Chapter 1

A Liberal Despite Himself

Reflections on a Debate, Reappraisals of a Question

Michael Behrent

The debate over Foucault’s position on liberalism and neoliberalism—and specifically over the implications of these positions for understanding Foucault’s politics, as well as politics inspired by his thinking—boils down to two questions: First, is Foucault’s thought, particularly in his lectures from the late 1970s, liberal or anti-liberal? Second, is Foucault’s position on liberalism¹ (whatever one holds it to be) appealing or unappealing?

The debate on Foucault and liberalism has, one might say, yielded four basic positions, reflecting the spectrum of possible answers to these two questions. Among those who see Foucault’s thinking as liberal in its basic thrust, some find his stance attractive, while others view it as objectionable. Similarly, those who see Foucault as constitutively allergic to liberalism can be divided, in turn, into a current that maintains that it is precisely in his alleged anti-liberalism that Foucault’s political importance resides, and a constituency that contends that it is this aversion to liberalism that makes his politics incoherent, and perhaps even dangerous. For purely heuristic purposes, the four positions can thus be represented in the following table:

Position 1—“Foucault is a liberal, and good for him”—is unique in being purely notional. It occupies a logical space in the debate that has yet to be seriously defended. No one has really tried to make a sustained case that Foucault both embraces a form of liberalism that would be politically positive or fruitful. Some have, however, at least brushed up against this position. The philosopher Richard Rorty once described a position that he dubbed “postmodernist bourgeois liberalism,” which involved defending liberal freedoms while largely dispensing with the need to root them in some deeper philosophical or ethical system of justification. It would not be difficult to find elements of Rorty’s idea of a non-foundationalist liberalism in Foucault’s late-1970s lectures, in which he plumbed the emancipatory possibilities of a historically distinct form of governmentality that, he believed, shunned the sorts of foundational gestures that anchor freedom in ethical principles and legal rights—the kind that Rorty, in his essay, had associated with a more traditional and Kantian form of liberalism.2 Position 1’s insight—were anyone to take the trouble to flesh it out, though perhaps some have intuited it—is that Foucault’s critique of institutions and of state-centered habits of mind and practices could inform a liberalism that (in keeping with Foucault’s skepticism of metaphysics) renounces many of liberalism’s customary trappings, such as a first-order commitment to human rights and the legal principles underpinning them. This Foucault, in other words, severs the bonds connecting liberalism and the need for foundations.

Table 1.1 Positions on Foucault

	Foucault as liberal	Foucault as anti-liberal
Normatively appealing	Position 1	Position 3
Normatively objectionable	Position 2	Position 4

Source: Author's own.

The position that has elicited the most controversy in recent years is position 2: the view that Foucault more or less eagerly welcomed the advent of neoliberal policies in the late 1970s and, consequently, that he provided respectable intellectual cover for the “neoliberal thought collective,”³ and helped to dilute the left’s traditionally critical attitude toward capitalist society. These charges, it is worth recalling, build on often forgotten antecedents. The communist philosopher Michel Clouscard included Foucault in his tirades against the “libertarian liberalism” spawned by May ’68,⁴ while the socialist politician Jean-Pierre Chevènement, in the 1970s, derided Foucault as an ideologist of an anti-Marxist, anti-social, and politically quiescent “American left.”⁵ But the publication of Foucault’s lectures from the late 1970s, particularly The Birth of Biopolitics, triggered a new wave of attacks aimed at Foucault’s alleged sympathy for neoliberalism. The sociologist José Luis Moreno Pestaña cites the 1979 course as evidence that Foucault was “totally convinced by neoliberal discourse,” lamenting the fact that “at no moment does Foucault question neoliberalism’s effects on social inequality.”⁶ Even more potently and persuasively, Daniel Zamora has argued that “Foucault’s thinly veiled sympathy for, and minimal criticism of, the emerging neoliberal paradigm” and his championing of neoliberalism “in the name of greater autonomy and the subject’s rebellion against major institutional structures and entrenched discourse” participated in a post-’68 leftist politics that ultimately provided intellectual cover for neoliberalism’s economic and ideological consecration.7 In this instance, the insight is that the elective affinities Foucault identified between neoliberal political practices and his own critique of modern institutions and their disciplinary and normalizing effects represent a decisive (if hardly unanticipated) break with the traditional categories of leftwing social criticism (focusing on class hierarchies, economic exploitation, and social inequality) and a suspiciously uncritical attitude toward the new economic order emerging in the 1970s.

These views are striking and bold precisely because they challenge an older and quite well-established assumption—position 3—that the inherent anti-liberalism of Foucault’s core philosophical outlook renders his politics problematic. Particularly in the English-speaking world, this view colored Foucault’s early reception. Thus in 1983, the political philosopher Michael Walzer asserted that Foucault’s inability to offer “an account . . . of the liberal state and the rule of law” resulted in “the catastrophic weakness of his political theory.”⁸ The insight of this position is Foucault’s radical critique of the concepts upon which liberalism is premised, such as individuality, autonomy, and rationality. Having knocked aside liberalism’s theoretical foundations, Foucault, so the argument goes, could only be hostile to liberalism as a coherent political outlook. Indeed, proponents of this view have even, at times, seen Foucault’s purported anti-liberalism as culminating in positions that liberals regard as liberalism’s very antithesis. Thus, Mark Lilla has suggested that the antinomianism hardwired into Foucault’s thought ultimately explains why he succumbed to the tyrannophilia so endemic to twentieth-century French thought.⁹ On the basis of similar assumptions, others have expressed puzzlement with Foucault’s late-career adoption of rights talk, which seems to chafe theoretically against what they see as the withering critique he had leveled against liberalism’s theoretical underpinnings in his earlier work.¹⁰

Yet in recent years, with rising anxieties about globalization and an emerging consciousness about its roots in neoliberal ideology, a new generation of activist-scholars—embracing position 4, in our scheme—have found in Foucault’s thought a conceptual toolkit that they deem of great theoretical value in critiquing contemporary capitalism (which they equate with a kind of liberalism). Thus while position 4 agrees with position 3 in regarding Foucault as a critic of liberalism, the former differs from the latter in seeing this anti-liberalism as one of Foucault’s most valuable political assets (though these two positions disagree, presumably, over the meaning of liberalism and perhaps over even what Foucault had to say about it). One of the most thorough and sophisticated expositions of this standpoint is La nouvelle raison du monde (roughly, “The World’s New Rationality”), an essay by the philosopher Pierre Dardot and the sociologist Christian Laval. They start from the insight that the key to understanding neoliberalism—the basic political logic of the contemporary world—is grasping Foucault’s insight that it is, more than an ideology or economic model, a form of “governmental reason”11—i.e., a political rationality. Dardot and Laval meticulously show how, once it had become clear that nineteenth-century liberalism had proved itself politically bankrupt by the interwar years, a “neo” form of “liberalism” reinvented itself in the postwar years and particularly in the final decades of the twentieth century, based on a fundamentally new framework for governing present-day society. This framework remodeled society on the principle that human beings are fundamentally entrepreneurial, that giving priority to the market as a nexus for adjudicating private interests requires a strong state (even as the state retreats from the commanding heights occupied under the Keynesian model), the divorce of private rights and democratic governance, and, perhaps most importantly, the nurturing of a “neoliberal subject,” which sees the self as a kind of startup, structured around the coordinates of performance, assessment, and risk. The insight here is that it is possible to expurgate from Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism the language and value judgments that other readers have seen as evidence of sympathy (or at least critical neutrality) and can rejigger it in such a way that it does for free-market ideology what, say, Discipline and Punish did for prisons. Had Foucault lived long enough to ponder twenty-first-century politics, his analyses may indeed have looked something like La nouvelle raison du monde. But he did not. This does not, as such, undermine the value of Dardot and Laval’s book, but it raises the question of how exactly it relates to Foucault’s own work, and particularly the positions he adopted in the 1970s.

It goes almost without saying that most readers will remain skeptical that any of these boldly traced positions gets Foucault right—even if they do allow us to map out the topography of a debate. Many will want to find truth in the interstices of these positions—to see Foucault as occupying an area between endorsement and condemnation of neoliberalism. For instance, the legal scholar Ben Golder has, in a provocative and persuasive book, argued that Foucault’s late-career espousal of liberal-sounding rights talk was not so much a disavowal of earlier positions as a tactical deployment of the liberal language of rights. Without acquiescing to liberalism’s philosophical underpinnings (such as autonomous subjectivity), Foucault, Golder maintains, nonetheless found it politically efficacious to invoke rights as a way of placing limits on state (and other forms of) power and shining the floodlights on liberal governmentality’s illiberal recesses.¹² In an important and exhaustive study published in France, Serge Audier has also tried to extract Foucault from the reductive alternative between anti-neoliberal prophet and unrepentant free-marketer. Foucault’s intellectual contribution to the study of neoliberalism is significant, Audier maintains, but his contribution to the question “is not situated where one might think it to be.” What matters is less which side Foucault was on than the explanation he offered of neoliberalism’s emergence—specifically, how it arose at the intersection of a crisis of disciplinary society (that is, of the institutions and the power relations that Foucault had analyzed in his work since Discipline and Punish) and a disillusionment with Marxism. Yet as Audier’s research suggests, Foucault’s conceptualization of neoliberalism loaded the dice in favor of a number of values he implicitly embraced.13 Despite their nuanced accounts of Foucault’s views, neither Golder nor Audier can refrain from normative assessments: Golder, who is intrigued by the political fruits to be reaped from the tactical use of rights talk, lies somewhere between position 1 and 3; Audier, who fears that Foucault may have inflicted unnecessary damage on the socialist tradition, can be found between position 2 and 4 (though leaning toward the former).

