The success of neoliberal rationality in remaking citizenship and the subject is indexed by the lack of a scandalized response to the state's new role in prioritizing, serving, and propping a supposedly free-market economy. The economization of everything and every sphere, including political life, desensitizes us to the bold contradiction between an allegedly free-market economy and a state now wholly in service to and controlled by it. As the state itself is privatized, enfolded, and animated by market rationality in all of its own functions, and as its legitimacy increasingly rests in facilitating, rescuing, or steering the economy, it is measured as any other firm would be. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of the neoliberal transformation of the state is that it is remade on the model of the firm while compelled to serve and facilitate an economy it is not supposed to touch, let alone to challenge.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 68