Notwithstanding these diverse instantiations, for reasons that will become clear, I will be more concerned to stipulate a meaning for "neo-liberalism" than for "democracy" in this work. However, these aspects of neoliberalism—its unevenness, its lack of self-identity, its spatial and temporal variability, and above all, its availability to reconfiguration — are important to underscore in an argument focused on its iteration in the time we may call contemporary and the place we may call the Euro-Atlantic world. Alertness to neoliberalism's inconstancy and plasticity cautions against identifying its current iteration as its essential and global truth and against making the story I am telling a teleological one, a dark chapter in a steady march toward end times.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 30