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.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 114