The wide variety of positions on Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism is, no doubt, revealing of the stakes of this debate: What did one of the most influential thinkers of recent decades think about the dominant sociopolitical paradigm of our time? Yet for all the insights they have generated, each position has foundered on a reef of unresolved questions.

Those who see Foucault as embracing neoliberalism face one basic problem: the fact that Foucault never described himself as a neoliberal—or a liberal, for that matter. Defenders of this position are forced to argue that the underlying logic of Foucault’s views on a range of topics was liberal, despite his refusal to align himself overtly with this political outlook. Foucault, at times, cultivated this ambiguity. In a 1983 interview at Berkeley, an unidentified interlocutor remarked to Foucault: “I think there is a general impression that your work doesn’t just view bourgeois liberalism as utopian but also as theoretically unsound, and I think that you’re saying no, that isn’t the implication, because from what you’ve just said it would seem that the ordinary John Stuart Mill kind of notion of liberal politics makes perfectly good sense, it’s a way of describing certain power relations from the inside, and viewed from the inside, it’s as good a way as a community might find.” Foucault did not take the bait—even as he went on to say that he believed that “in the historical-political analyses made in the twentieth century, the problems posed by liberal thought, in the strict sense of the English and French eighteenth century and nineteenth century… has perhaps been too much forgotten.” He added that “this kind of liberalism was constituted through a critical opposition with the administrative states of the eighteenth century” and that, given that the twentieth century witnessed a significant expansion of the administrative state under Marxist as well as social democratic regimes, there was clearly much to be gained in “reactivating these problems” and “tak[ing] up anew the questions of Benjamin Constant [and] of Tocqueville.”¹⁴ This exchange perfectly encapsulates Foucault’s puzzling relationship with liberalism: While emphasizing the need to reactivate the questions liberals posed to the administrative state, he refused to subscribe to “the ordinary John Stuart Mill kind of notion of liberal politics.”

There are at least two ways this problem can be mitigated. First, one could argue that Foucault’s refusal to self-identify as a liberal is no great problem, because his very silence—this refusal to merge his view with a public and collective position—is consistent with liberalism itself. Second, it could be pointed out that Foucault vehemently resisted being identified with broader intellectual movements in general. He never considered himself a structuralist even when, in the 1960s, his work was closely identified with that school of thought, and he eschewed any association with “postmodernism” or “post-structuralism,” despite the eagerness of some commentators (particularly in the English-speaking world) to pin those labels on him. Foucault, one might say, rejected all efforts to categorize his thinking. Still, the fact that Foucault expressed sympathy for liberal ideas while refusing to identify himself as a liberal remains a problem.

Those who reject any affiliation between Foucault and liberalism and who maintain that he provides crucial resources for critiquing neoliberal thinking and modes of governance face, however, a problem of their own: namely, the description and theoretical account Foucault provides of neoliberalism itself. Indeed, far more important than Foucault’s attitude toward neoliberalism (i.e., whether he “liked” it) are the characteristics he attributes to it and their implications for a critical appraisal of neoliberal society. Thus Foucault does not, in a Marxist vein, see neoliberalism as a way of restoring profits or disempowering labor movements in a time of economic crisis, nor does he reflect on its impact on social equality. Of course, those who are eager to see Foucault as an anti-neoliberal welcome these aspects of his thought, arguing that his focus on neoliberalism as a form of “governmentality,” which creates a distinct kind of subjectivity, is precisely what makes his insight into the phenomenon original and trenchant. Yet Foucault himself believed that neoliberal governmentality meant a financially strapped state with a more restricted capacity for action, an erosion of disciplinary institutions, and a disinclination to monitor morals and social norms. Even scholars who draw on Foucault to understand contemporary neoliberalism rarely share these assessments: They tend to see the free market and privatization as resulting (however paradoxically) in an expansion of certain forms of state power (a fact that Foucault recognized in the case of German ordoliberalism, but not in that of American neoliberalism), and, in some instances, to see neoliberalism as entailing an intensification of the disciplinary power that Foucault believed it could dispense with.15 The partisans of an “anti-neoliberal Foucault” must, in short, contend with the question of whether a theoretical framework that begins with such assumptions can ever provide an adequate understanding of really existing neoliberalism—whether, that is, the most critical elements in some Foucauldian analyses of neoliberalism are those that owe the least to Foucault, or, in any case, to his late-seventies lectures.

In making sense of Foucault’s assessment of neoliberalism, we must, I think, be willing to acknowledge both of these problems. We must take seriously Foucault’s refusal to identify himself as a liberal. Nor can it be denied that Foucault always understood his project to be driven by the idea of critique—though liberalism was, in his eyes, as much a form of critique (a critique of governmental reason) as a thing to be critiqued.16 At the same time, going beyond the question of Foucault’s personal views about liberalism, it is important to consider the assumptions that are hardwired into Foucault’s understanding of these phenomenon, and to ask what critical avenues are opened and closed by these conceptual starting points.

To show how Foucault’s assessment of liberalism and related matters was constantly shaped by these two problems, this essay, rather than attempting a systematic reconstruction of his views on liberalism, will consider three specific moments in his thinking about this issue that, in their very idiosyncrasy, are highly revealing: Foucault’s claim, which he made on several occasions during the period when his interest was turning toward liberalism, that he was a Marxist insofar as he was influenced by the second volume of Capital; his preoccupation with explaining why contemporary liberalism was not fascistic; and, finally, his assertions that, under neoliberalism, state power seemed likely to decrease. These episodes bring into focus a thinker who was neither a champion of neoliberalism, nor a prescient critic of its earliest manifestations, but one who is, rather, a liberal despite himself—a mind that, for all its commitment to critique and aversion to categorization, was drawn into the orbit of liberal thinking by the force of his own assumptions and commitments.

A Capital-Volume-II-Marxist?

The status of Foucault’s liberalism is closely intertwined with his views on Marxism and socialism. In the 1979 lectures, Foucault examined such notions as the market, self-interest, and entrepreneurialism—issues on which Marxism, needless to say, offers its own distinctive perspective. Moreover, in France in the 1970s, a positive reassessment of things liberal was an attitude adopted by a number of intellectuals who had grown disillusioned with the Marxist politics they had pursued in the radical 1960s, some of whom received Foucault’s public support.¹⁷ In the 1983 exchange mentioned above, the interviewer asked Foucault if he found Tocqueville’s and Constant’s questions “more pertinent than socialist analyses.” He replied, “I think in any case that it this kind of question that must be posed to any socialist regime.”18

Foucault’s critical assessment of Marxism is, in many ways, the flipside of the coin of his engagement with liberalism.

While much has been said about Foucault’s disparagement of Marxism, socialism, and leftist politics at this time, one interesting claim he made during this period has been generally overlooked: that he sympathized with the analysis of contemporary society Marx offered not in his work as a whole, but specifically in Capital’s second volume. The stakes of this claim are difficult to decipher. It would seem to throw a lifejacket to those who cling to the fantasy that Foucault is some kind of unrecognized Marxist. But it is just as plausible to read it as an circuitous critique of Marx: If one of the more obscure and arduous texts in the Marxism canon—the “arid table-lands and plateaus,” as Louis Althusser once put it, in the long march of Capital¹⁹—is deemed its most instructive, what does this say about Marx’s oeuvre as a whole?

Let us first consider Foucault’s statements themselves. In April 3, 1978, just as he was wrapping up the first lecture series at the Collège de France addressing the question of liberal governmentality (i.e., Security, Territory, Population), Foucault was interviewed by Colin Gordon and Paul Patton. They were particularly eager for Foucault to explain how his thought related to Marxism, a theme that the nouveaux philosophes had made newly relevant. Foucault replied: “You want to ask me what relationship I establish between my work and Marxism? I would tell you that I establish none.”²⁰ The reason, he explained, is that “Marxism is a reality that is so complex, so muddled, that consists of so many successive historical layers, that is also caught up within so many political strategies, not to mention all the small-group tactics … that, ultimately, it doesn’t interest me. I do not work by asking myself the question of knowing where things stand with Marxism and where my relationship with Marxism stands.”

