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.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 546