This loss of conviction about the human capacity to craft and steer its existence or even to secure its future is the most profound and devastating sense in which modernity is “over.” Neoliberalism’s perverse theology of markets rests on this land of scorched belief in the modern. Ceding all power to craft the future to markets, it insists that markets “know best,” even if, in the age of financialization, markets do not and must not know at all, and the hidden hand has gone permanently missing.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 435