In the Collège de France lectures on neoliberalism, Foucault uses the descriptor “political rationality” rather infrequently. More often, he speaks of neoliberalism as “governmental reason,” “governmentality,” “governmental rationality,” or “economic rationality.” Above all, he identifies it as “a new programming of liberal governmentality,” a reformulation of the relations between state, economy, and subject posited and produced by liberalism. Thus, I am pressing much more from the formulation of neoliberalism as a political rationality than Foucault did.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 231