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.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 162