Neoliberalism, I have argued throughout this book, is best understood not simply as economic policy, but as a governing rationality that disseminates market values and metrics to every sphere of life and construes the human itself exclusively as homo oeconomicus. Neoliberalism thus does not merely privatize — turn over to the market for individual production and consumption — what was formerly publicly supported and valued. Rather, it formulates everything, everywhere, in terms of capital investment and appreciation, including and especially humans themselves.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 357