Foucault was examining something that fascinated him in the present and whose twentieth-century intellectual origins—distinctive for their antipathy to certain kinds of governmental power—also intrigued him, yet he appeared relatively uninterested in what many would call the “politics” of neoliberalism—its gestation of new inequalities and concentrations of wealth, its deracinations and destitutions of populations, its dismantling of publics and social solidarities. Rather, he was interested in neoliberalism’s transformations of the social, the state, and the subject and also in how neoliberalism brings liberalism more squarely into places, such as France, where liberal principles had heretofore nested somewhat uneasily with other governing rationalities, such as republicanism and socialism.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 94