Above all, it means uncoupling the market economy from the political principle of laissez-faire, and here lies the radicalism of Foucault’s scholarly intervention into the political debates that would unfold in the decade following his lectures. Neoliberalism is not about the state leaving the economy alone. Rather, neoliberalism activates the state on behalf of the economy, not to undertake economic functions or to intervene in economic effects, but rather to facilitate economic competition and growth and to economize the social, or, as Foucault puts it, to “regulate society by the market.”

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 106