or damages of capital. The neoliberal state may act openly as a capitalist state and on behalf of capital because economic growth is its raison d’état, and capital appreciation is the presumed engine of growth.

4. The austerity politics ensuing from these crises and the transformation of neoliberal rationality that such politics entail, from limitless to constrained, from freedom to sacrifice.

The rise of “governance,” the meshing of political and business lexicons through which neoliberal reason is disseminated; the antipathy of governance to politics; and the displacement of the rule of law with instruments of governance such as benchmarks, guidelines, buy-ins, and best practices.

The transformation of economic actors and action by governance such that teamwork, responsibilization, and stakeholder consensus replace individual interest; the shift, in short from a neoliberal discourse of free subjects to a discourse featuring more explicitly governed, “responsibilized,” and managed subjects.

The way these features of governance and human capital generate a citizen who is both integrated into and identified with the project of the economic health of a nation, a citizen who can be legitimately shed or sacrificed when necessary, especially in the context of austerity politics.

The way that “too big to fail” has as its complement “too small to protect”: where there are only capitals and competition among them, not only will some win while others lose (inequality and competition unto death replaces equality and commitment to protect life), but some will be rescued and resuscitated, while others will be cast off or left to perish (owners of small farms and small businesses, those with underwater mortgages, indebted and unemployed college graduates). Combined with the relentless attack on publics and what Foucault called “society,” an attack that has dismantled public institutions and political spaces, this alters the principle of “inclusion of all” that Foucault describes in his lectures as a novel feature of neoliberalism. Everyone is still rendered as human capital, but the protections he imagined extended to all have vanished.

There are many more features of neoliberalism that Foucault did not and could not anticipate, including its grinding of gears between the national, postnational, and global; the importance of transnational institutions to governance and regulation; and the socialization of risk accompanying the privatization of gain. Foucault’s neoliberalism is notably statecentric, not governed by transnational or global institutions, and construes the relations between state, economy, and civil society in national terms.

Insofar as Foucault’s investigation and analysis of neoliberalism is driven by a concern with the birth of biopolitics, by shifts from sovereignty to governmentality, and by reformations of liberalism, these coordinates are insufficient for capturing what neoliberalism has done to social life, culture, subjectivity, and, above all, politics. This points to a broader limitation in Foucault’s work, which we might call his “formulation of the political,” a formulation that is largely limited to the (ironically, state-centered) terms of “sovereignty” and “juridicism.”

The wholesale refusal of Marxist categories, logics, and historiography allows Foucault to bring forth undertheorized aspects of the emergence of political economy and permits a novel staging of the relationships between liberalism, the state, the economy, and the modern subject. However, this refusal also has its costs, especially in taking the measure of the unique dominations entailed in neoliberalism. Thus, Foucault’s seemingly light judgments against neoliberalism pertain not only to his admirable commitment to excavating the novelties that only a genealogical curiosity can discover and not only to the fact that neoliberalism had not yet become hegemonic or fused with discourses that would integrate business, economy, and governance as well as the individual into national economic aims. Rather, Foucault averted his glance from capital itself as a historical and social force. Appearing with striking infrequency in these lectures, when capital is mentioned, it is usually to heap scorn on the idea that it follows necessary logics or entails a system of domination.

However, capital and capitalism are not reducible to an order of reason. While Foucault is surely correct that “in the last analysis, we must produce truth as we must produce wealth, indeed we must produce truth in order to produce wealth in the first place,” neither the imperatives nor the effects of capital can be wholly ascribed to capitalism as a regime of truth.

It is simply that capitalism has drives that no discourse can deny … to grow, to reduce input costs, to search out new venues of profit, and to generate new markets, even as the form, practices, and venues for these drives are infinitely diverse and operate discursively. Moreover, capital itself (along with, but not reducible to the specific form of reason advancing, organizing, and generating new possibilities with it) always gives shape to human worlds — relations, arrangements, subject production — in excess of its economic operations and circulations and in excess of its aims: this is the power of its world making that Marx depicted so poetically in the Manifesto and attempted to systematize in the German Ideology.

Foucault is clearly intrigued by the “freedom” that liberalism and neoliberalism promise. He knows we can be governed through such freedom, but refuses the Marxist point that what is being named as freedom elides and even discursively inverts crucial powers of domination.

At the end of lecture 11, Foucault suggests that economics is a science “lateral to the art of governing,” that it cannot be “the science of government.” This seems importantly wrong today. The claim relates in part to his belief that economics is separated off from civil society, again, an implicit quarrel with Marx. It relates as well to his acceptance of the neoliberal claim that the economy constitutes the limit of government for liberalism and neo-liberalism, that it must not be touched because it cannot be known. But it also relates to the fact that he did not anticipate the ways that the sciences of economics, business, and politics would be merged through rational choice, formal modeling, and above all, the language of administrative governance. When the expressly and intentionally antipolitical language of governance, discussed at length in Chapter 4, becomes the lingua franca of the state, corporations, schools, nonprofits, indeed, of all public and private enterprise, economics has become the science of government.

I will suggest that with the ascendency of neoliberalism, interest has ceased to anchor or characterize homo oeconomicus and also that Foucault ignores homo politicus in modern thought and practice. Homo politicus, I will argue in the next chapter, is not captured by the subject of right or by homo legalis. Yet it has persisted through most of modernity and has only recently been displaced by the specifically neoliberal formulation of homo oeconomicus as human capital, a creature for whom interest is no longer the proper designation.

To say that it figures man as fundamentally driven and oriented by economic concerns begs two crucial questions. First, there is the question of homo oeconomicus's constitutive outside. Every image of man is defined against other possibilities — thus, the idea of man as fundamentally economic is drawn against the idea of him as fundamentally political, loving, religious, ethical, social, moral, tribal, or something else. Even when one image becomes hegemonic, it carves itself against a range of other possibilities — tacitly arguing with them, keeping them at bay, or subordinating them. So it is not enough to know that humans are economic in their drives and motivations — we must know what this means we are not, and especially what has been sent packing, what we are adamantly not.

Timothy Mitchell reminds us in Rule of Experts that "the economy," a noun with a definite article, a noun naming an objective domain, rather than a process or practice, came into being only in the 1940s and 1950s. Prior to this time, "economy" (without the article) referred to seeking a desired end with the least possible expenditure of means, closer to our notion of efficiency or thriftiness today. (A trace lingers in our language, as when we say "that's a very economical method" or refer to "economizing" in our expenditures or to "economy class" on an airplane.) Thus, when coupled with the adjective, "political," Mitchell argues, "economy" identified a particular mode of governing community affairs, not a structure of production and exchange and not the domain of the market or the sphere of material life. In fact, it is only when the definite article is slipped in that "the economy" is cast as a self-contained structure, one in which wealth generation becomes its own autonomous sphere. Compare this with the etymological root of economy, oikos, which identified for the ancient Greeks the space/place of the household, not material life as such, not the market, and not the economy.

According to Foucault, what "characterizes homo oeconomicus" is that he is driven by interest and his "action has a multiplying and beneficial value through the intensification of interest." As I will be arguing, I do not think "interest" adequately captures the ethos or subjectivity of the contemporary neoliberal subject; this subject is so profoundly integrated into and hence subordinated to the supervening goal of macroeconomic growth that its own well-being is easily sacrificed to these larger purposes.

When individuals, firms, or industries constitute a drag on this good, rather than a contribution to it, they may be legitimately cast off or reconfigured — through downsizing, furloughs, outsourcing, benefits cuts, mandatory job shares, or offshore production relocation. At this point, the throne of interest has vanished and at the extreme is replaced with the throne of sacrifice.

Moreover, the idea and practice of responsibilization—forcing the subject to become a responsible self-investor and self-provider—reconfigures the correct comportment of the subject from one naturally driven by satisfying interests to one forced to engage in a particular form of self-sustenance that meshes with the morality of the state and the health of the economy. Thus, neoliberalism differs from classical economic liberalism not only in that there ceases to be what Smith formulated as an “invisible hand” forging a common good out of individual, self-interested actions, and not only because the naturalism is replaced by constructivism, although both of these are the case. Equally important, reconciling individual with national or other collective interests is no longer the contemporary problem understood to be solved by markets. Instead, the notion of individuals naturally pursuing their interests has been replaced with the production through governance of responsibilized citizens who appropriately self-invest in a context of macroeconomic vicissitudes and needs that make all of these investments into practices of speculation.

Homo juridicus arises from the constituting power of sovereignty, its production of certain kinds of subjects, and the specification of the relation between these subjects and itself as one in which each has some rights. “Liberalism,” Foucault says, “acquired its modern shape precisely with the formulation of this essential incompatibility between the nontotalizable multiplicity of economic subjects of interest and the totalizing unity of the juridical sovereign.”

Only toward the end of the twentieth century did homo oeconomicus (in its distinctly neoliberal iteration) finally get the better of homo politicus, usurping its territory, terms, and objects both in the figure of the human and the polity. If this process were to become complete, if homo politicus were really vanquished, it would darken the globe against all possibilities of democratic or other just futures.

Moral reflection and association making—these are the qualities that generate our politicalness. The two are related by Aristotle himself insofar as linguistically conveyed moral judgments permit humans to order and govern their associations — from the family to the state—according to deliberations about the good. They are also related by their contribution to “self-sufficiency”: as creatures who are mutually dependent, humans who live in a polis can enjoy justice, as well as the capacity to pursue the “good life,” that is, life that engages distinctly human capacities and exceeds concern with mere survival.

Aristotle’s first move on this front is to favor barter over market relations, because barter hews to need, while markets veer toward gain. However, even for need provision, Aristotle recognizes the inevitability of currency-based exchange arising from trade across distances. So he reaches for other ways to cap the impulses generated by the presence of the market. One of these is moral, the other ontological.

If the problem Aristotle struggles against—the proximity of household acquisition to other kinds—is one he creates for himself by defending private property, families, and slavery against Plato’s move to abolish them, it is a problem he meets directly. The formulation of man as fundamentally political — meant to live in the polis, share in its rule, deliberate about proper actions and just relations in every sphere of life—is the foundation for handling this problem.

