Next, we have to approach neoliberalism and what makes it unique. Ability is the apparatus that establishes a shift in liberalism’s approach to the body and to the economy. It is the new approach to human capacity that gives rise to a new economic theory of labor – one grounded in new kind of Homo Oeconomicus: human capital. Eugenic modernity relies on an epistemic grid that individualizes bodies through ability. In order to make this case, we will look to Foucault’s account of neoliberalism in his often-cited, but rarely understood, Birth of Biopolitics lectures at the college de France and analyze Gary Becker’s foundational neoliberal text, Human Capital.

Conway