Yet having summarily dismissed the relevance of Marxism in a way that was typical of his late-1970s pronouncements on the topic, Foucault proceeded to argue that his intellectual relationship to Marx himself was an entirely different matter. During his student days, Foucault had carefully read Marx, notably under the guidance of the great Hegelian philosopher Jean Hyppolite. Foucault integrated his understanding of Marx’s significance into some of his early essays, notably his significant (and often forgotten) paper from 1964, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”²¹ and, most importantly, The Order of Things (1966). When it came to Marx, Foucault knew whereof he spoke. This is why it is so striking that, in the Gordon-Patton interview, Foucault stated: “I would say, if you will, very crudely, to put things in a caricatural way: my lineage [is] to Capital’s second volume [second livre du Capital].”

What did this mean? Much philosophical reflection on Capital, Foucault explained, was focused on the celebrated first volume, and thus on such questions as “commodities, markets, the abstraction of commodities, and the resulting abstraction of human existence.” Both Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre belonged to this tradition. Carefully distinguishing himself from this reading of Marx, Foucault said that “what interested [him] in Marx, what inspired [him] . . . is Capital’s second volume, that is to say, . . . analyses that are in the first place historically concrete on the genesis of capitalism, and not capital, and, secondly, analyses of the historical conditions of capitalism’s development, especially from the standpoint of the establishment [and] development of power structures and power institutions.” His own work, notably Discipline and Punish, had drawn not on volume I’s analysis of “the genesis of capital,” but on volume II’s “genealogy of capitalism.”22

Foucault concluded his answer to Patton and Gordon’s question by reflecting on the intellectual politics informing his decision to refrain from citing Marx in the very texts that (he claimed) bore the German thinker’s influence. “I refrained from making all the references I might have to Marx, because references to Marx in the intellectual and political climate in today’s France function not as indicators of origin but as markers of belonging. It is a way of saying: don’t touch me, clearly you see that I’m a genuine man of the left, that I’m a Marxist—the proof being that I cite Marx.” This is why, he added, he preferred to make “secret quotes from Marx, which Marxists themselves are unable to recognize, than do what many people unfortunately do—that is, to make statements that have nothing to do with Marxism, but adding a little footnote referring to Marx, and then—there you go—the text acquires a political meaning.” He concluded: “I detest signs of belonging,” saying that he would rather quote Marx more and cite him less.²³ Foucault’s refusal to footnote the second volume of Capital was, in this way, consistent with one of his most basic and unwavering character traits: his aversion to being pigeonholed or classified, his fantasy that ideas might circulate without being tethered to a name.²⁴ In this sense, those who claim Foucault for the Marxist legacy face the same basic problem as those who would see him as sympathetic to liberalism: Foucault’s deep aversion for “signs of belonging” made it virtually impossible for him to ever align himself with a political ideology or movement (as opposed to taking a position within a particular struggle or strategic configuration). The question—the significance of which transcends polemical subtlety or subterfuge—is whether an aversion to “signs of belonging” is compatible with Marxism and averse to liberalism.

The ideas upon which he based his affiliation with Capital’s second volume were developed more thoroughly in a lecture delivered to the philosophy faculty at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil two years earlier. This address is a landmark in Foucault’s emerging ideas about power, which he had first discussed, in print, in Discipline and Punish (1975) and which he would soon expand upon in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976). The basic problem with the analysis of power, Foucault explains, is that it is primarily defined as prohibition; the roots for this definition can be traced, in turn, as Foucault argued in The History of Sexuality’s first installment, to the legal arguments whereby European monarchs defined their power as sovereign, particularly vis-à-vis the nobility. It is to this idea of sovereignty that we owe the modern idea of the state. The notion of a centralized state presiding over all social relations and using the legal apparatus to prohibit certain forms of conduct became, in short, central to Western “representations of power,” but in a way that, Foucault believed, had resulted in theoretical blindness to the “real functioning of power.”25

To whom, then, was one to turn if one sought insight into power’s “positive mechanisms”? One guide was Jeremy Bentham, “the great theorist of bourgeois power.” The other, Foucault noted, could be found in Marx—but “essentially in volume II of Capital.”²⁶ The lesson of this text, Foucault suggested, had little to do with capital, or even with economics, for that matter. It was, more than anything, a study of power. First, Marx showed that there was not just one form of power. Power is not some homogeneous energy projected across social space from a single, centralized point; rather, power bursts forth in multiple and heterogeneous forms, many of which are not—at least originally—plugged into the circuitry of state power. Marx had placed particular emphasis on the “simultaneously specific and relatively autonomous character—impermeable, as it were—of the power wielded by the boss in the workshop, in relation to the juridical kind of power that exists in the rest of society.”²⁷ Second, Marx showed that power did not occupy a central position in society, along the lines of the primordial position that Rousseau and other social contract theorists had attributed to the sovereign state that brings society out of the state of nature. Marx “did not recognize this schema.” In volume II, he shows how “from the initial and primitive existence of these little power regions—such as property, slavery, the workshop, as well as the army—the great state apparatuses could, little by little, be formed.” “State unity” was, in this way, “secondary in relation to these regional and specific powers.”²⁸ Marx, in volume II, does not think of power as a prohibition, but instead as “an efficiency” or an “aptitude.” Foucault notes that Marx, in the second volume, offers “superb analyses of the problem of discipline in the military and workshops”—even if Foucault failed to find, in Marx, an analysis of military discipline comparable to his own in Discipline and Punish.²⁹ Finally, Marx understood that power had to be grasped, for the reasons mentioned previously, as a “technology.” Along these lines, “one can easily find between the lines of volume II of Capital an analysis, or at least the sketch of an analysis, of what would be the history of a technology of power, as it was exercised in workshops and factories.”³⁰

While characteristically unconventional, Foucault’s suggestion that he was a Capital-volume-II-Marxist would seem to suggest a plausible compromise between those who see him as a staunch critic of capitalism and those who view him as an enabler of the neoliberal order. The critique of power, Foucault suggests, was always already embedded in the Marxian project; consequently, no daylight need exist—in principle, anyway—between a genealogy of modern power forms and a critical theory of capitalism. If anything, one might imagine that the latter is enriched by the former. Before celebrating the reconciliation of these estranged theoretical traditions, however, a slightly plodding but nonetheless necessary question is in order: Does the second volume of Capital really say what Foucault claimed it did?

The evidence is ambiguous at best. It is worth briefly reminding ourselves of the basic facts surrounding this book. Capital, volume II, was published in 1885, two years after Marx’s death. Though Marx had largely completed the manuscript, Friedrich Engels prepared it for publication using his friend’s notes. The volume’s title—which Foucault never seems to mention—is The Process of Circulation of Capital. As such, it reflects Marx’s specific goals for the book: to explain how the theoretical analysis of the origin of capital—namely, through capitalist exploitation of working-class labor through the generation of surplus-value—that had been the theme of Capital’s first volume played out within the broader context of the modern capitalist market. As David Harvey notes, the first volume took the existence of the modern market for granted, focusing on the conditions under which surplus value was generated in the otherwise undisturbed process of capitalist production. The second volume, however, takes the opposite approach: it assumes the production of surplus-value proceeds without interference in order to consider how surplus-value circulates (specifically through market forces: i.e., the buying of raw materials and bringing commodities to market) and how the capitalist system is able to reproduce itself. Its focus is, according to Harvey, on the dialectic between capitalist production (creating surplus-value) and realization (trading surplus value on the market in a way that it can be reproduced).31

How accurate, then, was, Foucault’s description of the second volume? His claim that it focused on “historically concrete” analyses of “the genesis of capitalism” rather than “capital” is broadly correct, if we take him to be referring to what Harvey calls the “realization” of capitalism—the way capitalists had to find markets on which to purchase raw materials and sell completed commodities, an issue that Marx could bracket when analyzing the generation of surplus-value. But it is harder to pin down what parts of the text Foucault had in mind when he claimed that the second volume explores the role of “power structures and power institutions” in capitalism’s development. This is hardly the book’s focus: Its concern is with the circuits that capitalist production creates (successive phases in which the capitalist acts as a buyer, producer, and seller), the temporal sequences associated with capitalist circulation (the period over which money is transformed into surplus-value and the never-ending process of subdividing capital into its fixed and circulating forms), and the way these circuits reproduce the capitalist production process. As Marx dwells on the rather technical issues of circulation, turnover, and reproduction, one is hard-pressed to find anything more than passing references to the problem of power. It is possible, perhaps, to find some support for Foucault’s claim that Marx, in the second volume, was concerned with the microphysics of power—“these little power regions” from which “the great state apparatuses could . . . be formed.” Evidence in support of Foucault’s claim could, perhaps, be found in the way Marx breaks capitalist production into three “circuits”: the money-capital circuit (the capitalist as a buyer on the labor and raw materials market), the production-capital circuit (the capitalist as a producer—i.e., a factory owner or the equivalent), and the commodity-capital circuit (the capitalist as a salesperson). Yet even aside from the fact that Marx strongly emphasizes the economic (rather than power-related) motives shaping these circuits, he in no way suggests that any of these circuits are analytically autonomous—that they constitute “little power regions.” Thus, Marx writes:

As a whole, then, the capital is simultaneously present, and spatially coexistent, in its various phases. But each part is constantly passing from one phase or functional form to another, and thus functions in all of them in turn. . . . It is only in the unity of the three circuits that the continuity of the overall process is realized.32

In Marx’s analysis, no analytical priority is given to local, “bottom-up” processes (to the extent that these circuits are even what Foucault had in mind). The way they literally flow into and become another, the way they are inconceivable without being part of a larger system, is fundamental to Marx’s analysis. Finally, the specific institutions Foucault said that Marx had discussed in the second volume—namely, “property, slavery, the workshop, as well as the army”—are mentioned only in passing, if at all. The term “discipline” appears neither in the French nor in the English translation of volume II.

