If Rousseau is nearly alone in boldly reasserting this creature's dominance in social contract theory, homo politicus is hardly absent from others' accounts. Nor is it aptly captured by what Foucault calls "homo juridicus" or "homo legalis," both of whom are too bound to law and rights to capture the political ethos and demands at stake. This means that the vanquishing of homo politicus by contemporary neoliberal rationality, the insistence that there are only rational market actors in every sphere of human existence, is novel, indeed, revolutionary, in the history of the West.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 194