Correcting homo oeconomicus’s falsity leaves the governance question untouched

Evidence

There are two ways to think about the neoliberal figure of the human whose self-care and self-investment cannot be obtained within its own terms, that is, who is dependent upon invisible practices and unnamed others. One is that neoliberalism makes a mistake, that homo oeconomicus is both more multidimensional and more dependent upon human noncapital entities (that is, women) than this ontology suggests. There is some bite to this critique, but it is not a radical bite. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 204

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the weak feminist critique (neoliberalism is factually wrong about human nature) from Brown’s stronger one (it produces reality through governance).
• XREF: connects to: Economists’ claim to transcendent knowledge collapses when they enter governance — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1597; Homo economicus is a grid of intelligibility, not a full anthropology, enabling governability — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 1317; Foucault saw homo oeconomicus as enabling, not resisting, governmental reason. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 491