Even so, I think it is possible to redeem, at least partially, Foucault’s claims about Marx’s influence on him—provided that one concedes that Foucault incorrectly identified the volume that allegedly influenced him. The passages dealing with the history and “genealogy” of capitalism and with the use of discipline in the workplace (and other capitalist institutions) would seem not to be located in volume II, but in the later chapters of volume I. After his famous discussion of the commodity form and its relationship to surplus-value in the opening sections, Marx turns, in the final chapters of volume I, to an examination of primitive capitalist accumulation, which corresponds closely to what Foucault described as “historically concrete” analyses of “the genesis of capitalism” (as opposed to capital). For instance, Marx addresses such topics as the “Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land” (vol. I, ch. 27) and “Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated since the End of the Fifteenth Century. The Forcing Down of Wages by Act of Parliament” (ch. 28). Moreover, the terms Foucault uses to describe the intellectual project of volume II—to provide a “genesis of capitalism” (which he also, giving the term a Nietzschean twist, terms a “genealogy of capitalism”) is practically a direct reference to several chapters in volume I: chapter 29—“The Genesis of the Capitalist Farmer”—and 31—“The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist.” Moreover, the later chapters of volume I do, in fact, consider “power structures and power institutions,” as well as the history of a “technology of power, as it was exercised in workshops and factories.” Specifically, chapters 14 (“The Division of Labor and Manufacture”) and 15 (“Machinery and Large-Scale Industry”) consider the structure of power as it developed in industrial workshops and factories, dwelling on such issues as division of labor as a system for controlling workers, “The Struggle between Worker and Machine” (ch. 15, sec. 5), the “Repulsion and Attraction” the factory system exercises on working people (ch. 15, sec. 7), and the impact of the British Parliament’s Factory Acts—in other words, the very kind of issues that Foucault believed exemplified problems of power rather than of economic exploitation. In chapter 15, Marx specifically refers to the problem of factory discipline, comparing it to military discipline, which Foucault, with his example of the Prussian drill sergeant, had made the centerpiece of his analysis of discipline as a new power form in Discipline and Punish. As Marx writes:

The technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour, and the peculiar composition of the body of the working group, consisting as it does of individuals of both sexes and all ages, gives rise to a barrack-like discipline, which is elaborated into a complete system in the factory . . . thereby dividing the workers into manual labourers and overseers, into the private soldiers and the NCOs of an industrial army.33

Thus if we assume, as the evidence overwhelmingly suggests, that Foucault had in mind the latter chapters of Capital, volume I, when he claimed that his lineage was with Capital, volume II, the substance of his claim remains relatively intact: that there is a significant strand in Marx that focuses on issues of power as analytically distinct from economic exploitation, that is concerned with “technologies” of power, and that places greater emphasis on the historical emergence of capitalism as a system rather than capital’s quasi-metaphysical procession from the surplus-value generated by the capitalist system of labor. Foucault only ever made these comments, after all, in lectures and interviews; how much importance can we attach to remarks made in passing, which he never committed to print?

Yet while there is no reason to use this minor oversight to challenge Foucault’s intellectual honesty or rigor, this episode does tell us something about his views of Marx at the time when he was turning to the question of liberal governmentality as the theme of his Collège de France lectures. First, it is significant that as meticulous a reader as Foucault would make the mistake of confusing the first and second volumes. Foucault’s knowledge was extensive and his scholarship scrupulous (even if historians have quibbled with his interpretations). Can it be regarded as merely an accident that the one thinker that Foucault made an erroneous reference to—on at least two occasions—was Karl Marx? At the very least, this would suggest that Foucault was not, as he pursued his analysis of modern power structures, revisiting the insights of Capital with compulsive regularity. Indeed, it is tempting to conclude that the reason he claimed to be a Capital-volume-II Marxist was, precisely, in order to say: “Don’t touch me, clearly you see that I’m a genuine man of the left . . . the proof being that I cite Marx” (albeit secretly)—in other words, the very reason he gave for his aversion to citing Marx. Claiming that his lineage was with Capital, volume II, was, in a sense, a way of asserting his leftist bona fides, yet while citing a text that was sufficiently obscure that it allowed him to suggest less that he, Michel Foucault, was a latter-day Marxist than that Marx himself was already a genealogist of power.

At a more fundamental level, the entire premise of Foucault’s claim about Marx is debatable. Is there any point in Capital in which Marx really considers, as Foucault puts it, “the genesis of capitalism, and not capital”—as if, in Marx’s mind, “capitalism” could ever be distinguished from “capital”? Consider the chapter in Capital, volume I, on “Machinery and Modern Industry,” which is central to what Marx says about discipline in the capitalist factory. He does, in what might be considered a proto-Foucauldian vein, talk about how factories “transform the worker, from his very childhood, into a part of a specialized machine”; he observes that whereas in manufacturing, “the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him”; and he asks, in a particularly Foucauldian twist, “Is Fourier wrong when he calls factories ‘mitigated jails?”34 Yet for Marx, factory discipline can only be understood as contributing to and as shaped by the need to generate surplus labor that is inherent in the analysis of capital that he proposed in his magnum opus’s opening pages. The machinery that imposes barracks-like discipline on the factory worker is not just a power tool—it is, in Marx’s analysis, an instrument of capital itself, and evidence of the fact that it is the imperatives of capital itself that make shop-floor discipline necessary: “Owing to its conversion into an automaton,” Marx writes, “the instrument of labour confronts the labourer during the labour-process in the shape of capital, of dead labour, which dominates and soaks up living labour-power.”35 This discipline only makes sense in a production system that “is not only a labour-process, but also capital’s process of valorization.”³⁶ Its root cause is capital itself, and not some notion of capitalism from which it can be cut off. Finally, when one reads these pages, it seems highly dubious to present Marx, as Foucault attempts to, as embracing a “positive” conception of power, and as asserting that factory discipline is an “efficiency” or an “aptitude” rather than a prohibition. If anything, Marx suggests that such techniques could only be seen as efficiencies to capitalists; to workers they are clearly prohibitions. Thus Marx writes, once again in chapter 15: “All punishments [in the factory] naturally resolve themselves into fines and deductions from wages, and the law-giving talent of the factory Lycurgus so arranges matters that a violation of his laws is, if possible, more profitable to him than the keeping of them.” A little further, he adds:

The economical use of the social means of production, matured and forced as in a hothouse by the factory system, is turned in the hands of capital into systematic robbery of what is necessary for the life of the workman while he is at work, i.e., space, light, air, and protection against the dangerous or the unhealthy concomitants of the productive process, not to mention the robbery of appliances for the comfort of the worker.

Few workers, Marx implies, could imagine the power wielded in factories as anything other than a very onerous prohibition. Very sternly, factory discipline indeed says “no.”

In affiliating himself with Capital’s second volume, Foucault was, of course, doing anything but identifying himself as a Marxist. The statements he made in this vein were strategic—a way of calling attention to the neglected problem of power as an autonomous problem in Marx’s thought. It resembles, in this sense, Foucault’s reflection on the strategic value of liberal ideas for challenging state power. The difficulty lies in Foucault’s arguments: even if one overlooks the errors that make the claim seem somewhat off-the-cuff, the fact remains that Foucault tried—not especially persuasively—to claim that an analytic of power can be found in Marx, which can be distinguished from the dynamics of capital formation that the latter places at the heart of his analysis. Foucault’s subtle strategies of self-identification in this instance did not, in short, alter the flow of his main arguments, which sought to dissolve the state analytically into a kaleidoscope of “little power regions” and to make power relations rather than class relations and social inequality the main vector of social critique. Foucault’s odd pledge of allegiance to Marx serves only to highlight the anti-Marxism of his core concepts and arguments.

Foucault versus “Fascization”

On two occasions separated by less than three weeks—both in March 1979—Foucault made what at first glance would seem to be a peculiar observation. It would be a mistake, he said, to see the contemporary—i.e., liberal—state as “fascist” or prone to “fascization.” What is, of course, striking about this statement is precisely that it had to be said. Relatively few theories of liberalism have seriously entertained the idea that it bears any resemblance to fascism; if anything, liberalism’s very essence is usually assumed to involve a radical rejection of fascist-style politics (and vice versa). Why, then, did Foucault feel the need to distinguish liberalism from fascism? What were the stakes of this claim?

