The age of austerity dawned as a moment of neoliberalism without apology. Citing only the voracious demands of the market as the highest government obligation, a grim unanimity emerged among world leaders that put the famous “Washington Consensus” to shame: social spending would be dramatically slashed in order to provide bailouts to banks and other financial corporations and to pay for highly targeted and temporary economic “stimulus” measures that largely amounted to handouts and tax cuts for corporate interests. The triumphalism that had announced the ascendency of markets in the early 1990s, emblematized by Francis Fukayama’s (1993) celebratory pronouncement of the End of History, was over. Instead of a rhetoric of a “rising tide lifting all boats,” austerity is marked by a post-ideological candour, emerging from politicians both left and right: expect only precariousness, now and forever.