At the end of lecture 11, Foucault suggests that economics is a science “lateral to the art of governing,” that it cannot be “the science of government.” This seems importantly wrong today. The claim relates in part to his belief that economics is separated off from civil society, again, an implicit quarrel with Marx. It relates as well to his acceptance of the neoliberal claim that the economy constitutes the limit of government for liberalism and neo-liberalism, that it must not be touched because it cannot be known. But it also relates to the fact that he did not anticipate the ways that the sciences of economics, business, and politics would be merged through rational choice, formal modeling, and above all, the language of administrative governance. When the expressly and intentionally antipolitical language of governance, discussed at length in Chapter 4, becomes the lingua franca of the state, corporations, schools, nonprofits, indeed, of all public and private enterprise, economics has become the science of government.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 154