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.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 419