In Code of Capital, Katarina Pistor talks about how modern states are founded on individual autonomy, and that this leads to the malleability of the law. This reminds me of Deneen's argument in Why Liberalism Failed. > The autonomous self is thus subject to the sovereign trajectory of the very forces today that are embraced as the tools of our liberation. Yet our liberation renders us incapable of resisting these defining forces—the promise of freedom results in thralldom to inevitabilities to which we have no choice but to submit. These tools were deployed to liberate individuals from the “givenness” of their condition, especially through “[[depersonalization]]” and “abstraction,” liberalism’s vision of liberty from particular duties, obligations, debts, and relationships. These ends have been achieved through the depersonalization and abstraction advanced via two main entities—the state and the market. Yet while they have worked together in a pincer movement to render us ever more naked as individuals, our political debates mask this alliance by claiming that allegiance to one of these forces will save us from the depredations of the other. Our main political choices come down to which depersonalized mechanism will purportedly advance our freedom and security—the space of the market, which collects our billions upon billions of choices to provide for our wants and needs without demanding from us any specific thought or intention about the wants and needs of others; or the liberal state, which establishes depersonalized procedures and mechanisms for the wants and needs of others that remain insufficiently addressed by the market. \. > Both main political options of our age must be understood as different sides of the same counterfeit coin.