In the mid-eighteenth century, yet another principle of limitation arose, that of the market. Rights remained a constraint on sovereignty, but the principle of what Foucault terms “market veridiction” now animated an ontological, epistemological, and political reformulation of sovereignty, one that not only constrained, but produced a new form of the state and its legitimacy. As the market became the new site of truth or veridiction, it simultaneously became that which must be left alone by the state and what came to construct, measure, and legitimate the state, substituting for law and edict in this regard.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 98