As the province and meaning of liberty and equality are recalibrated from political to economic, political power comes to be figured as their enemy, an interference with both. This open hostility to the political in turn curtails the promise of the modern liberal democratic state to secure inclusion, equality, and freedom as dimensions of popular sovereignty. Again, as each term is relocated to the economy and recast in an economic idiom, inclusion inverts into competition, equality into inequality, freedom into deregulated marketplaces, and popular sovereignty is nowhere to be found. There, compressed to a formula, is the means by which neoliberal rationality hollows out both liberal democratic reason and a democratic imaginary that would exceed it.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 71