However, if we take our cue from Foucault's appreciation of polyvalent discourses and heterogeneous histories, the emergence of homo oeconomicus may not mean that homo politicus vanishes or even becomes subordinate. Indeed, if we return to Smith, we can see that when he first introduces our trucking and bartering propensities, he is careful to stipulate marketeering as but one quality of being human. Nor is it primary and unmediated. Rather, Smith rests this quality in our capacity for language, deliberation, calculation, and a certain self-sovereignty in an intensely interdependent world. Immediately after introducing the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange, Smith says that it is less likely an “original principle” of human nature than “the necessary consequence of the faculties of reason and speech” and of our complex and singular species interdependence. Language and calculation facilitate deal making, itself animated by our intense need for one another. We bargain, he says, to provide advantage to others in meeting our own needs, something neither required nor possible from the more autarkic creatures of the animal world, something dependent upon a degree of knowledge, calculation, and relationality unavailable to other animals. In short, while homo oeconomicus certainly operates according to interest for Smith, the form of interest is neither primordial nor unhistorical. Arising from need amid interdependence, interest is facilitated by language and reason and generates relations of mutual benefit through exchange. Far from a creature of naked interest, Adam Smith's homo oeconomicus is premised on and saturated with deliberation, self-direction, and restraint, all basic ingredients of sovereignty. Moreover, as readers of his Theory of Moral Sentiments know well, self-interest is hardly an exclusive or even central node in his account of human nature.

If we return again to Timothy Mitchell's point that in its origins, “political economy” referred to (economical) governing of the polity, rather than to the politics or powers of economic life, then the rise of political economy in the eighteenth century remains compatible with a presumed sovereignty of the political over the economic. It permits the sustained primacy of the political both in the state and in man, the state's miniature—these twin sovereignties being modernity's continuation of the ancient city-soul homology. In fact, Smith's brief for laissez-faire is premised on the notion that the state may choose its relation to economic activity in the society emerging from the marketeering side of humans; it could lean in as a mercantilist or stand back as a proper capitalist state, but there is no question about what is sovereign. To put the point another way, as both man and state are becoming increasingly concerned with productivity, wages, and wealth, both are becoming economical in their governing, but this does not yet make them economic in identity and form.

It highlights, for example, the intensely political quality of life in Locke's state of nature before property is introduced. In this early condition, as Locke tells the story in the Second Treatise, we are not mere self-preservationists, but responsible for discerning, judging, and executing the law of nature on behalf of the common. Before the social contract, we have in our own hands, and as part of our moral obligation to God and one another, the powers of executing and enforcing natural law in the name of communal justice and preservation. These markedly political powers and this markedly political orientation are what we will eventually confer to political institutions when we enter the social contract. Of course, this primordial politicalness in Locke's state of nature is dampened by the intensification of individual interest that property introduces into that state. However, this politicalness never fades completely from the project of making the social contract or from its purpose and legitimacy.

Indeed for Rousseau, we are free, sovereign, and self-legislating only when we join with others to set the terms by which we live together. Those who remain slaves to instinct or to individual interest forsake both freedom and humanness as they surrender this sovereignty over themselves. For Rousseau, humans are the only creatures capable of generating complex orders of domination from their needs, of enslaving themselves by giving free rein to homo oeconomicus, by letting it overtake their personalities, social relations, and politics: this is the essence of Rousseau's critique of emerging liberalism. Thus, for Rousseau the deliberate and fierce cultivation of homo politicus (and it is most definitely not homo juridicus or homo legalis) is the only antidote to this peril. Homo politicus—understood as self-sovereign through collective sovereignty — must literally subdue the creature of self-interest and self-absorption. Otherwise, we not only fall into egoism, narcissism, and superficiality, but are dominated by the social relations and regimes generated by unbridled interest.

The importance of homo politicus in modern political thought explains as well Marx's obsession in his early writings with the unrealized figure of sovereign political man and with his critique of the compromised status of political man in constitutional democracy. It helps us understand why, as Marx struggles with the Hegelians and the fictions of the bourgeois state, his concern initially is not with class inequality or exploitation but with what he takes to be the illusory freedom and thin notion of citizenship and belonging tendered by bourgeois constitutionalism. Similarly his critique of the French Revolution pertains to its failure to realize the quest for “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” animating it. In his assessment of “political emancipation” — the formal enfranchisement of heretofore excluded portions of humanity—he finds the politically emancipated individual to be isolated and impotent, subject to powers beyond its control that have lost their political names. For Marx, modern man is both a ghostly sovereign and is ghosted by his own alienated political powers, which come to dominate him in the powers of the state and economy.

Freud's most sustained and chilling figure for humans in civilization is not bridled animals, but "conquered cities." The superego, he says in Civilization and Its Discontents, obtains mastery of our dangerous desires by weakening, disarming, and watching over them "like a garrison in a conquered city." The homology is the classic one between soul and city; the figure of man and his psyche is relentlessly political.

If Rousseau is nearly alone in boldly reasserting this creature's dominance in social contract theory, homo politicus is hardly absent from others' accounts. Nor is it aptly captured by what Foucault calls "homo juridicus" or "homo legalis," both of whom are too bound to law and rights to capture the political ethos and demands at stake. This means that the vanquishing of homo politicus by contemporary neoliberal rationality, the insistence that there are only rational market actors in every sphere of human existence, is novel, indeed, revolutionary, in the history of the West.

Historically, even when its masculinity was not explicitly asserted and women's exclusion from the category was not overt, homo politicus from Aristotle through Kant and Hegel assumed a masculinist comportment and sphere of activity. Whether stipulated as participating in rule of the common (Aristotle), as paralleling military virtu (Machiavelli), as manly measure and fortitude (Weber), or simply as autonomy, rationality, and self-sovereignty (the moderns), homo politicus was almost always and expressly male.

Another way to explain the incoherence is through the gender subordination it tacitly presumes: the individual freedom iterated by neoliberals is not compromised by or in the family because it pertains only to those who freely come and go from them into the domain of market freedom, not those who perform unwaged work or activity within them. The story being told, in other words, is not from the perspective of families as ensembles of generic individuals, but from a social positioning long associated with male heads of households. The stumble, then, occurs precisely because this perspective is disavowed, even as it is assumed.

There are two ways to think about the neoliberal figure of the human whose self-care and self-investment cannot be obtained within its own terms, that is, who is dependent upon invisible practices and unnamed others. One is that neoliberalism makes a mistake, that homo oeconomicus is both more multidimensional and more dependent upon human noncapital entities (that is, women) than this ontology suggests. There is some bite to this critique, but it is not a radical bite.

However, our family-individual conundrum — the question of whether the family or the individual is the proper unit of analysis for a human world conceived as competing units of self-subsistent capital— is not yet resolved. We are not simply dealing with an analytic elision or disavowal in liberal and neoliberal formulations of human nature. Rather, we are dealing with a world made and governed by this elision and disavowal. … What happens when the indispensably necessary ethos and labors highlighted by McCloskey, Tronto, and England are both disqualified and trod underfoot as homo oeconomicus becomes the real in every sense of the word?

When homo oeconomicus becomes normative across all spheres, and responsibilization and appreciation of human capital become the governing truth of public life, social life, work life, welfare, education, and the family, there are two possibilities for those positioned as women in the sexual division of labor that neoliberal orders continue to depend upon and reproduce. Either women align their own conduct with this truth, becoming homo oeconomicus, in which case the world becomes uninhabitable, or women's activities and bearing as femina domestica remain the unavowed glue for a world whose governing principle cannot hold it together, in which case women occupy their old place as unacknowledged props and supplements to masculinist liberal subjects. … It is formulated, in short, as an effect of nature, not of power.

The intensification occurs through the shrinking, privatization, and/or dismantling of public infrastructure supporting families, children, and retirees. Such infrastructure includes, but is not limited to affordable, quality early childhood and afterschool programs, summer camps, physical and mental health care, education, public transportation, neighborhood parks and recreation centers, public pensions, senior centers, and social security. When these public provisions are eliminated or privatized, the work and/or the cost of supplying them is returned to individuals, disproportionately to women. … In this respect, familialism is an essential requirement, rather than an incidental feature of the neoliberal privatization of public goods and services.

Rather, it is to attenuate radically the exercise of freedom in the social and political spheres. This is the central paradox, perhaps even the central ruse, of neoliberal governance: the neoliberal revolution takes place in the name of freedom — free markets, free countries, free men—but tears up freedom's grounding in sovereignty for states and subjects alike. States are subordinated to the market, govern for the market, and gain or lose legitimacy according to the market's vicissitudes; states also are caught in the parting ways of capital's drive for accumulation and the imperative of national economic growth.

Foucault was alert to this possibility; he described homo oeconomicus as “someone … eminently governable … the correlate of a governmentality … determined according to the principle of economy.” But he did not fathom the extreme to which this governability could go in a neoliberal regime, an extreme expressed through the formula of maximum governance through maximum individual freedom. In place of the liberal promise to secure the politically autonomous and sovereign subject, the neoliberal subject is granted no guarantee of life (on the contrary, in markets, some must die for others to live), and is so tethered to economic ends as to be potentially sacrificible to them.

Put slightly differently, Weber and Marx assume a political exterior and subjective interior that is disharmonious with capitalism — political life featuring at least the promise of freedom, equality and popular sovereignty and a figure of subjective personhood bound to ideals of worth, dignity, self-direction, even soulfulness. It is precisely such an exterior and interior that neoliberal reason’s configuration of states, citizens and souls in the image of homo oeconomicus, and elimination of homo politicus, threaten to extinguish.

Foucault’s idea, underdeveloped in theory, although extensively explored in his genealogies and lectures, is that political actions, regimes, violence, and everyday practices ought neither to be understood as simply emanating from the intentions of rulers or participants nor, on the other hand, as driven by either material conditions or ideology. Rather, he uses the term "political rationality" to identify the governing form of normative reason that, as Mitchell Dean formulates it, is both "anterior to political action and a condition of it." … Moreover, power always brings into being the subjects and orders that it may be seen only to organize or to rule.

Political rationality is not an instrument of governmental practice, but rather the condition of possibility and legitimacy of its instruments, the field of normative reason from which governing is forged.

Put differently, governmentality represents a shift away from the power of command and punishment targeting particular subjects and toward the power of conducting and compelling populations "at a distance."

Foucault does indeed speak of neoliberalism as a "new programming of liberal governmentality" — it changes the way the liberal state reasons, self-represents, and governs and it also changes the state-economy relation. But these changes mark something apart from the political rationality of neoliberalism. Political rationality does not originate or emanate from the state, although it circulates through the state, organizes it, and conditions its actions.

In the process that Weber calls "rationalization," rational action comes to displace all other forms, those springing from faith, tradition, affect, fealty to a leader, or any other prerational or nonrational source. But this displacement is only the beginning of rationalization, which does not really get underway until instrumental rationality takes over everything, displacing even value-rational action. Initially only a means, instrumental reason becomes a force of its own in the world and dissolves other values with that force. For Weber, capitalism and bureaucracy are each examples of this. Each system begins as a means—for wealth generation and for administration—but both break out of harness to become unprecedented systems of domination and automatic reproduction, placing humanity in "an iron cage." Both become formations of power and rationality that cease to be instruments of our existence and instead become forces of history unto themselves — governing, dominating, fashioning human beings and worlds in every way.