The first occasion was on Foucault’s March 7, 1979, lecture at the Collège de France, which has since been published as part of The Birth of Biopolitics. In what has become one of the lectures’ better-known passages, Foucault explained that part of the reason for his decision to refocus the course on the study of liberalism was the need to diagnose and refute the “state phobia” afflicting the French left. One of the features of this state phobia was the belief that the contemporary state was prone to fascism: it denounces “the states and the seeds of fascism that it harbors”37; it posits a fundamental similarity between “the administrative state, the welfare state, the bureaucratic state, the fascist state, [and] the totalitarian state”³⁸; and it created a tendency to condemn all state actions by associating them with the worst form of the state, such that there are always people who will denounce the punishment a court imposes on a common vandal as “a sign of the fascization of the state, as if, before the fascist state, there were no sentences of this kind.”³⁹ One of the goals of studying liberal governmentality was precisely to challenge the—simplistic, in Foucault’s eyes—view that “state” and “fascism” are essentially synonymous, not least by rather mischievously showing that the equation of the expansion of state power with fascism had been a rhetorical ploy that had been initially used by liberals to denounce the postwar welfare state.

On March 23, 1979, Foucault addressed a plenary session of a conference on the theme “The New Internal Order” (Le nouvel ordre intérieur) at the University of Paris-8 in Vincennes. In remarks that have never been published (but for which audio and video archives are available), Foucault explained, in general terms, his view of the nature of the contemporary state and the trends shaping it. Foucault stated that Western societies were clearly entering a new historical moment. Intriguingly, the factor he cited as the primary reason of this change was the energy crisis. Western economic growth had been built on what he described as the “energy plundering” (pillage énergétique) of the rest of the world.⁴⁰ Referring presumably (without specifically naming them) to the oil crises of the 1970s, he observed that the cheap energy upon which the West had depended would henceforth be far more expensive. If this causal argument is one that Foucault rarely made, his conclusion is more familiar: the energy crisis, he maintained, went hand in hand with a crisis of governance, specifically a crisis of the welfare state. Foucault explained:

So I believe that in any case one thing is certain, which is that the state as it has functioned until now is a state that is no longer in a position and does not feel capable of managing, mastering, controlling, an entire series of problems, conflicts, struggles that will most likely be of an economic or social nature that this situation of expensive energy risks creating. In other words, the state has until now functioned as a welfare state: it can no longer, in the current economic situation, be a welfare state.

In these circumstances, Foucault went on, one of two possibilities was likely. The first (the second will be considered in this essay’s next section) is what he called “roughly speaking, . . . the ‘fascist possibility.’” Foucault noticeably—possibly uncomfortably—hesitated before continuing: “I do not think, if one takes the term ‘fascist’ in its strict sense, that it is exactly this possibility that threatens us.” He explained: “I call . . . [the fascist possibility] what happens in a country in which the state apparatus can no longer carry out its functions except under one condition, which is that of doubling itself up with a party [se doubler d’un parti], an all-powerful party, an omnipresent party, a party that is above the law and beyond right [au-dessus des lois et hors du droit], which imposes—alongside the state, in the meshes of the state, within the state’s very apparatus—a reign of terror.” Foucault referenced this possibility, however, only to reject it categorically: “I do not think, for the moment, that in a country such as France it is this possibility of doubling up of the state’s impotence with that of an omnipotent party [la possibilité du doublage de l’impuissance de l’État par la toute puissance du parti] that threatens us.”41

The seeming peculiarity of Foucault’s claim that liberalism is not a form of fascism can be mitigated if one considers the context in which he made these remarks: specifically, the Vincennes conference on the “new internal order” of March 1978, and what it tells us about the outlook of certain sectors of the French left at the time. For the conference was organized by intellectuals who took seriously the notion that fascism was the best analytical grid for understanding liberalism’s reemergence in the late 1970s. The conference’s main organizers straddled two highly specific niches of the academic far left: the English Department (later known as the department of Anglophone Studies) of the University of Paris-8 at Vincennes, the experimental campus created in the wake of May 1968; and the newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, which had been founded as a kind of foreign-policy supplement of the daily Le Monde in 1973, but which had grown increasingly independent as it hewed to a strongly tiers-mondiste editorial line. The conference’s two primary organizers, Bernard Cassen and Pierre Dommergues, both taught in Vincennes’ English Department, in addition to being regular contributors to “Le diplo” (Cassen would later become its editor).

In organizing the Vincennes conference, their goal was to try to understand the forces that were reshaping the industrialized world in the wake of the economic crisis of the 1970s. They wondered in particular about the political consequences of both economic instability and the social and cultural upheaval of the late 1960s. These concerns led them to compare the present situation to the period that had produced fascism. In a series of articles for Le Monde diplomatique, Dommergues argued that the rise of conservatism and neoconservatism in the United States during the 1970s represented a “soft fascism,” in which a tide of apparent social and cultural liberalization cast a veil over the reassertion of social and economic hierarchies. Dommergues concluded: “In the America of the seventies, one … finds traces of proto-fascism,” evident in “the insidious development of fundamentally anti-democratic tendencies.”42 Like many at this time, Dommergues mentioned, in this regard, the Trilateral Commission’s notorious 1975 report, The Crisis of Democracy,⁴³ which, among other proposals, called for a restoration of authority based on social hierarchies, expertise, and wealth. Dommergues’s argument was influenced by the work of American political scientist Bertram Gross, the author of Friendly Fascism: Logic of a More Perfect Capitalism.⁴⁴ In 1976, Claude Julien, the editor of Le Monde diplomatique and another conference participant, rejected the specific claim that the emerging order was fascistic, while fully accepting the broader terms of this discussion. In “desperate situations—Nazi Germany, Vichy France,” he noted, ruling classes had “decided against democracy, and … never regretted this decision too bitterly.” He concluded: “Obviously, we are not there yet. But already people are openly dreaming of a more muscular democracy, ensuring order by ‘means of social control’ that are sufficiently sophisticated for more barbarous measures to be ‘needed.’”⁴⁵ The premise that the political reconfigurations occurring in the context of the economic crisis of the 1970s could be compared to the interwar years was widely discussed at the 1979 conference and was, indeed, one of its underlying assumptions.

Foucault’s remarks about the contemporary prospects of fascism and the relationship between fascism and the liberal state were at many levels a response to the concerns expressed by this segment of the French left. The remarks at the Vincennes conference (March 23) clarify the briefer remarks in the Collège de France lecture (March 7)—the claims he addressed at the later date having already been aired in public in the months preceding the conference. Foucault was not only denouncing a general tendency whereby the left equated the state and all forms of political authority with fascism, thus succumbing to the danger of “inflationary” rhetoric. He was specifically addressing the question of whether the economic crisis and the problems of stability and legitimacy it spawned would require an authoritarian solution: Was 1973, in other words, the new 1929? The Vincennes remarks make it clear that his entertainment of the fascist possibility (which may have been purely notional) arose as a response to a crisis in the state resulting from a broader economic downturn (as his emphasis on the problem of energy attests). Yet to fully grasp his remarks, we need to unpack a very specific claim embedded in them: that the defining feature of fascism (and totalitarianism) is party rule.

Though he never addressed it at any length in his major writings, the question of the nature of fascism and totalitarianism was on Foucault’s mind in 1978–1979, no doubt because of the polemical splash made by the nouveaux philosophes and the standpoint from which they proposed to view contemporary French politics. On the few occasions in which he broached the topic during these years, he returned to the same claim: that the distinguishing feature of fascism specifically, and totalitarianism generally, lay in the political role they assigned to the party. This idea, which Foucault briefly summarized in his remarks at Vincennes on March 23, 1979, was fleshed out more fully in the conversation he had in Japan a little less than a year earlier, on April 25, 1978, with the philosopher Takaaki Yoshimoto. It is worth mentioning, incidentally, that the career of Foucault’s interlocutor in this dialogue overlapped with his own in a number of intriguing ways. Though politically active and involved in the student contestation movement of 1968, Yoshimoto (who was born in 1924, two years before Foucault) belonged to the Japanese “New Left” and was a critic of the Japanese Communist Party, the forms of totalitarian mobilization he had witnessed during the Second World War, and postwar Japanese society’s rhetoric of self-sacrifice to the community, which he saw as the unacknowledged legacy of militarism. Yoshimoto, moreover, defended the rights of “private self-interest” against communal pressures, worried about the state more than capitalism, and favored the “autonomy” of the masses from intellectuals and their conceits. Though a leftist, he eventually came to believe that capitalism, in the form it assumed in postwar society, could even have emancipatory effects. One scholar writes:

In [Yoshimoto’s] view, the criticism of consumer society by many intellectuals is still another instance of their grudging and disparaging view of the masses who have now finally achieved a level of living where they can afford a materially affluent life. Another reason for Yoshimoto’s defense of super-capitalism is its corrosive effects on his old bêtes noirs, the state and its “public sphere” or civil society. As capital undermines the idea of a homogeneous society, individuals and families are liberated from the grip of communal fantasy. Rather than placing hope in “socialism”—which in Yoshimoto’s view has always easily reverted to Stalinism or (through tenko) fascism—he hopes that the hierarchies and the exploitation characteristic of the earlier stage of capitalism diagnosed by Marx will be undermined by the movement of capital itself through development towards an affluent middle-class society.46

The dialogue between Foucault and Yoshimoto was thus clearly an exchange between two thinkers who, in their political instincts and analysis of contemporary society, shared much in common.

