Fourth, it is worthwhile noting the continuing and still growing importance of the category of failure in liberal societies. Here, the generalisation and economisation of failure is part and parcel of an ongoing process of marketisation. It is difficult to separate the language and metrics of failure from the aspiration to extend the market game for public services to its natural conclusion – the point of exit. In so far as public services are designed increasingly according to the rules of the market game, it seems that the entities providing them now have to be allowed to fail according to the same rules. At least in principle, bankruptcy law in some shape or form may now be equally applicable to public services as well as the corporate world (Kurunmäki & Miller, 2011). For the regulation of these very different domains is circumscribed by the need, in a liberal society, to ensure transparent and equitable arrangements for identifying failings and pronouncing on failure, yet without giving rise to a limitless expansion of the domain of regulatory intervention. Such developments have only been made possible by a century and more of transformations of the ideas and instruments of failure for the corporate sector, which have now become the template for an attempted economisation of the entire social field. It is these transformations that we consider in this paper, for these have provided the conditions of possibility for the current attempts to economise as much of the social field as possible.