Marcuse argues that instrumental reason in the twentieth century had become suffused with the norms and imperatives of capitalism to generate a rationality that saturated society and secured capitalism in ways Marx and Marxism could not fathom or explain. Thus, in place of a Marxist notion of bourgeois ideology in workplaces, schools, and the state, Marcuse traces the specific rationalities with which modern capitalism saturates and governs the world and the human. “Technological rationality has become political rationality” and produces “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom … in advanced industrial civilization.”

In the Collège de France lectures on neoliberalism, Foucault uses the descriptor “political rationality” rather infrequently. More often, he speaks of neoliberalism as “governmental reason,” “governmentality,” “governmental rationality,” or “economic rationality.” Above all, he identifies it as “a new programming of liberal governmentality,” a reformulation of the relations between state, economy, and subject posited and produced by liberalism. Thus, I am pressing much more from the formulation of neoliberalism as a political rationality than Foucault did.

Governance is not identical with or exclusive to neoliberalism; it was no part of the neoliberal imaginary set out by Milton Friedman or F. A. Hayek and had little place in neoliberal transformations in Latin America or South Asia in the 1970s and 1980s. However, as it matured and converged with neoliberalism, governance has become neoliberalism’s primary administrative form, the political modality through which it creates environments, structures constraints and incentives, and hence conducts subjects.

“Government often refers to the governing body itself, while governance refers to the act of governing. So members of a government are engaged in governance.” But why is the term “governance” needed (and needed only recently) as a substitute or supplement for the active verb “to govern”? Why does the act of governing need to be consolidated into a noun, and what is the significance of that conversion? What continuous process of power, detached from agents of execution or enforcement, does it signify?

We might put the problem as a proposition: “Governance” signifies a specific mode of governing that is evacuated of agents and institutionalized in processes, norms, and practices. According to social theorist Thomas Lemke, “governance involves a shift in the analytical and theoretical focus from institutions to processes of rule.” Lemke adds that governance “announces the eclipse or erosion of state sovereignty” Importantly, this emphasis on process over sources or institutions is not restricted to methodology. Rather, as we will see in the discussions of devolution, responsibilization, and best practices, much of the normative and constitutive power of governance occurs through and in processes that bear no reference to agents.

The United Nation’s account of “good governance” confirms this and adds another twist. There, “governance” is described as “the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented or not.” It notes further that governance involves formal as well as informal actors and structures — these include the media, the military, corporations, organized crime, and political parties, among others. Thus, as an analytical term, “governance” signifies the decentering of the state and other centers of rule and tracks in its place the specifically modern dispersal of socially organizing powers throughout the order and of powers “conducting” and not only constraining or overtly regulating the subject.

Inclusion and participation as indices of democracy have been separated off from the powers and the unbounded field of deliberation that would make them meaningful as terms of shared rule. Put another way, while inclusion and participation are certainly important elements of democracy, to be more than empty signifiers, they must be accompanied by modest control over setting parameters and constraints and by the capacity to decide fundamental values and directions. Absent these, they cannot be said to be democratic any more than providing a death row inmate with choices about the method of execution offers the inmate freedom. Rather, this is the language of democracy used against the demos.

Most definitions of good governance include the following elements: participation, consensus, accountability, effectiveness, efficiency, equitability, inclusiveness, and following the rule of law. Thus, while governance analytically describes decentered and devolved power, as a policy term, governance aims to substitute consensus-oriented policy formation and implementation for the overt exercise of authority and power through law and policing. It is a short step from this reorientation of democracy into problem solving and consensus to a set of additional replacements fundamental to the meaning and operation of governance today: “stakeholders” replace interest groups or classes, “guidelines” replace law, “facilitation” replaces regulation, “standards” and “codes of conduct” disseminated by a range of agencies and institutions replace overt policing and other forms of coercion. Together, these replacements also vanquish a vocabulary of power, and hence power’s visibility, from the lives and venues that governance organizes and directs.

As governance becomes the “lingua franca of both the political and business establishments,” ostensibly neutral, yet norm-laden notions such as best practices circulate across a range of public institutions, knowledge domains, warfare, and welfare.

In public life, governance displaces liberal democratic-justice concerns with technical formulations of problems, questions of right with questions of efficiency, even questions of legality with those of efficacy. In the workplace, governance displaces the lateral solidarities of unions and worker consciousness and the politics of struggle with hierarchically organized “teams,” multiparty cooperation, individual responsibility, and antipolitics.

Devolution frequently means that large-scale problems, such as recessions, finance-capital crises, unemployment, or environmental problems, as well as fiscal crises of the state, are sent down the pipeline to small and weak units unable to cope with them technically, politically, or financially. Thus, state funding cuts in education or mental health devolve responsibility for these undertakings to municipalities, which in turn devolve them to individual schools or agencies, which devolve them to individual departments, which then have something called “decision-making authority,” absent, of course, the resources to exercise this ghostly autonomy and sovereignty.

The ubiquitous concept of best practices and its close cousin and predecessor, “benchmarking,” are exemplary of many features of neoliberal governance — its emphasis on soft power, antipolitics, buy-ins, consensus, teamwork, market metrics, and rejection of external regulation, command, partisan interest, and ideology.

Benchmarking refers to the practice of a firm or agency undertaking internal reforms on the basis of studying and then importing the practices of other, more successful firms or agencies. In other words, benchmarks are set by industry leaders, and benchmarking represents the process of non-leaders understanding, distilling, and then implementing the practices that make those leaders successful.

The contemporary ubiquitousness and promiscuity of best practices thus simultaneously indexes and facilitates neoliberal economization of heretofore nonmarketized spheres and activities. Public educational, artistic, civic, and other kinds of human endeavor are dissolved into a marketized medium through the circulation of best practices across private and public sectors. Consequently, many public and nonprofit institutions, from charities to universities, find themselves in a kind of mission drift today, disoriented by practices adopted from the profit sector that subtly recalibrate their goals and constituencies, along with their structures and processes. Mission drift, however, is only one way in which governance through best practices has altered public entities and public life. As I suggested at the beginning of this discussion, best practices stand for value-free technical knowledge validated by experience and consensus, where the alternative is not only tradition or mandate, but partisanship and contestation over purposes, values, and ends. Best practices connote both expertise and neutrality; they emerge from and cite research, as well as frame it. Their authority and legitimacy is corroborated through replacing rigid rules and top-down commands with organically gestated procedures validated by experience and success. In all of these ways, they are not merely claiming to be unpolitical, but constitute an antipolitics and thereby construct a particular image of the political. … From the epistemological standpoint of best practices, politics appears as a combination of dicta or commands where there should be expertise, as particular interests or debate about ends where there should be teamwork for a goal, as partisanship where there should be neutrality and objectivity in both knowledge and practice, as provincialism where there should be the open doors and the lingua franca of the market.

On its face, this passage is gibberish—a gossamer net of high ethical values wafted over a bottom line of market success. However, it is gibberish bearing significance. These two definitions suggest that best practices aim to maximize competitive advantage without cheating — they represent a steroidally charged form of Weberian instrumental rationality wrapped in Aristotelian ethics and Kantian legal rectitude. So why the wrapping? In bundling together concerns with legality, transparency, accountability, ethics, and competitiveness and at least formally attending to each, best practices represent more than the suffusion of the public sphere with market metrics. They also represent the opposite, namely, the absorption of public or political concerns into markets and consequently the elimination of the need for legal, political, or ethical interference from the state or any other source.

In short, best practices represent not merely the intimacy, but the consolidation of government, business, and knowledge endeavors into a market episteme that subtly banishes nonmarket values and aims. As best practices imbricate the formerly distinct purposes and ends of business, government, and knowledge in neoliberal regimes, they neuter or deflect normative challenges to neoliberal reason precisely through this imbrication. How do you contest a winning practice that claims (by virtue of being only a practice) value neutrality? How would you do so in the name of a (nonmarket) value or purpose that the practice spurns or does not recognize? It is through carrying market values while claiming only to be techniques that best practices promulgate certain norms and foreclose arguments about norms and ends.

While best practices may be “set forth by an authority, such as a governing body or management,” they embody precisely the consensus-developed directives with which neoliberal governance more generally aims to replace law, policing, punishment, and top-down directives. At the same time, best practices may incite or instigate certain legal reforms that would permit closer comportment between the law and business interests, and they also may entail or generate certain legal and ethical workarounds. Thus, while best practices often operate as replacements for law and regulation (not to mention for religion, tradition, or other forms of deliberation), while they are neoliberalism's alternative to the state that it officially abjures, proof that we can be both ethical and efficient without external interference, they can also be the Trojan horse through which law and the political order it secures may be transformed for and by neoliberal reason.

In 2003, months after Saddam Hussein was toppled, Paul Bremer, the American-appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, declared Iraq “open for business” and spelled out a set of 100 orders that came to be known as the Bremer Orders. These mandated selling off several hundred state-run enterprises, permitting full ownership rights of Iraqi businesses by foreign firms and full repatriation of profits to foreign firms, opening Iraq’s banks to foreign ownership and control, and eliminating tariffs — in short, making Iraq a new playground of world finance and investment. At the same time, the Bremer Orders restricted labor and throttled back public goods and services. They outlawed strikes and eliminated the right to unionize in most sectors, mandated a regressive flat tax on income, lowered the corporate rate to a flat 15 percent, and eliminated taxes on profits repatriated to foreign-owned businesses.

These mandated selling off several hundred state-run enterprises … Many of these orders were in violation of the Geneva and Hague Conventions concerning war, occupation, and international relations, which mandate that an occupying power must guard, rather than sell off the assets of the occupied country. But if illegal under international law, the orders could be implemented by a sovereign Iraqi government. To that end, an interim government was appointed by the United States in late 2003 and was pressed to ratify the orders when it was pronounced “sovereign” in 2004. And lest future elected governments not be so pliable, one order declares that no elected Iraqi government will have the power to alter them.

