Neoliberalism’s displacement of the political subject is historically unprecedented in the West.

Evidence

If Rousseau is nearly alone in boldly reasserting this creature’s dominance in social contract theory, homo politicus is hardly absent from others’ accounts. Nor is it aptly captured by what Foucault calls “homo juridicus” or “homo legalis,” both of whom are too bound to law and rights to capture the political ethos and demands at stake. This means that the vanquishing of homo politicus by contemporary neoliberal rationality, the insistence that there are only rational market actors in every sphere of human existence, is novel, indeed, revolutionary, in the history of the West. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 194

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Central thesis of the book: the erasure of homo politicus is not incremental but revolutionary — a distinct break in Western political history worth sitting with.
• SEED: Could anchor an essay contrasting earlier state coordination of subjects (even totalitarian) with the novel claim that no prior Western regime reduced the human to pure market capital.
• XREF: connects to: Political closure in the West masked persisting revolutionary energies globally — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 232; Neoliberalism extinguishes the political subject that critiques of capitalism presupposed — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 218; Neoliberalism redefined human being itself as human capital. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 134 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism extinguishes the political subject that critiques of capitalism presupposed #expands (0.92) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 218
• Political closure in the West masked persisting revolutionary energies globally #qualifies (0.80) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 232
• Neoliberalism redefined human being itself as human capital. #expands (0.80) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 134
• Neoliberalism redefined liberty as economic rather than political. #expands (0.78) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 380
• Neoliberalism generalizes the enterprise form across the entire social body #expands (0.75) — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 823