In this discussion, both thinkers reflected on Marxism’s limitations as an intellectual paradigm. The French translation of the Japanese title under which it was originally published was “Comment se débarasser du Marxisme?” or “How to Get Rid of Marxism?” Foucault, at one point, emphasized the need to reflect upon “the existence of an organization that is known as the Communist Party,” an “unprecedented organization” that “can be compared to nothing” (and certainly not conventional liberal democratic political parties), yet which proved “decisive in the history of Western Marxism.”⁴⁷ Foucault’s reflections on the nature of the party in the Communist tradition, I believe, were part of the same train of thought that informed his views about the place of the party in fascism, thus shedding light on what he meant when, in 1979, he asserted that fascism seemed an unlikely option in an age of liberal government.

It is important to note the issue that, in this dialogue, triggers Foucault’s analysis of the nature of communist parties: the seemingly abstract and arcane philosophical question of the “will” (la volonté). After Yoshimoto explained his views about the different levels at which the question of the will can be understood, Foucault responded by saying that “French Marxism has ignored the analysis of the different levels of the will” and that, more broadly, this question “remained completely unexplored in the West.”⁴⁸ For Foucault, the significance of the idea of the party—which culminated with Lenin, though it drew on earlier antecedents—lies, at least in part, in the way it led to the “total abandon[ment]” of the “question of will.” First, because it is based on the idea that only through the party does the proletariat acquire class consciousness, the party-concept assumes that “individual and subjective wills” can be subsumed into a “collective will.”⁴⁹ Second, through its hierarchical structure, the party sought to exclude “heretical elements.” Hierarchy had a similar effect as the party’s monopolistic claim on proletarian consciousness: it sought to “concentrate the individual wills of militants into a kind of monolithic will,” which amounted in practice to the “bureaucratic will of its leaders.”⁵⁰ Thus one of the most significant historical effects of the concept of the party was to conceal particular wills beneath the hegemonic will of the party—and, ultimately, to obscure the very idea of the will itself through the subordination of practice to theory. This perspective could only ignore the existence of “different levels of will.” At present, however, these “multiple wills are starting to burst forth from the breach in the hegemony of the traditional left.”51 The theoretical and practical lid that the party-concept had placed on the manifestation of wills in what Foucault seems to have viewed as their inherent multiplicity was losing its weight in contemporary society—a reference, apparently, to the new forms of activism and the new social movements that had arisen since the 1960s; it seemed unlikely that the impoverished conception of the will implicit in the idea of the party would be in a position to reassert itself anytime soon.

The idea of “will” that Foucault made central to his analysis of the concept of party was not simply a polite concession to his Japanese interlocutor’s interest in the topic. It was a notion that had deeper roots in Foucault’s own thought, particularly in the years preceding this remark. Foucault had, after all, published La volonté de savoir—the “will to know”—as the first volume of The History of Sexuality in 1977, and had used the same title (for very different for material) for his first lecture course at the Collège de France in 1970–1971. In the latter—one of the most explicit engagements with Nietzsche in his oeuvre—Foucault shows how the Western philosophical tradition, beginning with Plato and particularly Aristotle, is founded on an occlusion of the role played by the will in generating knowledge: Aristotle’s claim in the Metaphysics that “All men by nature desire to know,” Foucault argues, seeks to make “desire” and “knowledge” so synonymous as to make the claim a kind of tautology. What Nietzsche shows is that the history of knowledge is driven not by an internal necessity but by the règle de volonté—a “rule of the will”—that is asceticism.⁵² In a lecture from 1971, Foucault claimed that Foucault’s significance was to have “placed the root and the raison d’être of truth in the will.”⁵³ The philosophical tradition has generally conceived the relationship between truth and will in terms of freedom: the nature of truth is to be free in relation to (i.e., undetermined by) the will, while the will can encounter truth only insofar as it is endowed with freedom. Nietzsche, however, asserts that the “articulation” between will and truth is one of “violence.” The specific way in which Foucault develops this claim in this lecture is obscure, but the basic idea is fairly straightforward: the revelation that an act of will lurks beneath every claim to truth shows how little truth there is in the truth, and that it might be possible to live outside of the story that truth tells about itself (in, say, the Western philosophical tradition, as reflected in such statements as “all men by nature desire to know”), to accept the “truth without truth”⁵⁴ that is implicit in any insight into a world founded on willing—Nietzsche’s will to power—rather than truth.

This detour through Foucault’s notion of the will is necessary, I think, because it ultimately clarifies his views about the idea of the party, totalitarianism, fascism, and its (non)relationship with liberalism. The party, in Foucault’s analysis, is one of those figures of Western thought that, like the slave morality or asceticism, instantiates the violence implicit in a will to truth that professes the utter purity of its intentions. It is presumably not a coincidence that Foucault noted that the Leninist party had often been described as a “monastic order.”55 Furthermore, like Aristotle, Foucault seeks to embed the desire for knowledge in the idea of knowledge itself, so the justification of the Leninist party’s praxis (subjugating individual wills into a collective will) ultimately lies in the validity of its theory: “The will of the Party disappears beneath the mask of a rational calculation consistent with a theory that passes for truth.”⁵⁶ Just as in the 1970–1971 lectures, Foucault imagines freeing discourse from the strictures of the (unacknowledged) “will to know,” so, in the 1978 conversation in Japan, he says: “The normative words of philosophy must not resonate alone” and “[o]ther kinds of experience must be made to speak.”⁵⁷ The will to truth that the Party embodies has thus served as an obstacle to the expression of particular wills and the multiple forms of truth or alternatives to truth the will embodies.

The declining appeal of this conception of the party at a time when the struggles of the 1960s had liberated these numerous and variegated wills explains, I think, what Foucault meant when he said that fascism was not, in 1979, a possibility that “threatens us.” Granted, fascism and communism are not the same thing. Indeed, in the March 7 Collège de France lecture, shortly after he spoke critically of the leftist tendency to equate the contemporary state with its worst, i.e., “fascist” incarnation, he once again invoked his claim that the distinguishing character of “totalitarian” governments was the rule of a party—and not limitless state power. Looking back to the Yoshomito conversation the year before and anticipating his remarks at Vincennes several weeks later, Foucault suggested that his analysis of the nature of the Communist party, as he had previously described it, applied to all “totalitarian” governments, including fascist ones, and that this type of government had little to do with the contemporary state. One of the mistakes of the “inflationary critique of the state,” Foucault argued, was to associate the modern welfare state with a “totalitarian state.” The error in this claim lies in the fact that “the so-called totalitarian state is not at all an exaltation of the state, but, to the contrary, a limitation, a diminishment, a subordination of the state’s autonomy, of its specificity and its distinctive functioning—in relation . . . to something else, which is the party.”⁵⁸ The totalitarian state is not the Polizeistaat of the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century administrative state: it represents a form of “non-statist governmentality,” and specifically a “governmentality of the party.”⁵⁹ It is the party, this “very extraordinary, very curious, very new organization” that is the “historical origin” of “totalitarian regimes,” “Nazism,” “fascism,” and “Stalinism.”60

Foucault cared enough about this question of “governmentality of the party” that he suggested, in the same March 7 lecture, that it might be the theme of the 1979–1980 lecture course—if, as he put it, “these ideas are still on my mind.”⁶¹ They would not be: what promised to be Foucault’s head-on engagement with the great French totalitarian debate never occurred. An explicit intervention on Foucault’s part into the 1970s debate on totalitarianism may have provided considerable insight into Foucault’s position on liberalism. Yet the grounds upon which he refuted the fascization thesis advanced by leftist intellectuals at the Vincennes conference does imply a conception of liberalism in which far from neutral preferences were embedded. Fascism, Foucault contended, was founded on a monolithic view of the party that aspired to subsume particular wills into a collective will. Yet the overwhelming trend in contemporary society since the late 1960s was toward a kind of profusion of particular wills in a motley array of struggles. The emerging neoliberal state, he seems to have concluded, was far more likely to accommodate these particular wills than to try to shoehorn them into a single, hierarchical will.