Since at least 8000 B.C. Iraqi farmers have successfully grown wheat without this package in what is known today as the Fertile Crescent. Over the centuries, farmers cultivated the range of varieties essential to crop sustainability by saving seeds from thriving wheat plants one year and planting and cross-pollinating them with seeds of different strengths the following year. By using such practices, the crop continually improves and diversifies, partly through selection by experienced farmers, partly through plant evolution, partly through open pollination conducted by winds, insects, and animals. As late as 2002, writes ecologist Jeremy Smith, the Federal Accounting Office “estimated that 97 percent of Iraqi farmers” engaged in these practices, with the consequence “that there are now over 200,000 known varieties of wheat in the world.”

For millennia, Fertile Crescent farmers informally shared and traded seeds at harvest and planting time. In the twentieth century, they shifted to storing and retrieving seed from a national seed bank, located, alas, in Abu Ghraib, where the entire bank vanished after the bombings and occupation. This calamity, following war and episodes of draught since 1991 and combined with the embargo by the United States and United Kingdom that limited access to agricultural equipment, caused Iraqi wheat production to drop dramatically and become unable to sustain the population for the first time in centuries. 65 The production crisis opened the door for the agribusiness giants to move in: the seed bank destroyed, the harvest yield dramatically down due to natural disaster and years of war, Iraqi farmers were vulnerable, desperate, exploitable. They needed seed, and agribusiness-backed relief efforts were there to provide it. Bremer Order 81 sealed the farmer’s permanent dependence on the agribusiness giants.

The U.S. government handout of genetically modified seed in 2004 was like offering heroin to a desperate single mother out of a job, facing eviction, and despairing of the future. Not only did it promise relief, but the first bag was free. It permanently attached the recipient to the supplier, and the addiction was deadly — to sustainable Iraqi farming, Iraqi self-sufficiency, and even the farmers themselves.

A similar experiment took place in India in the 1990s. Tens of thousands of farmers were lured into using genetically modified cotton seed by village-to-village agribusiness representatives promising bigger crops with export potential, something especially important at a time when neoliberal reforms were eliminating government price supports and subsidies for cotton production. Farmers were abetted in the transition by the availability of large bank loans to purchase seed and the needed pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides. Like the Iraqis, Indian cotton farmers were not only adopting new agricultural technologies, but becoming fully integrated into world markets and debt finance.

The problem is that farming in general is uniquely vulnerable to fluctuations in nature, such as draughts and floods, and farming for export is also vulnerable to fluctuations in world markets. One bad year with either can leave debt-burdened farmers without the means to repay loans, which means bad credit, which means the inability to borrow more (or borrowing at scandalous rates), which means the inability to plant and thus recoup losses. This is what happened in India a decade ago, pushing cotton farmers into an ever-deepening hole of debt. The result? An epidemic of farmer suicides (at least twenty thousand at this point), often committed by drinking a bottle of RoundUp®, the Monsanto-produced herbicide that kills everything except Monsanto’s genetically modified seed.

As they neutralize or obscure contested or conflicting ends, best practices codify existing market norms and features as the reality principle. Thus, while it is certainly possible to imagine more ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable practices for Iraqi agriculture, these would be at odds with global markets and competition, intellectual property rights, and new financing conventions, not to mention modernized agricultural techniques. Farming practices that are organic, biodiverse, small scale, cooperative, free of debt financing, and aimed at generating “food sovereignty” for the nation might be sensible from the perspective of how Iraqi wheat production could draw on past knowledge, materials, and techniques for a sustainable future. But insofar as they would make Iraq an outlier in the global economy, they could not qualify as best practices.

Also visible in this story is the specific meshing of state and business aims through neoliberal governance, a meshing that exceeds the interlocking directorates or quid pro quo arrangements familiar from past iterations of capitalism. The project of the state is to facilitate economic growth and a strong investment climate, not the well-being of a particular sector or people, and the project of capital is to generate such growth, though it also absorbs into itself the broader purposes and ethics previously provisioned elsewhere. And so a series of historical transpositions unfolds in neoliberal governance: business devotes itself to local development as government devotes itself to global positioning; governments negotiate contracts as firms become educators; government concerns itself with the investment climate, business concerns itself with ethics; government prioritizes economic growth, credit ratings, and global economic positioning while business represents the interests of the needy or underserved.

In January 2010, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled against government bans on corporate contributions to super PACS, political action committees formed to support a candidate outside the auspices of her or his campaign. Calling such bans an abridgement of free speech and giving corporations the standing of persons with an unqualified right to political speech, the ruling permits corporate money to overwhelm the election process.

In April 2011, another Supreme Court decision, AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, permitted corporations to end-run class-action suits, forcing disgruntled consumers to enter into individual arbitration, instead. Class-action suits have long been crucial instruments of worker and consumer resistance to discriminatory, deceptive, or fraudulent corporate behavior, from underpaying and overcharging to polluting or violating health and safety laws. These have now been effectively neutered.

The first decision permits large corporations to finance elections, the ultimate icon of popular sovereignty in neoliberal democracy. The second eliminates the primary legal means by which consumers or workers band together to fight corporate abuses. The third and fourth join a string of recent laws constricting the capacity of public-sector and private-sector workers to act in concert. Together, these decisions assault every level of organized popular power and collective consciousness in the United States: citizens, consumers, workers.

In one of the most analytically astute critical commentaries on Citizens United, legal scholar Timothy Kuhner terms the decision “neoliberal jurisprudence” insofar as it applies neoclassical economic theory to the political sphere, analogizes that sphere to the market, and ultimately undoes what he calls the boundary between democracy and capitalism, “two different systems that belong to two different spheres.” Kuhner is certainly correct, yet still understates the accomplishment of the decision. The reasoning in Citizens United exceeds analogizing democracy to the market and applying neoclassical economic principles to First Amendment cases. Rather, in what Foucault identified as the signature move of neoliberal rationality, the decision recasts formerly noneconomic spheres as markets at the level of principles, norms, and subjects. It remakes the political sphere as a market and remakes homo politicus as homo oeconomicus—in the political sphere, individuals, corporations, and other associations are all operating to enhance their competitive positioning and capital value.

Second, persons are not merely producers, but consumers of speech, and government interference is a menace—wrong in principle and harmful in effect — at both ends. The marketplace of ideas, Kennedy repeats tirelessly, is what decides the value of speech claims. Every citizen must judge the content of speech for himself or herself; it cannot be a matter for government determination, just as government should not usurp other consumer choices. In this discussion, Kennedy makes no mention of shared deliberation or judgment in politics or of voices that are unfunded and relatively powerless.

For Kennedy, not only must both speech and capital circulate freely, the only enemy to such freedom is government. This formulation links all members of society and economy, from the poorest citizen to the richest corporation, as potential victims of government interference or censorship. As individuals and corporations are thus allied—even identified with one another in the perils they face—the distinctive power of corporate speech, more than glossed over, is converted into a cause.

In a rhetorically structured field in which there is only speech and its endangerment by government and in which the unimpeded flow of speech benefits all, while government intervention invariably targets and discriminates, significant differences among speakers disappear. Whether the speaker is a homeless woman or Exxon, speech is speech, just as capital is capital. This disavowal of stratification and power differentials in the field of analysis and action is a crucial feature of neoliberal rationality, precisely the feature that discursively erases distinctions between capital and labor, owners and producers, landlord and tenant, rich and poor.

What has happened here? Democratic political speech, far from being a delicate, monopolizable, and corruptible medium for public persuasion becomes, in and as a marketplace, an unhindered capital right. Similarly, the political, far from being a field of highly specific powers through which common existence is negotiated, protected, or transformed, becomes, as a market, a field for advancing every kind of capital—human, corporate, financial, cultural. Both of these moves make perfect sense insofar as neoliberal rationality recognizes market conduct as the sole principle of action and market metrics as the sole measures for every sphere of human action. Importantly, the Kennedy opinion, more than merely drawing on this rationality, articulates it as a set of principles for interpreting the Constitution, construing democracy, and producing political life. Neoliberal rationality constitutes the hermeneutics through which constitutional principles are read and applied in Citizens United and in this way enacts the economization of politics through law.

We are now in a position to grasp how the civil rights language works as a supplement to the marketplace language. Corporations share with all persons free-speech rights in the political sphere. The decision in Citizens United aims to secure these rights for a historically disenfranchised class of persons so that this class of persons may freely compete in the political marketplace and so that all may benefit from this enriched competition. Two different strands from two different eras of minority discourse are mobilized on behalf of deregulating corporate electoral speech: the classic progressive equal-rights argument and the more recent all-are-enriched-by-diversity argument. Drawing on both to advance what Justice Stevens, in his dissent, notes that the public has never clamored for more of, namely, corporate influence in politics, Justice Kennedy positions the court as enfranchising not the powerful, but the disliked, unwanted, and historically excluded. Removing the boot from the necks of this class of persons simultaneously advances the cause of universal rights and enriches the political marketplace of democracy.

In his dissent, Justice Stevens refers to this development as trammeling the long-held constitutional principle of restricting "the speech of some in order to prevent a few from drowning out the many." He rereads the very cases—Austin, Bellotti, Buckley, and McConnell—on which Kennedy rests his judgment and draws opposite conclusions. "Over the course of the past century Congress has demonstrated a recurrent need to regulate corporate participation in candidate elections," and the Supreme Court has appropriately vindicated this need. Both branches of government limited and regulated "corporate electoral advocacy" to "preserve the integrity of the electoral process, prevent corruption, sustain the active, alert responsibility of the individual citizen, protect the expressive interests of shareholders, and preserve … the individual citizen's confidence in government." Preventing the many from being drowned out by the few is precisely what legislatures and courts have historically understood as their task in preserving democracy. Such prevention, however, is squarely at odds with the economization of politics. It has no place in a market, where the most innovative, ambitious, and aggressive prevail, where this prevalence also equates their "voices" with "valuable expertise" in interpreting and shaping political life, and above all, where competitive positioning and consumer choices rather than equality and deliberation are at stake.

Clearly, Justice Kennedy is flailing a bit: the first declarative is wild, especially insofar as it depends on the second, which repeats the formal conceit about the independence of PACS that no one believes. … And the lack of logical entailment from one sentence to the next is almost painful. However, these strange stipulations and leaps of logic can also be explained by the radically new set of meanings for which the justice is reaching and for which a new idiom must be crafted.

(Non corrupt) influence has now been redefined as responsiveness, narrowly stipulated as following the money. Corporately financed super PACS have been redefined as speech. Super PACS are by definition independent political speech, because they are not the direct voice of corporations or the political campaign: the super PAC is independent of each by virtue of its distinct corporate persona.

If voters have the "ultimate influence," but corporations seek to persuade them via super PACS, has he not effectively confessed that voters are but a medium through which corporations wield their political influence? Has democracy become more than a scrubbing or a shield of legitimation for corporate domination?

