If, for neoliberals, economic competition is essential (an eidos, Foucault calls it at one point) and valuable, but not natural, then it must be continuously supported and corrected from outside, and this need defines one of the crucial functions of the neoliberal state. Government intervenes to produce and reproduce competition, to facilitate or restore it. Again, nature is the province of classical liberalism, hence the importance of laissez-faire to its theorists. By contrast, convention, intervention, and even subvention are all key to neoliberalism. The “juridical gives form to the economic,” Foucault says of neoliberalism. 41 “Government must accompany the market from start to finish,” he adds. However, what distinguishes neoliberalism from liberalism here is that the state must “govern for the market, not because of the market.”

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 111