PERSON
Ulrich Bröckling
The German sociologist who named the entrepreneurial self—the normative subject that neoliberal governance manufactures not through coercion but through the seductive invitation to be free.
Ulrich Bröckling is sociology’s cartographer of the self that late capitalism builds. Where economists chart markets and political theorists trace state power, Bröckling descends into the institutional machinery that produces the human beings those systems require—the performance reviews, coaching sessions, creativity workshops, and personal-branding seminars that together fabricate a subject who governs herself more efficiently than any external authority ever could. His 2007 landmark
The Entrepreneurial Self gave a name and a genealogy to the figure that
[YOU] on AI encounters everywhere: the person who treats her own existence as a startup, every skill as
human capital, every pause as an opportunity cost. Bröckling’s analysis does not stop at diagnosis: he shows, with the precision of an entomologist, how the mechanisms of
managed creativity,
permanent self-evaluation, and the
project self operate not through repression but through the production of desire—the desire to optimize, to compete, to be worthy of amplification. When AI removes the last friction from the optimization engine, Bröckling’s framework reveals not a