Neoliberalism, I have argued throughout this book, is best understood not simply as economic policy, but as a governing rationality that disseminates market values and metrics to every sphere of life and construes the human itself exclusively as homo oeconomicus. Neoliberalism thus does not merely privatize — turn over to the market for individual production and consumption — what was formerly publicly supported and valued. Rather, it formulates everything, everywhere, in terms of capital investment and appreciation, including and especially humans themselves.

It is already a symptom of the vanishing value and lexicon for public things that such questions today are generally converted to a different one, namely, the role of government versus the private sector for the provision of goods and services. In this conversion, government is not identified with the public, but only as an alternate market actor. Citizens, meanwhile, are rendered as investors or consumers, not as members of a democratic polity who share power and certain common goods, spaces, and experiences.

Human capital is not driven by its interests, as was homo oeconomicus of yore. Nor is the classical liberal subject free to make its life and choose its values at will. Rather, human capital is constrained to self-invest in ways that contribute to its appreciation or at least prevent its depreciation; this includes titrating inputs such as education, predicting and adjusting to changing markets in vocations, housing, health, and retirement, and organizing its dating, mating, creative, and leisure practices in value-enhancing ways. Human capital is distinctly not concerned with acquiring the knowledge and experience needed for intelligent democratic citizenship.

At a minimum, however, democracy requires that the people authorize their own laws and major political decisions, whether directly or through elected representatives, and also that they share modestly in other, nonlegal powers governing their lives. Anything less means the people do not rule.

Democracy does not require absolute social and economic equality, but it cannot withstand large and fixed extremes of wealth and poverty, because these undermine the work of legislating in common. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau insisted, when such extremes prevail, shared values vanish, and class powers and resentments become decisive, making the act of combining to rule together impossible. Precisely such extremes have been generated in the United States over the past thirty years through neoliberal deregulation and the dismantling of public institutions that served modest redistributive functions and advanced equal opportunity over inherited privilege.

In short, the essential conditions of democratic existence remain these: limited extremes of concentrated wealth and poverty, orientation toward citizenship as a practice of considering the public good, and citizens modestly discerning about the ways of power, history, representation, and justice. Each of these conditions is severely challenged by neoliberal rationality and policy. Indeed, limits on wealth and poverty and educated citizens oriented toward problems of public life are left in the dust by neoliberal values, governance, and the dismantled social state.

Growing and increasingly legitimate socioeconomic inequalities and abandonment of the project of educating a public for citizenship are at once cause and effect of public divestment from universities and public universities' departure from a mission of providing broad liberal arts education to the many. Put the other way around, curtailed access to public universities, along with their changing mission and content, reflects and intensifies contemporary dedemocratizing tendencies in Euro-Atlantic nation-states generally and the United States in particular.

Even when liberty is thinned to the ideal of crafting one's own life and equality is reduced to equal opportunity or equal standing before the law — that is, even bracketing more substantive formulations of freedom and equality than those featured by classical political liberalism—can these values survive the evisceration of an educated public?

Students are pressured by families and cultural norms into choosing business, engineering, and preprofessional majors over those in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences. Meanwhile, universities search incessantly for ways to trim costs by compressing time to degree and making extensive use of summer and online courses taught by casual academic labor, moves that in turn exert pressure to trim breadth and general-education requirements and also discourage double majors—the latter is significant, because many public-university students currently finesse the "practicality" problem by combining a preprofessional major with one in the arts or humanities.

The term “liberal arts” came into regular use in the fourteenth century and, as Raymond Williams argues, was “predominantly a class term,” identifying “the skills and pursuits appropriate … to men of independent means and assured social position, as distinct from other skills and pursuits … appropriate to a lower class.” Even in classical antiquity, the liberal arts (rooted in liberus, the Latin word for individual freedom) denoted the education appropriate to free men, in contrast to that of slaves. A liberal arts education, in other words, was necessary for free men to know and engage the world sufficiently to exercise that freedom. It was the knowledge that enabled the use of freedom, but that in an important sense also made men free insofar as it lifted them from the immediate present to a longer temporal and larger spatial domain, one accessible only through knowledge. Thus did Martianus Capella define the seven liberal arts in the fifth century A.D.: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. Later, history, theology, and art would be added, along with the natural sciences.

This background makes clear that extending liberal arts education from the elite to the many was nothing short of a radical democratic event, one in which all became potentially eligible for the life of freedom long reserved for the few. The notion that all colleges and universities ought to offer a liberal arts degree and that such a degree is one to which all intellectually qualified citizens should have access heralded an order in which the masses would be educated for freedom. Regardless of the quantitative and qualitative limits on its realization, the radicalism of this event cannot be overstated: for the first time in human history, higher-educational policy and practice were oriented toward the many, tacitly destining them for intelligent engagement with the world, rather than economic servitude or mere survival. In this respect, far more than class mobility and equality of opportunity were advanced by a liberal arts education generalized across society. Rather, the ideal of democracy was being realized in a new way insofar as the demos was being prepared through education for a life of freedom, understood as both individual sovereignty (choosing and pursuing one’s ends) and participation in collective self-rule.

It expressed that part of liberal thought, found in a range of thinkers including Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Dewey, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls, that regarded raw economic interest as too thin a reed and too crude a principle on which to build either an individual life or a democracy; cultivation of mind and character through education was one crucial counter to this thinness and crudeness. Consider this justification, from the 1946 President’s Commission on Higher Education, for immense federal investment in public higher education: “It is an investment in social welfare, better living standards, better health and less crime. It is an investment in a bulwark against garbled information, half-truths and untruths, against ignorance and intolerance. It is an investment in human talent, better human relationships, democracy and peace.”

We can no longer speak this way about the public university, and the university no longer speaks this way about itself. Instead, the market value of knowledge—its income-enhancing prospects for individuals and industry alike—is now understood as both its driving purpose and leading line of defense. Even when the humanities and interpretive social sciences are accounted as building the analytical thinkers needed by the professions or as building the mind and hence securing a more gratifying life for the individual, they align with the neoliberal notion of building human capital. In neither defense are the liberal arts depicted as representing, theorizing, interpreting, creating, or protecting the world. They are not conceived as binding, developing, or renewing us as a people, alerting us to dangers, or providing frames, figures, theories, and allegories for altering our practices or collective trajectories. Above all, they are not conceived as providing the various capacities required for democratic citizenship. Rather, they are conceived as something for individuals to imbibe like chocolate, practice like yoga, or utilize like engineering.

Did the principle of broadly educating the masses, generated in the aftermath of World War II, really improve democracy? Did it make U.S. citizens more thoughtful, less easily manipulated, more democratic in instinct, more public minded, more insistent on transparent governance, or more oriented toward justice than self-interest? Did it bring about better leadership or more political accountability? If such accomplishments seem dubious during the four long decades of the Cold War that would constitute the test period for this experiment in what Christopher Newfield has dubbed “high-quality mass higher education,” it is important to remember that these same decades featured the civil rights movement, feminism, sustained challenges to inequality and to Cold War ideology, and an explosion of other justice-minded cultural, artistic, and civic practices. Moreover, mass quality education held out the promise of citizens who were knowing enough about history, power, foreign affairs, language, affect, and meaning to give substance to the notion of choosing their own ends in life, as well as choosing and checking political representatives. To be “knowing enough,” Socrates would remind us, above all entails humility before the vastness and complexity of the world, an appreciation of what one does not know. Such humility and appreciation are precisely what is disappearing from popular political discourse in the United States; smugness in ignorance is notably more common.

The political significance of the provision of a liberal arts education to the many might be compressed this way: if, historically, a liberal arts education pertained to a leisured class that was also a ruling class, the extension of such an education to the general citizenry configures an ideal of this leisure and power as widely shared. Extending such an education to the masses draws a utopian vision in which freedom from toil is generalized and political rule is widely shared. Crucially, citizens educated in the liberal arts are being prepared for what Aristotle called “the good life,” which he understood as cultivating the higher human faculties for thoughtful civic engagement and eudamonia, that special Greek term for happiness comprising rich fulfillment through the elaboration of human possibility. The notion of the “good life” may sound arcane, effete, or even decadent. Thus, it is important to remember that for Aristotle, it signifies the capacity for human pursuits beyond toiling for survival. “Mere life” (mere existence) is the good life’s opposite, and the difference between them is marked by the difference between freedom and necessity and even between freedom and enslavement.

The specific content of Aristotle’s binary is contestable, especially in its conjoining of work and servitude, on the one hand, and of freedom with aristocratic leisure, on the other. Yet the point is sustainable beyond these challenges and can be made into a sharp critique of a neoliberal table of values. Human life wholly bound to the production of wealth, whether laboring to produce it or hovering over its accumulation, is small and unrealized. The same is true of human life that does not develop creative or intellectual capacities and does not seek to govern its own affairs. A liberal arts education, whatever its aporias and occlusions consequent to its class basis (and its markedly raced and gendered historical unfolding and content), is the most comprehensive affirmation of this truth contained in Western history. The proffering of this education to broad swaths of the population thus includes them in the projects of humanism and democratic governance so long reserved for the few.

If the extension of a liberal arts education to the many carried an ideal of radically democratized knowledge, human perfectibility, freedom, and political rule, what is signified by the reversal of this move today? By the diminution of a liberal arts education in the two higher-education destinations of most working-class and middle-class students today, the proprietaries and the state universities? Certainly, depreciating liberal arts higher education for the masses retreats from the promise of upward socioeconomic mobility, of emancipation from being born to one’s position in a class-stratified social order. But it retreats as well from the value of a citizenry educated for democracy, from the idea that education offers the prospect of intrinsically richer and more gratifying lives and from the idea that education fosters an enhanced capacity to participate in public life and contribute to the public good. Thus, the popular contemporary wisdom that a liberal arts education is outmoded is true only to the extent that social equality, liberty (understood as self-governance and sharing in the powers that govern us together), and worldly development of mind and character are outmoded and have been displaced by another set of metrics: income streams, profitability, technological innovation, and contribution to society construed narrowly as the development and promulgation of marketable goods or services.

