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Contrary to the received view that the success of neoliberalism was mainly the result of a radical change in the economic policy of Western welfare states in the seventies and eighties of the 20th century, this success can be understood as the product of a long-term, slow, and largely unwitnessed cultural transformation. In this process the homo ludens of the counterculture of the sixties gradually changed into the homo oeconomicus of neoliberalism, political democracy was replaced by market democracy, and our notion of freedom as guaranteed by the state and realized in the public sphere substituted by individual freedom from the state. This new freedom redefines the individual as human capital in a constant condition of competitiveness and precarity.