The reasons for Foucault’s analysis are not entirely consistent. In the Vincennes remarks, he suggests the fascist option is implausible in part because of the state’s economic weakness in the wake of the energy crisis; in the Collège de France lectures, he suggests that fascism is an unlikely possibility because, ultimately, totalitarian government is actually weaker than the welfare state (since the latter is not reined in by the rule of a party). Foucault’s reasons for dismissing the fascism prospect dovetailed, to a significant degree, with his rejection of communism as a broader political option. Foucault was, in this way, a genuine anti-totalitarian, in that he believed that fascist and communist regimes were comparable phenomenon while opposing them both. One can, of course, oppose neoliberalism on other grounds that it creates the kind of authoritarian regime or manufactured consent that many at Vincennes believed it was in the process of establishing. It is significant, however, that Foucault explicitly rejected this characterization of neoliberalism. He believed neoliberalism allowed particular wills to manifest themselves, in a non-totalitarian, non-fascistic way. This may not amount to an endorsement. But this view did, unquestionably, place certain critical positions out-of-bounds.

The Liberal State’s Decreasing Power

The third passage from Foucault I would like to consider concerns his assessment of the emergence in Western societies of a kind of “soft power,” a power that would have to do “more with less.” Though Foucault attributed these qualities to liberalism in general in the 1978 lectures (Security, Territory, Population), as well as the 1979 lectures, it is to Foucault’s intervention at the Vincennes Conference on March 23, 1979 that we shall once again turn. Immediately after dismissing the likelihood of a fascist solution to the state’s current crisis, Foucault laid out what he saw as a far more likely option:

The second solution … the more sophisticated solution, and which presents itself, at first glance, as a sort of disinvestment of the state, as if the state lost interest [se désintéressait] in a certain number of things, details, minor problems, to which until now it had granted particular and watchful attention. Put differently, I think that the state now finds itself in a situation in which, politically and economically, it can no longer afford the luxury of exercising power that is omnipresent, finicky, and costly.62

Foucault proceeded to sketch out some of the dominant traits of this emerging power form. It would identify “vulnerable zones” that were particularly exposed to danger, such as terrorist activities. It would allow “margins of toleration”: detailed police enforcement would be abandoned, as it became apparent that a state could render itself more effective by allowing activities it had previously prohibited. This new power form would, moreover, abandon the aspiration for panoptic surveillance in favor of mass data collection—a “permanent mobilization of the state’s knowledge of individuals.” Like other conference participants, Foucault no doubt had in mind the 1977 report, which was originally addressed to the French president, entitled L’informatisation de la société (The Computerization of Society) written by two top civil servants, Alain Minc and Simon Nora,⁶³ which played an important role in raising French consciousness of the imminent “computer revolution.” Finally, this new power form would use the media to construct a consensus, thus relying on society’s capacity for “self-regulation” rather than disciplinary techniques. The common denominator of these characteristics was that of an “apparent retreat of power.” This new system would, in these ways, be “very different” from the order that had existed when the state was not, as it currently was, strapped for resources.

Foucault was not alone in sharing these views. Indeed, much of what he said harmonized with the insights of another speaker on the same panel at Vincennes, a judge named Hubert Dalle. In his remarks, Dalle contrasted two conceptions of social control. An older, “archaic” model was founded on the “doctrine of security.” This model responded to perceived threats to the social order, through repressive measures and the judicial system. It is less concerned with guaranteeing individual liberties than with protecting the social order. It relies in particular on the “judicial apparatus,” notably the prison system. In certain instances, it entails a dramatic increase in prison populations. While it may seek popular support, the overall goal of this approach is to identify and suppress behavior that renders society unsafe. In this way, the security doctrine differs considerably from what Dalle called the “more sophisticated” alternative, which corresponded to the “soft way” that was the broader theme of the Vincennes conference. Anticipating a point that Foucault would make, Dalle described that this newer approach was (perhaps necessarily) less costly than the lavish expenses required by a model based on the systematic repression of disorder. But this cheaper approach was also based on a different conception of how power was to be exercised: rather than focusing on repression, it sought to manage populations and to anticipate threats before they occurred. This newer model was thus based on “generalized prevention” (prévention généralisée). It was made possible by the advent of computers, which made population management and prevention technologically possible to a degree that had hitherto been unimaginable. Where repression depended primarily on the judicial apparatus, the system of “generalized prevention” relied more on specialized administrators. Yet while this more recent power form seemed, in general, to tread more lightly than the repressive alternative, it was far more exhaustive in its scope; as if the tradeoff for abandoning the desire to eliminate all social disorder was a more comprehensive enlistment of society as a whole into the web of power. Dalle, in this way, made an argument—seemingly on his own terms, drawing on his own experience as a magistrate—that was very similar to the one Foucault had developed since around 1976: namely, that an older, disciplinary form of power was being absorbed and superseded by a form of liberal governmentality, founded on population management rather than repression and skeptical of the cost-effectiveness of sprawling judicial apparatuses.

Foucault’s March 23 remarks at Vincennes about states that would have to learn to do “more with less” as they “disinvested” themselves from the realm of power were presaged in the same March 7 Collège de France lecture discussed above. On both occasions, Foucault critiqued overblown claims about the “fascization” of the state by arguing that the deeper trend in contemporary society is toward a shrinking of the state. Before his Collège de France audience, Foucault stated: “That which is currently at issue in our reality, is not so much the increase [croissance] of the state and of reason of state, but, to a much greater extent, its decrease [décroissance].”64 “Liberal governmentality” is precisely one of the forms this decrease in state power has taken (the other, Foucault quixotically asserted, being totalitarianism, or “party governmentality”). Foucault was quick to assert that, in describing liberalism as a form of diminishing state power, he was making no “value judgment,” nor was he trying to “sacralize or valorize this kind of governmentality from the outset.” He was, rather, simply stating what struck him as an undeniable fact. Moreover, Foucault maintained, the prophets of a delusional left fail to realize, when they pronounce their jeremiads against a newly emergent fascism, that they are actively participating in this trend toward diminishing state power. In their critique of state power, Foucault suggested, leftists were the objective allies of liberals. The proponents of state phobia, according to Foucault, “vont dans le sens du vent”—that is, they are “going in the direction of the wind.”65

Foucault’s claim that Western societies were experiencing an historic “decrease” in state power thus suggested a second reason for refuting the “fascization” thesis. The first, as we saw earlier, claims that fascism (or totalitarianism) should not be understood as an expansion of state power, but rather as a subordination of the authority of the state to that of a party. The second argument is, quite simply, that, insofar as the “fascization” raises the fear of an increasingly omnipotent state, it is empirically unfounded: the capacity of post-1973 states to exercise power has been diminished significantly. In condemning current states as fascist or totalitarian, leftists were, unknowingly, participating in a process that is precisely the reverse of the very phenomenon they believed they were denouncing. No one is more liberal, Foucault impishly implied, than the leftist who denounces the liberal state as fascist. The critics of the “new internal order” are the unrecognized children of Hayek.

In claiming that state power was on the decrease, Foucault once again made it clear that he was not trying to endorse liberalism: he was making no “value judgment,” nor attempting to “sacralize or valorize” a particular model of the state. Yet one of the undeniable uses that Foucault made of this claim was to delegitimize the arguments of those who feared that the crisis of the 1970s would strengthen the state, even if its configuration differed from earlier forms. Critiquing state power, in such a context, was like pushing at an open door. It is in this sense, I think, that we must understand the “state phobia” passages in The Birth of Biopolitics. Foucault was not making a social-democratic argument. He was not saying that because it can serve progressive purposes, we need not worry about the state the way neoliberals and some leftists do. Rather, his point was that there is no reason to fear a state that has become a shadow of its former self. If the state lies drowned in the bathtub, it no longer makes sense to worry about it. Far from qualifying Foucault’s anti-statism, his comments about “state phobia” took the liberal program of shrinking the state for a reality.

Conclusion

Walter Kaufmann once described Hegel’s conception of tragedy as a “conflict . . . between one-sided positions, each of which embodies some good.”⁶⁶ Something similar might be said about the debate over Foucault’s assessment of liberalism (though it hardly deserves to be called tragic). Those who see Foucault as challenging liberalism grasp the fundamentally critical nature of his project, as well as his reluctance to align himself with any established order. Those who see Foucault as a sympathizer or at least as an enabler of liberalism recognize the liberal assumptions upon which many of his key arguments and concepts rest. In addition to revealing the complexity of Foucault’s views of liberalism, the three episodes considered in this essay illustrate the elusiveness that characterizes his position. First, by asserting (somewhat dubiously, from an empirical standpoint) that he had been influenced by Capital, volume II, Foucault sought to read into Marx’s writings some of the themes that overdetermined his own interest in liberalism, such as the critique of the state and the concept of sovereignty, and to downplay inequalities based on economics in favor of those based on power. Second, without praising liberalism, Foucault vigorously rejected the argument that the return of liberalism in European politics in the late 1970s was a kind of soft fascism. Specifically, he contended that the modern liberal state tolerated a multiplicity of particular wills in a way that the party concept that is so central to fascism (as well as communism) sought to stamp out. This seemingly objective comparison rests on an account of liberalism that emphasizes liberalism’s emancipatory potentialities and minimizes concerns about economic inequalities or the disciplinary practices associated with it. Finally, in arguing that state power was on the decline, Foucault took a specifically neoliberal aspiration for a reality, even as he insisted he was not playing favorites with liberalism.