It is easy enough to see this displacement of the value of developed, free, and equal citizens by the value of capital appreciation (human or otherwise) in today’s halls of heroism: popular culture does not celebrate inventors of vaccines, advocates for peace, revolutionary leaders, or even astronauts opening new frontiers; it celebrates Hollywood or sports celebrities; creators of Apple, Facebook, Netflix, or eBay; and above all the very rich … some of whom are college or even high school drop-outs. “Who needs a college degree?” is the theme not only of Kanye West’s debut CD, but also countless get-rich-quick blogs, and it was the headline of a 2010 Businessweek story about megarich CEOs. Apart from glorifying uneducated and often vacuous celebrity, much in popular and maverick business culture suggests that higher education is irrelevant to success defined as fame, wealth, or even ingenuity and invention: billionaire Peter Theil’s “fellowship competition,” which pays college-age students $100,000 to drop out and pursue business ventures instead, makes this point explicit. At the same time, of course, university curriculums and culture have been demonized by the Right as saturated with Left agendas and political correctness, while the common rage of the common citizen has been glorified and exploited.

Second, the bottom line has become the only line in the current cultural valuation of college and a life beyond it. The debate about the “worth” of expensive college educations today turns almost entirely on the question of return on investment.

State universities will survive these sea changes, but what will likely not survive is their core in undergraduate liberal arts education offered by prestigious faculty researchers. Written and oral skills can be developed in writing and speech classes taught by inexpensive lecturers, who can also offer courses in American politics, Latin American literature, and Chinese history. There is no reason for public universities to keep eminent or promising scholars on their payrolls in these fields; indeed, from a fully marketized perspective, there is no reason for the public universities to sustain these research fields at all.

The point is not to castigate a rising generation of scholars for participating in practices that index the degree to which all academic practices have been transformed by neoliberal economization. Rather, the point is that relentless configuration of liberal arts research by academic market norms paradoxically weakens the capacity of liberal arts scholars to defend the liberal arts at the moment of their endangerment. It renders what scholars do increasingly illegible and irrelevant to those outside the profession and even outside individual disciplines, making it difficult to establish the value of this work to students or a public. The move to judge every academic endeavor by its uptake in nonacademic venues (commerce, state agencies, NGOs), as the British Research Excellence Framework (REF) does, is equally damaging. Of course, these metrics abjure humanistic inquiry, but they also cannot capture the value of basic scientific research from which technical applications derive, thus threatening to shut off the spring waters whose exploitation the REF aims to affirm.

It is remarkable how quickly all strata in public universities—staff, faculty, administrators, students—have grown accustomed to the saturation of university life by neoliberal rationality, metrics, and principles of governance. Faculty are used to corporately funded research centers, professorships, programs and departments and have, with a few exceptions, largely accepted the erosion of their power to govern the university.

The Haas School of Business at Berkeley, for example, has three dozen full-time positions related to alumni relations and development, one for every three faculty members. The UCLA business school, the Anderson School of Management, privatized in 2012. The school chose to forego $8 million a year in state funds in order to gain the flexibility to raise tuition, spurn salary caps, and spurn limitations on fundraising, partnerships, and admissions protocols, all of which compromised its competitiveness with Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.

Democracy in an era of enormously complex global constellations and powers requires a people who are educated, thoughtful, and democratic in sensibility. This means a people modestly knowing about these constellations and powers; a people with capacities of discernment and judgment in relation to what it reads, watches, or hears about a range of developments in its world; and a people oriented toward common concerns and governing itself. Such knowledge, discernment, and orientation are what a university liberal arts education has long promised and what are now severely challenged by neoliberal rationality inside and outside universities. Contesting this challenge democratically would place us squarely within Rousseau's paradox: to support good institutions, the people must be antecedently what only good institutions can make them. The survival of liberal arts education depends on broad recognition of its value for democracy. The survival of democracy depends upon a people educated for it, which entails resisting neoliberalization of their institutions and themselves.

Put the other way around, a liberal arts education available to the many is essential to any modern democracy we could value, but is not indigenous to it. Democracy can defund, degrade, or abandon the education it requires, undermining its resources for sustaining or renewing itself, even for valuing or desiring itself. Indeed, one crucial effect of neoliberal rationality is to reduce the desire for democracy, along with its discursive intelligibility when it does appear.

Demos/kratia. The people rule. "Democracy" signifies the aspiration that the people, and not something else, order and regulate their common life through ruling themselves together. Conversely, democracy negates the legitimacy of rule by a part of the people, rather than by the whole—for example, only by those with property, wealth, education, or expertise—or by any external principle, such as power, god(s), violence, truth, technology, or nationalism, even as the people may decide that one or more of these ought to guide, even determine, their shared existence. The term "democracy" contains nothing beyond the principle that the demos rules, although as the only political form permitting us all to share in the powers by which we are governed, it affords without guaranteeing the possibility that power will be wielded on behalf of the many, rather than the few, that all might be regarded as ends, rather than means, and that all may have a political voice. This is the bare promise of bare democracy.

The term does not specify the arrangements, agreements, or institutions by which popular rule could or should be fulfilled. It does not say whether the people will delegate their authority or exercise it directly, whether they will be superordinate (sovereign) or subordinate (subject) to extant laws, whether they will actively assert their sovereignty in formulating and executing a common good or subscribe only to minimalist agreements for living in proximity with each other. Hence, on the one hand, Occupy participants shout "This is what democracy looks like!" when they seize private property (or privatized public space) for the commons, when they deliberate for hours in general assemblies, and when they refuse to produce accountable leaders, representatives, or even make demands. On the other hand, mayors, university administrators, and police invoke democratic law and principle when they evict or arrest the occupiers. There is a deep argument here about what democracy entails—not mere hypocrisy, dissimulation, or instrumentalization of the term. However, a long historical shadow and a contemporary struggle are also in play: Is democracy destined always to be captured and co-opted by the socially dominant? Will the demos always be contained, divided, or subdued in the name of its own political form?

More than leaving its contents and particulars unspecified, the bare concept of democracy (or the concept of bare democracy) features no continuous or consistent account of why the people ought to rule, only the negative one that we should not be ruled by others. Even Rousseau, nearly singular in Western political thought for closely specifying why democracy alone secures (or recovers) the moral dignity of man, theorizes democracy as a way not to violate this dignity, rather than by delineating democracy's positive political value. Democracy alone is "the form of association … under which each individual, while uniting with the others, obeys no one but himself, and remains as free as before."

Over the centuries, of course, there have been many accounts of democracy's superiority and advantages over other political forms. However, most of them have little or nothing to do with popular rule and instead attribute features to democracy that are not inherent to it: equality, liberty, rights or civil liberties, individuality, tolerance, equal opportunity, inclusiveness, openness, proceduralism, the rule of law, peaceful conflict resolution and change. None of these belong exclusively to democracy defined as rule of the people. Each could be promulgated or secured by nondemocratic regimes. Moreover, any demos could affirm one or more of the following: extreme inequality; invasive policing and surveillance; limited or nonsupervenient rights; nonuniversal rights; severe restrictions on speech, assembly and worship; conformism; intolerance; exclusions or persecutions of targeted peoples and practices; rule by experts or bureaucrats; war, colonialism, or a domestically militarized society. Many have done so. It will not do to say that such phenomena are undemocratic, if the demos willed or sanctioned them.

From its emergence in the late eighteenth century through the present, European liberal democracy has always been saturated with capitalist powers and values. More generally, through its political and legal abstractions, it has secured the power and privileges of the socially dominant, consecrating not only private property and capital rights, but racialism and a subordinating and gender-normative sexual division of labor. Liberal democracy's imbrication with privileges, inequalities, and exclusions is masked through explicit formulations such as equality before the law and freedom based in rights and through a trove of tacit precepts such as moral autonomy and abstract personhood. Together, these precepts secure unequal and unfree social, cultural, and economic life as they disavow their intersection with entrenched divisions of labor and class stratifications and their mobilization of norms of personhood heavily inflected by race, gender, and culture. Through their formal context and content neutrality, liberal democratic ideals of personhood, freedom, and equality appear universal while being saturated with norms of bourgeois white male heterosexual familialism. This is but one reason why the historically excluded, long after political enfranchisement, have yet to achieve substantive equality and belonging.

Economization replaces a political lexicon with a market lexicon. Governance replaces a political lexicon with a management lexicon. The combination transforms the democratic promise of shared rule into the promise of enterprise and portfolio management at the individual and collective level. In place of citizens sharing and contesting power, the resulting order emphasizes, at best, consensus achieved through stakeholder consultation, focus groups, best practices, and teamwork. The unruliness of democracy is stifled by a form of governing that is soft and total.

The point is simply that as long as it operated in a different lexical and semiotic register from capital, liberal democratic principles and expectations could be mobilized to limit capitalist productions of value and market distributions; they could be a platform for critiques of those values and distributions, and they could gestate more radical democratic aspirations. When this other register is lost, when market values become the only values, when liberal democracy is fully transformed into market democracy, what disappears is this capacity to limit, this platform of critique, and this source of radical democratic inspiration and aspiration.

In the Euro-Atlantic world today, there would seem to be a fair amount of discontent, or at least unease, about the neoliberalization of everyday life. However, this quotidian unhappiness tends to focus on neoliberalism's generation of extreme inequalities, on its invasive or crass levels of commodification, or on its dismantling of public goods and commercialization of public life and public space. There is far less worry expressed about neoliberalism's threat to democracy, perhaps because the incursions, inversions, and transformations I have been describing are more subtle than the juxtapositions of billionaire bankers with slum dwellers, perhaps because of the shell form democracy already had prior to neoliberalization (its reduction to rights and elections), perhaps because of ubiquitous cynicism and alienation from political life. Above all, no doubt, neoliberal rationality has been extremely effective in identifying capitalism with democracy.

But if democracy stands for the idea that the people, rather than something else, will decide the fundamentals and coordinates of their common existence, economization of this principle is what can finally kill it.

Even a radical or direct democracy, or one not saturated with capital, racialism, and so forth, is capable of dark trajectories or simply of neglecting critical issues such as climate change, species extinction, or genocidal warfare beyond its borders. Thus, there are times when democracy may have to be intermixed with practices of nondemocratic stewardship or contained by moral absolutes. Moreover, democracy is not inherently self-sustaining; it often requires undemocratic or ademocratic sources of supplementation or reinforcement.

This also means that when economic “reality” requires it, even the most thoroughly responsibilized individuals may be legitimately cast off from the ship. Human capital for itself bears the responsibility of enhancing and securing its future; it is expected to self-invest wisely and is condemned for dependency. However, human capital for the firm or the nation is bound to the project of the whole and is valued according to macroeconomic vicissitudes and exigencies. This means that neither its responsibility nor its fealty guarantees its survival.

