[What follows is an excerpt describing Foucault’s engagement with ‘neoliberalism’ i.e. Hayek-style libertarianism, and Foucault’s endorsement of significant elements thereof. A worthwhile read.]
Foucault’s involvement in efforts to rethink the political orientation and strategies of the French left was among the relevant features of his political activity during the period in which these 1978-1979 lectures [on The Birth of Biopolitics] were written. In this context, it is noteworthy that he raises the question of socialist governmentality at the end of the fourth lecture: “What would really be the governmentality appropriate to socialism? Is there a governmentality appropriate to socialism?” His answer is that if there is such a thing as socialist governmentality, it remains to be invented.
Part of the interest of neoliberal governmentality in relation to this question is that it provides a historical example of the reinvention of liberal governmentality. Foucault is not uncritical of this type of government, but neither does he dismiss it out of hand. For example, at one point in his discussion in lecture nine of the American neoliberal theory of human capital, he pauses to ask what is the interest of this theory and his analysis of it. In response, he suggests that it would be a dangerous mistake to simply brush aside this theory because of its political connotations. Presumably, he has in mind the treatment of persons as capital and social relations such as those of parents to their children as forms of investment. To dismiss this theory out of hand would be a mistake because of the way it enables a new approach to phenomena that have remained unresolved problems for leftist economic theory, such as the failure of the rate of profit to fall or the historical question why economic growth takes place in some areas and not others. Neoliberalism identifies human capital as an important variable, moreover one that lies within the capacity of governments to modify. For this reason, Foucault notes, “we are seeing the economic policies of all the developed countries, but also their social policies, as well as their cultural and educational policies, being orientated in these terms” (ibid.: 232).
He also finds merit in the neoliberal theory of criminality in which crime is defined as action undertaken by individuals that involves a risk of punishment. This implies a way of understanding and dealing with crime that dispenses entirely with the moral and anthropological theories of criminality that formed part of the carceral apparatus since the nineteenth century. The criminal is simply a person who invests in a course of action where there is an accompanying risk of punishment, nothing more and nothing less. The penal system will therefore no longer seek to reform criminals but will simply seek to reduce the supply of crime by increasing the risk, the likelihood, or the severity of punishment (ibid.: 253).
The tendency to abandon techniques of discipline in favor of purely economic means of producing compliance is a general principle of neoliberal governmentality that Foucault appears to endorse. For example, in discussing the social and economic policy of the French government during the late 1970s after it had abandoned the objectives of full employment and planned economic growth in favor of a market economy, he points to the consequences (with regard to the unemployed and those requiring assistance) of a proposal to replace existing social security arrangements with a form of negative taxation. This would imply providing a certain base level of income to insure that no one is completely excluded from the economy and the labor market by poverty. Foucault comments:
This is a completely different system from that through which eighteenth and nineteenth century capitalism was formed and developed, when it had to deal with a peasant population which was a possible constant reservoir of manpower. When the economy functions as it does now, when the peasant population can no longer ensure that kind of endless fund of manpower, this fund has to be formed in a completely different way. This other way is the assisted population, which is actually assisted in a very liberal and much less bureaucratic and disciplinary way than it is by a system focused on full employment which employs mechanisms like those of social security. Ultimately it is up to people to work if they want or not work if they don’t. (Ibid.: 207)
In other words, whatever one’s judgment of its merits, neoliberal social policy is a real and effective alternative to the techniques of discipline. Neoliberal governmentality involves a conceptual framework quite different from the one that sustained disciplinary government. For this reason, Foucault’s comments on neoliberal social policy, like those on the economic approach to criminality, help to clarify a remark made two years earlier, at the end of his lecture of January 14, 1976, when he called for a new form of right that would be both anti-disciplinary and emancipated from the principle of sovereignty and that would serve as an effective discursive weapon against disciplinary power (2003: 39–40). …opposition to disciplinary power should rely upon forms of right that already operate in our present and that are capable of providing effective counter-arguments to the techniques and goals of disciplinary power (Patton 2005: 282). Neoliberal right satisfies both criteria.
Foucault’s analyses of neoliberal governmentality confirm that he approaches the question of normative bases for critique or resistance to power in terms of actually existing ways of thinking and speaking. This is what neoliberalism represents in contrast to the earlier techniques of liberal government that required disciplined and obedient subjects of economic processes.
For example, the system of social security developed in the aftermath of World War II in France functioned in such a way that it produced and maintained forms of dependency. In contrast, neoliberal governmentality relies much more on the autonomy and responsibility of citizens and, for that reason, may provide a more effective counter to the techniques of disciplinary power. Foucault is explicit on this in his 1983 interview “The Risks of Security,” when he suggests that the rationality that informed the postwar system has reached its limit “as it stumbles against the political, economic and social rationality of modern societies” (Foucault 2000: 366). In response to the “perverse effects” of social security systems that serve to maintain forms of dependency, he acknowledges a legitimate demand for a form of social security that allows for “richer, more numerous, more diverse, and more flexible relationships with others and ourselves, all the while assuring each of us real autonomy” (ibid.).
The implicit principle at work here, and indeed throughout Foucault’s critical and genealogical analyses of power, is that resistance to existing forms of government must find support in alternative rationalities of government that are also available in the prevailing political culture. This principle is evident in his analysis of the forms of “counter-conduct” that flourished alongside the institutions and practices of pastoral power in medieval and early modern Europe, as it is in his parallel remarks about the forms of resistance to modern governmentality between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth century. In relation to pastoral power, Foucault argues that the precise mechanisms through which it sought to direct the conduct of individuals provided the basis for forms of counter-conduct through which some dissident subjects sought to conduct themselves differently: asceticism, different forms of community, mysticism, eschatology, and disputes over the proper interpretation of the Scripture (Foucault 2007: 194–216). In relation to the new forms of governmentality that developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were equally a series of counter-conducts based upon the elements of this governmentality: society as opposed to the state, economic truth as opposed to error, universal as opposed to particular interest, freedom as opposed to regulation, and so on (ibid.: 355–7).
—P. Patton, in Foucault and Philosophy (2010)
