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.”

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 87