The “shared sacrifice” discourse of neoliberalism’s austerity epoch differs sharply from that accompanying the “trickle-down” economics of the 1980s. The Reagan-Thatcher era promised that wealth generated by the giants would benefit the small; today’s sacrificial citizen receives no such promise. Economic ends are delinked from the general welfare of the population but, in addition, as citizens are integrated into these ends via governance, they may be sacrificed to its needs, vicissitudes, and contingencies in a nation, just as they are in a firm. Thus, a political rationality born in reaction to National Socialism (recall that the theories of F. A. Hayek and the Ordo School of neoliberalism were retorts to that formation) paradoxically comes to mirror select aspects of it.

Moishe Halbertal, in a meditation largely focused on the Hebrew Bible and contemporary just-war theory, argues for distinguishing between religious sacrifice and moral-political sacrifice. He formulates the distinction as turning on the difference between “sacrificing to” something (usually collectively) and “sacrificing for” something (usually individually). Thus, we sacrifice to the sacred, but for the nation, to the gods, but for war.

In the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, for example, 700 billion taxpayer dollars and over five million homeowners were fed to banks “too big to fail.” Thus we are returned to the religious valence of sacrifice. In shared sacrifice for economic restoration, we sacrifice “to,” rather than “for,” and make an offering to a supreme power on which we are radically dependent, but that owes us nothing. We are called to offer life to propitiate and regenerate its life-giving capacities … but without any guarantee that the benefits of this sacrifice will redound to us.

René Girard, drawing on the work of Samuel Leinhardt and Victor Turner, develops and transforms this point by emphasizing what the victim does for the community: sacrifice, Girard writes, is a “deliberate act of collective substitution performed at the expense of the victim and absorbing all the internal tensions, feuds, and rivalries pent up within the community.” Girard here lays groundwork for his renowned notion of “scapegoating”: “the victim is a substitute for all the members of the community, offered up by the members themselves. The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered through the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.”

Might interpellation by the call to sacrifice repress political dissension or uprising? Alternatively, perhaps “shared sacrifice” inverts while sustaining the general logic that Girard outlines: instead of preserving the community through sacrifice of a victim outside of it, the whole community is called to sacrifice in order to save particular elements within it. Thus, for example, rage appropriately directed at investment banks is redirected into a call for shared sacrifice undertaken by their victims. This would seem to be exactly the logic that Occupy was seeking to expose and reverse in its attempt to hold the banks, rather than the people, responsible for creating an unsustainable debt-based economy.

Today, as economic metrics have saturated the state and the national purpose, the neoliberal citizen need not stoically risk death on the battlefield, only bear up uncomplainingly in the face of unemployment, underemployment, or employment unto death. The properly interpellated neoliberal citizen makes no claims for protection against capitalism’s suddenly burst bubbles, job-shedding recessions, credit crunches, and housing market collapses, its appetites for outsourcing or the discovery of pleasure and profit in betting against itself or betting on catastrophe. This citizen also accepts neoliberalism’s intensification of inequalities as basic to capitalism’s health — comprising the subpoverty wages of the many and the bloated compensation of bankers, CEOs, and even managers of public institutions and comprising as well reduced access of the poor and middle class to formerly public goods, now privatized. This citizen releases state, law, and economy from responsibility for and responsiveness to its own condition and predicaments and is ready when called to sacrifice to the cause of economic growth, competitive positioning and fiscal constraints.

Thus, again, does a political rationality originally born in opposition to fascism turn out to mirror certain aspects of it, albeit through powers that are faceless and invisible-handed and absent an authoritarian state. This is not to say that neoliberalism is fascism or that we live in fascist times. It is only to note convergences between elements of twentieth-century fascism and inadvertent effects of neoliberal rationality today. These convergences appear in the valorization of a national economic project and sacrifice for a greater good into which all are integrated, but from which most must not expect personal benefit. They appear as well in the growing devaluation of politics, publics, intellectuals, educated citizenship, and all collective purposes apart from economy and security.

While the Left opposes an order animated by profit instead of the thriving of the earth and its inhabitants, it is not clear today how such thriving could be obtained and organized. Capitalist globalization, which Marx imagined would yield a class that would universalize itself by inverting its denigration into shared power and freedom, has yielded instead paralyzing conundrums: What alternative planetary economic and political order(s) could foster freedom, equality, community, and earthly sustainability and also avoid domination by massive administrative apparatuses, complex markets, and the historically powerful peoples and parts of the globe?

At the triumphal “end of history” in the West, most have ceased to believe in the human capacity to craft and sustain a world that is humane, free, sustainable, and, above all, modestly under human control.

This loss of conviction about the human capacity to craft and steer its existence or even to secure its future is the most profound and devastating sense in which modernity is “over.” Neoliberalism’s perverse theology of markets rests on this land of scorched belief in the modern. Ceding all power to craft the future to markets, it insists that markets “know best,” even if, in the age of financialization, markets do not and must not know at all, and the hidden hand has gone permanently missing.

Alas, Balibar's extraordinary text emerged in English just as Undoing the Demos was going to press. It deserves fuller treatment than I have given it here.

For the claim that neoliberalism has been made to signify so many different things that it is largely useless, see Taylor C. Boas and Jordan Gans-Morse, “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan,” Studies in Comparative International Development 44.2 (2009), pp. 137–61.

There is now a fine set of intellectual histories of neoliberalism, including Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason; Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World (New York: Verso, 2014); Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (New York: Verso, 2013); and Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Each of these works contributes to an appreciation of neoliberalism as emerging from several streams of dissident thought in the postwar period, eventually taking shape as a governing rationality that drew on and diverged from these waters. Each also contributes something distinctive to theorizing the novel powers and categories of neoliberal political regimes and subjectivities. Together, these studies implicitly contest a more orthodox Marxist view, exemplified by David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), that neoliberalism was a reformatting of capitalism in response to the falling rate of profit in the 1970s.

While the rating system is clearly oriented to would-be investors in higher education, Deputy Under Secretary of Education Jamienne Studley cast it as a consumer service: “it's like rating a blender,” she said to a gathering of college presidents.

Many are arguing with Piketty's policy prescriptions, few with his fundamental claim that capital accumulation without growth is at the bottom of intensifying inequality.

There are many other examples of the neoliberalization of social justice concerns by the Obama administration. Consider, for example, Obama's pet initiative, My Brother's Keeper, which aims to improve the chances of education and employment for at-risk boys and men of color by recruiting public and private “investors” in this population. The president summarized the project this way: “We've got a huge number of kids out there who have as much talent, and more talent, than I had, but nobody is investing in them.”

In November 2013, National Public Radio aired an excellent story on the subtle mechanisms of corporate domination in state policy, tracking how neoliberal economization of government generates a new vulnerability of legislators to corporate interests. One interviewee explained how lobbyists now write legislation and organize its passage. He offered the example of Citigroup's authorship of a bill to roll back a piece of financial regulation imposed after the 2008 finance-capital meltdown. "To me," says Lee Drutman of the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group, "it is just another tick-tock on a story that's been developing for a long time—that Congress has basically outsourced its policy expertise to the private sector." As outrageous as this story seems, Drutman says, it's now unfortunately business as usual on Capitol Hill. "People on the Hill don't stay as long. You don't get as good people on the Hill. The expertise on policymaking more and more has moved to the private sector, and it's moved to represent those organizations and companies who can afford to pay for it, which generally isn't you and me. It's big banks and Big Oil and big companies." Drutman worked as a banking policy staffer in 2009 and 2010, handling financial-overhaul issues, and what he saw around the Capitol was that congressional staff members were stretched incredibly thin. Lobbyists know this, says Drutman, so what they offer lawmakers is an all-in-one package—they'll help a lawmaker round up cosponsors for the bill, even write talking points, as well as the bill's specific language.

Michel Feher, the thinker who has most extensively theorized the implications for the subject and subjectivity of the shift from productive to finance capital, appears to argue that the shift is thoroughgoing and complete. I am suggesting that both modalities are present today, that human capital on the entrepreneurial model is not dead and may cohabit in the same person with human capital on the investment model.

Of course, with these formulations, Aristotle ontologized an unfree order, one based on slavery, gender, and class domination, and divided humanity between those condemned to mere life and those free to pursue the good life. Arendt was infamously uncritical of Aristotle's ontology. Marx, however, seized upon Aristotle's distinction as a premise for liberation: all humans should be emancipated from mere life for the good life.

When I have presented parts of this book to academic audiences, my use of Aristotle's “mere life,” has so often been confused with Agamben's “bare life” that it seems important to explain why Agamben's thesis does not bear on my point. In Homo Sacer, Agamben uses the term “bare life” to depict a particular positioning of human beings in relation to sovereignty and law. Aristotle uses “mere life” to signify the limited existence of those bound to producing and reproducing human existence; he contrasts this with the lives of citizens who can realize humanness through political and intellectual life, both of which are distinctly human in part because they are free(d) from necessity defined as the basic sustenance and reproduction of life.

Foucault introduces the problem this way: “Is homo oeconomicus an atom of freedom in the face of all the conditions, undertakings, legislation and prohibitions of a possible government, or was he not already a certain type of subject who precisely enabled an art of government to be determined according to the principle of economy, both in the sense of political economy and in the sense of the restriction, self-limitation and fragility of government? Obviously the way in which I have formulated this question gives the answer straightaway … homo oeconomicus as the partner, the vis-à-vis, and the basic element of the new governmental reason formulated in the eighteenth century.”

Foucault is careful not to separate crises of liberalism from crises of capitalism, noting that the problems of the 1930s exemplify their intertwining. However, he then says: “But crises of liberalism are not just the pure and simple or direct project of these crises of capitalism in the political sphere. You can find crises of liberalism linked to crises of the capitalist economy. But you can also find them with a chronological gap with regard to these crises, and … the way … these crises manifest, are handled … is not directly deducible from the crises of capitalism” (p. 70).

Tim Mitchell notes that the term “political economy” originally referred to an economical manner of governing. This suggests not that the economy becomes the model for government, but rather that governments can be economical, efficient, lean, qua governments. The difference is vast.

At the dawn of what we have come to call “the West,” the citizen was an overtly political being, participating in rule of the common through which he is also realized, perfected, and freed. During the long centuries of feudalism, this strenuous notion of citizenship faded as the authority of the church and monarchies came to the fore. From this dark night, the revolutions of modernity were born. Coterminous with (and partly inciting) these political revolutions was the emergence of a mode of production that bore heavily on political life—shaping its institutions, driving its contents, conditioning it languages—but that still did not fuse with it, let alone fully commandeer its terms or organize its principles. At this point, a figure of the citizen emerged who, on the one hand, formally shared in political sovereignty and, on the other hand, was relentlessly concerned with the citizen’s own interests and well-being, finding its freedom in the pursuit of its own ends. Animated by desire, armed with rights, this figure ceded concern with shared political rule to its representatives and chased after its own satisfactions. This is the subject split between “citizen” and “bourgeois” that dogged liberal democratic theory for two centuries, that Marx makes the basis of his critique of the liberal state, and that the neoliberal form of homo oeconomicus will finally leave behind.

