Both democratic citizenship and market choice reduce persons to countable statistical units

Evidence

Familiar, too, is his suggestion that the human being assumed in modern market culture is an autonomous individual who seeks pleasure and avoids pain. For just as electoral democracy postulates the equivalence of citizens (each of whom counts as one and only one) within any given party, so market strategies assume the equivalence of buyers (each of whom counts as one) within any given niche. In both cases the choosing subject is a statistical object to be targeted, added to or separated from other individuals. It is this that explains the U.S. Trade Representative’s claim that greater adherence to human rights is encouraged by the acquisition of “Western (that is, American) norms” in place of older ones, just as the opening up of free trade with the West and the blossoming of a market society will reinforce human rights. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 738

Categorization

• XREF: The citizen-as-countable-unit parallel with consumer-as-statistical-target is a strong analytic bridge point against the Cooper/neoliberal thread, where the universal ‘choosing subject’ is exposed as a specific cultural construct.
• SEED: A possible essay angle: Asad’s equivalence-of-citizens and equivalence-of-buyers isomorphism as the deep grammar that lets free-trade rhetoric claim to be a human-rights vehicle.