Nor is there anything here – even with the early political economists, most notably Adam Smith – that says we are economic subjects through and through. That said, there’s nothing here that claims this subject exists only to enhance its economic value, or is motivated entirely by self-interest (that will happen with Bentham).

But this formulation of the subject is contingent on whether reason itself prevails and also whether liberal governments – in the sense of restrained states, states that leave you a wide sphere of individual choice and personal life – also prevail. In the period that you’ve offered as our origin for thinking about this, the eighteenth century, we have Enlightenment and early liberal formulations of the emerging bourgeois male subject: a self-governing and self-crafting being, imagined to govern itself through reason and design its own ends. Wendy Brown: There are two important lines of thought we need to pursue here: one is the difference between the subject that is rendered as homo oeconomicus across all dimensions of life – as opposed to the subject who is understood to be economically oriented only in some of her or his endeavors but not everywhere and the second line involves the specific financialization of the economy and economic practices. In such an economy, the subject has turned into what you define as a new version of homo oeconomicus, characterized as “financialized human capital.” I would like to start by asking how we are to imagine such a financialized subject – what does it actually look like? And in what way does it differ from the model, invented in the eighteenth century, of a rational, sovereign, self-determined subject driven by economic interests? Isabelle Graw: In your book “Undoing the Demos” you very convincingly describe how neoliberalism has reached a new stage – one that also implies a remodeling of the subject.

Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown