Foucault was alert to this possibility; he described homo oeconomicus as “someone … eminently governable … the correlate of a governmentality … determined according to the principle of economy.” But he did not fathom the extreme to which this governability could go in a neoliberal regime, an extreme expressed through the formula of maximum governance through maximum individual freedom. In place of the liberal promise to secure the politically autonomous and sovereign subject, the neoliberal subject is granted no guarantee of life (on the contrary, in markets, some must die for others to live), and is so tethered to economic ends as to be potentially sacrificible to them.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 215