Hobbes well understood the fundamental noncoherence of families made of wholly self-regarding humans, which is why he, unlike Thatcher and many modern economists, did not formulate families as a priori.

See, for example, this argument by Becker: “The responsibility of married women for childcare and other housework has major implications for earnings and occupational differences between men and women, even aside from the effect on the labor force participation of married women. I submit that this is an important reason why the earnings of married women typically are considerably below those of married men, and why substantial occupational segregation persists.” Becker, A Treatise on the Family, p. 78.

Some have argued that gender stratification is reduced by neoliberalism, insofar as it involves a shift from an economy based on private property economy to an economy based on human capital. Elizabeth Mayes, for example, thinks the decreasing importance of private property is positive for women, for Engels-like reasons: if women’s subordination has been linked historically to their status as private property, women are now freed to be individuals rather than property.

Camp is very clear that the investigation of practices should come first and that the metrics quantifying their effect should come later (ibid., pp. 4–5). However, it is noteworthy that leading with the metrics in order to produce the practices has become an important governance tool. The British REF (Research Excellence Framework) is but one example; almost all the efforts at assessing teaching and educational outcomes in U.S. K–12 education has the purpose of altering pedagogical and curricular practices.

The erasure of the distinction between the form and the content of government and business by neoliberal governance is important. However, so are its effects in conjoining business and research. Since neoliberal governance is legitimated by its effectiveness in promulgating efficient means to ends, rather than, say, by its upholding of the principles of justice or of provisioning for its members, it has a distinctive relationship to knowledge. Good governance promotes economic growth, a good investment climate, and a high credit rating and requires the knowledge necessary to do this. Bad governance does not. Thus, the contouring of all knowledge to economic usefulness (evident in steadily accelerating moves to support academic research with high “impact factors” and to starve or eliminate research that does not have commercial impact) and of all government to economic health are two faces of the same phenomenon.

Jack Jackson notes that this is not an even or consistent process. Obamacare, he argues, was a significant challenge to neoliberalization. Jack Jackson, “Not Yet an End: Neoliberalism and the Jurisprudence of Obamacare,” unpublished paper presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Certainly, Jackson has a point, but the neoliberal form of Obamacare as a national health plan can be lost on no one. There is also a question of whether it will survive.

“[I]t isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” Quoted in Ronald Butt, “Mrs. Thatcher: The First Two Years,” Sunday Times, May 3, 1981, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104475.

Kuhner writes, “January 21, 2010, stands as the day that the Roberts Court solidified its commitment to defining democracy on the basis of a controversial form of economic theory.” And, “Two things stand out in the majority opinion: first, it espouses a dogmatic free market form of economic theory; and second, it is printed on the pages of a judicial opinion that authoritatively defines the terms of the First Amendment. This combination of capitalist ideology and case law makes up what I call neoliberal jurisprudence, the use of neoclassical economic theory as judicial reasoning.”

In making this point, Rousseau says, “In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.” Rousseau does not intend “that degrees of power and wealth should be absolutely the same for all.” However, “where wealth is concerned … no citizen shall be rich enough to buy another and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself.”

After decades of shrinking income and wealth inequality in the postwar period, inequality has risen steadily since the early 1980s. The vast preponderance of economic growth since that time has benefitted the richest Americans: in the most recent decade, 65 percent of all income growth went to the top 1 percent of the population, while the median income of nonelderly households fell, and the share of Americans living in poverty rose.

This competition is made palpable by hard sells on the part of public and for-profit universities to military veterans and other federally funded students.

In December 2013, the regents of the University of Kansas waged a direct assault on academic freedom, allowing the "CEO" of a state university to "suspend, dismiss or terminate from employment any faculty or staff member who makes improper use of social media." "Improper use" includes speech that "interferes with the regular operation of the university, or otherwise adversely affects the university's ability to efficiently provide services," or "is contrary to the best interests of the University." The justification of such radical curtailment of academic freedom was to protect transactions and relations between the university and state legislators.

To grasp the increase in provisioning a liberal arts education over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, consider just the University of California system. In 1940, there were only two campuses (Berkeley and Los Angeles), together enrolling fewer than twenty thousand students. By 1960, there were six campuses (Santa Barbara, Davis, Riverside, and San Francisco had been added) enrolling more than fifty thousand students. By 1980, with the addition of the Santa Cruz, Irvine, and San Diego campuses and expansion of the others, enrollment was one hundred and forty thousand. Today, ten campuses enroll more than two hundred and twenty thousand students.

The University of California Annual Accountability Report indicates that over the past decade, there has been increased enrollment by students from lower-income families (under $50,000) and upper-income families (more than $149,000), while there has been more than a 10 percent drop in enrollees from middle-income families ($50,000 to $149,000), with the greatest proportion of that drop coming from students of families earning between $100,000 and $150,000.

And it may be generous to say that college graduates have seen wage stagnation: real wages have decreased in several of the past years. One report found "the average starting salary for a graduate in 2009 was $48,633, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, a decrease of 1.2 percent from 2008. From 2000 to 2007, real starting pay for those with bachelor's degrees fell 3.2 percent among men and 1.7 percent among women. In contrast, between 1995 and 2000, real starting pay for college-educated men and women increased 20.9 percent and 11.7 percent, respectively.

It would seem that many faculty have departed from the values of the priesthood for those of the market, rendering the notion that “you don’t go into academia for the money” a quaint shibboleth of a tweedy past, one spurned by market-smart young professionals who just happen to study Chaucer or South Asian politics.

As part of the plan, JPMorgan will renovate a building to house the program, put up money to pay program faculty and pay a full ride for students seeking a degree, according to an internal university plan. In addition, JPMorgan employees may sit on dissertation committees and advise the university on which faculty members should teach in the program, according to the planning document and a top university official.

For a … people to understand wise principles of politics and follow basic rules of state craft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit which must be the product of social institutions would have to preside over the setting up of those institutions; men would have to have already become before the advent of law that which they become as a result of law.

A crucial and complex term in Of Grammatology, the “supplement” may be crudely defined as something that is formally outside of a primary term or binary, but that supports or sustains it. Pressure on or exposure of the supplement can thus help to denaturalize or delegitimate the ontological status of the original term, or reveal its internal incompleteness or incoherence. That is why there is political possibility in the supplement.

Individuals need not consciously “believe” in sacrifice for a sacrificial logic to be at work in citizenship remade by neoliberal rationality. Rather, the very notion of “shared sacrifice” interpellates and binds us as a citizenry — this is how the “sharing” works across extreme and obscene differences in how the sacrifice is experienced.

Among other things, Halbertal’s distinction is confounded by sacrifice in holy war, which, arguably, most wars are, including those fought by secular states. But the distinction is leaky in other ways as well.

Many anthropologists and other theorists of sacrifice insist that destruction of the victim is key to sacrifice. See, for example, Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, pp. 97–98; and René Girard, “Violence and the Sacred,” in Jeffrey Carter (ed.), Understanding Religious Sacrifice: A Reader (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 242. “The victim is sacred only because he is to be killed,” writes Girard.

According to many analysts, the “too big to fail” problem is far worse than it was in 2008. “The six largest banks in the nation now have 67% of all the assets in the U.S. financial system, according to bank research firm SNL Financial. That amounts to $9.6 trillion, up 37% from five years ago.”

Foucault, reading Hayek, says that what is distinctive about liberal (economic) governmentality is that the state cannot and should not touch the economy, because it cannot know the economy. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004), p. 283. Similarly, homo oeconomicus is a creature led by interest and calculation, not knowledge: he, too, does not know because he cannot know. “So we have a system in which homo oeconomicus owes the positive nature of his calculation precisely to everything which eludes his calculation” (ibid., p. 278). The premise is that man and state are inherently and necessarily ignorant about the economy, a field of logics that is rational, yet “naturally opaque” because of its nontotalizable quality (ibid., pp. 279–83). But if man and state do not know, does the market know? Theories of supply, demand, and pricing notwithstanding, the assumption persists that the market acts, rather than knows; economics can explain and even predict that action, but it cannot bring it into being. However, financialization changes even this correlation between knowledge and action—its explanatory or predictive quality and its relation to calculation. It evaporates predictability. Financialization changes markets from predictable reactions to supply, demand, and price into markets where speculation is the driving dynamic — from interest to gambling, from stability to instability, from following the crowd to shorting it. But this also means that homo oeconomicus can no longer act on the basis of calculation; rather, he acts on the basis of speculation. And it is very easy to crash.

In their view, the role of the government was not to protect vulnerable segments of the population from the potential violence of market relations but, instead, to shelter the allegedly fragile mechanisms of the market from stifling rules and the disabling influence of so-called “special interests” which ranged from organized labor to protectors of the environment.

Eager to blunt the resistance raised by their agenda, neoliberal reformers initiated a series of deregulations, regarding capital flow and asset creation, that were meant to replace social protection and guaranteed employment with abundant and accessible credit — thereby endowing all economic agents with entrepreneurial ambitions and discipline. Yet, under the guise of diffusing the ethos of the self-reliant entrepreneur throughout the entire population, their reforms eventually enabled the speculative logic of financial markets to preside over the allocation of resources on a global scale. Thus, far from restoring thrift and frugality as the virtuous paths to personal independence and lasting profit, the reign of deregulated finance defined success as leverage, understood as the ability to invest with borrowed funds, and compelled the less fortunate to stake their livelihood on perennial indebtedness.

Much more than a mood swing, whereby the advocates of freer markets would temporarily prevail over the harbingers of a more protective State, the policies instigated under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and further refined by their “Third Way” successors, have successively transformed everything from corporate management to statecraft, household economics to personal relations. In the world shaped by these transformations — a world where the securitization of risks and liabilities greatly widens the realm of potentially appreciable assets — even the criteria according to which individuals are incited to evaluate themselves no longer match the civic, business, and family values respectively distinctive of political, economic, and cultural liberalism.

However, neither the steady deterioration of labor conditions nor the increasingly alarming damages caused to the environment has acted as the anticipated wake up call. To the contrary, the aftermath of the Great Recession has demonstrated the remarkable resilience of a mode of government, disseminated across public and private institutions, that gives precedence to the gambles on tomorrow's presumptive profits over the mending of today's social woes and the prevention of after-tomorrow's ecological disaster.