If Foucault was a liberal, it was despite himself: his liberalism was not one of self-identification or political affiliation; it was, rather, an élan implicit in his concepts and arguments—in the assumptions he made, for instance, about which social problems matter, what the state is, and where the state is headed. Can Foucault’s ideas be retooled to serve critical purposes that run against the grain of their defining assumptions? Or does the logic of Foucault’s thought ultimately commit those who employ it to the principles that underwrite it? As liberalism and its neoliberal avatars continue to define our present, the answers to these questions may serve as a kind of prolegomenon to any future use of Foucault.

NOTES

1. In the interest of lightening my prose, I will speak of Foucault’s “liberalism” when I am, in fact, referring to his liberalism and/or neoliberalism. Though space does not permit to substantiate this claim in detail, it seems clear that Foucault’s reflections on neoliberalism in 1979’s The Birth of Biopolitics are in direct continuity with the considerations on liberalism found in 1978’s Security, Territory, Population (and the earlier lectures of The Birth of Biopolitics). This is not to say that Foucault made no distinction whatsoever between liberalism and neoliberalism, but simply that he saw them as reflecting a same problematic and being variations on one and the same form of governmentality.

2. Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy 80(10) (1983): 583–89.

3. Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London and New York: Verso, 2013).

4. Michel Clouscard, Néo-fascisme et idéologie du désir: Mai 68, la contre-révolution libérale libertaire (Paris: Editions Delga, 2008 [1973]).

5. Jean-Pierre Chevènement, “Les nouveaux penseurs de la gauche américaine,” Témoignage chrétien, September 21, 1978, 6–7.

6. José Luis Moreno Pestaña, Foucault, la gauche, et la politique (Paris: Textuel, 2011), 120, 122.

7. Daniel Zamora, “Foucault, the Excluded, and the Neoliberal Erosion of the State,” in Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent, eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016), 79–80.

8. Michael Walzer, “The Politics of Michel Foucault,” Dissent 30 (1983): 490.

9. Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind. Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 139–58.

10. Richard Wolin, for instance, observes: “At the time of Foucault’s death in 1984, prominent observers noted the irony that the ex-structuralist and ‘death-of-man’ prophet had played a pivotal role in the French acceptance of political liberalism.” Wolin, “From the ‘Death of Man’ to Human Rights: The Paradigm Change in French Intellectual Life, 1968–1986,” in The Frankfurt School Revisited, and Other Essays on Politics and Society (New York: Routledge, 2006), 180.

11. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde. Essai sur la société néolibérale (Paris: La Découverte, 2009).

12. Ben Golder, Foucault and the Politics of Rights (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).

13. Serge Audier, Penser le ‘néolibéralisme.’ Le moment néolibéral, Foucault et la crise du socialisme (Lormont: Le Bord de l’Eau, 2009).

14. Foucault, “Politics and Ethics” (edited typescript) (1983), 29–31. Papers from the UC Berkeley French Studies Program, pertaining to Michel Foucault’s visits at Berkeley and Stanford University, 1975–1984, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, BANC MSS 90/136z. Though the questioner is not identified, it is worth noting that one of Foucault’s interlocutors in this exchange was Richard Rorty (along with Charles Taylor, Paul Rabinow, Martin Jay, and Leo Lowenthal), who, the very same year, published his own idiosyncratic take on “bourgeois liberalism,” discussed above.

15. See, for example, Loïc Wacquant, “Bourdieu, Foucault, and the Penal State in the Neoliberal Era” in Zamora and Behrent, eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism, 114–34, and Bernard Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2011).

16. See, on this point, Audier, “Neoliberalism through Foucault’s Eyes,” History and Theory 54 (2015): 404–18, especially 407–11.

17. See Michael Scott Christofferson, “Foucault and the New Philosophy: Why Foucault Endorsed André Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers,” in Zamora and Behrent, Foucault and Neoliberalism, 6–23.

18. Foucault, “Politics and Ethics,” (31).

19. Louis Althusser, “Part I: From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” in Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2009 [1968; trans., 1970]), 13.

20. “Entretien enregistré le 3 avril 1978: Michel Foucault, Colin Gordon, Paul Patton,” Papers from the UC Berkeley French Studies Program, pertaining to Michel Foucault's visits at Berkeley and Stanford University, 1975–1984”), BANC MSS 90/136z, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California, [n.p.]. Though I have drawn on my own notes from the interview in French found at the Bancroft Library, an English translation of this interview was published as Foucault, Gordon, and Patton, “Considerations on Marxism, Phenomenology and Power. Interview with Michel Foucault; Recorded on April 3, 1978,” Foucault Studies 14 (2012): 98–114.

21. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” (delivered at the Colloque de Royaumont in July 1964) in Dits et écrits, vol. 1, 1954–1969, Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange, eds. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 564–79.

22. “Entretien enregistré le 3 avril 1978,” n.p.

23. Ibid.

24. See the famous lines from the opening pages of The Archaeology of Knowledge, “Do not ask who I am, and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.” (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith), 17. See, too, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (1969), in Dits et écrits, vol. 1, 1954–1969, 789–821, and “Le philosophe masqué” (1980), in Dits et écrits, vol. 4, 1980–1988, 104–10. In the latter, Foucault says: “I would propose a game: that of the ‘year without names.’ For a year, books would be published without authors’ names. Critics would have to manage with an entirely anonymous production. But when I think about it, maybe they would have nothing to say: all the authors would wait until the following year to publish their books.” (104–05).

25. Foucault, “Les Mailles du pouvoir” (1981[1976]), in Dits et écrits, vol. 4, 1980–1988, 186.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., 187.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., 189.

31. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, vol. 2 (New York and London: Verso, 2013), 1–2.

32. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. II, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1992), 184.

33. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 549. Emphasis added.

34. Ibid., 547, 548, 553.

35. Ibid., 548.

36. Ibid.

37. Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979 (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2004), 192.

38. Ibid., 193.

39. Ibid., 194.

40. This and subsequent quotes from the Vincennes conference come from Foucault, “Colloque ‘Le nouvel ordre intérieur,’ Partie 3: ‘Le nouveau contrôle social,’ avec les interventions de Hubert Dalle, Louis Casamayor, Louis Joinet, et Michel Foucault” [March 23, 1979], Archives vidéo. Films et bandes annonces. Université de Paris VIII, Vincennes-St.-Denis. http:​//www​.arch​ives-​video​.univ​-pari​s8.fr​/vide​o.php​?reco​rdID=​111, accessed August 11, 2013.

41. Foucault, “Colloque ‘Le nouvel ordre intérieur,’ Partie 3: ‘Le nouveau contrôle social,’ avec les interventions de Hubert Dalle, Louis Casamayor, Louis Joinet, et Michel Foucault” (March 23, 1979), Archives vidéo. Films et bandes annonces. Université de Paris VIII, Vincennes-St.-Denis. http:​//www​.arch​ives-​video​.univ​-pari​s8.fr​/vide​o.php​?reco​rdID=​111, accessed August 11, 2013.

42. Pierre Dommergues, “L’essor du conservatisme américain,” Le monde diplomatique, May 1978: 9.

43. Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975).

44. Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: Logic of a More Perfect Capitalism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1985 [1980]), 161. The original publication date for Gross’s book is listed as 1980, yet Dommergues clearly refers to it in his article from May 1978 (“L’essor du conservatisme américain”). The reasons for this discrepancy are unclear.

45. Claude Julien, “La nouvelle idéologie,” in Le devoir d’irrespect (Paris: Alain Moreau, 1979), 131.

46. Carl Cassegard, “From Withdrawal to Resistance: The Rhetoric of Exit in Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kojin,” in Asia-Pacific Journal 6(30) (2008), http:​//apj​jf.or​g/-Ca​rl-Ca​ssega​rd/26​84/ar​ticle​.html​, accessed August 19, 2017.

47. Michel Foucault and Takaaki. Yoshimoto, “Méthodologie pour la connaissance du monde: comment se débarasser du marxisme,” trans. R. Nakamura, in Dits et écrits, vol. 3, 1976–1979, 595–618, at 613.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., 614.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., 615.

52. Foucault, Leçons sur la volonté de savoir. Cours au Collège de France (1970-1971) (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2011), 26.

53. Foucault, “Leçon sur Nietzsche: Comment penser l’histoire de la vérité avec Nietzsche sans s’appuyer sur la vérité” (lecture delivered at McGill University in April 1971), 206.

54. Ibid., 210.

55. Foucault and Yoshimoto, “Méthodologie pour la connaissance du monde,” 613. An extensive and highly critical discussion of Lenin’s conception of the party can be found in a book published shortly before this exchange: Alain Besançon’s Les origines intellectuelles du léninisme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977). Besançon does consider Leninism as a quasi-religious movement, but he emphasizes its “gnostic” rather than “monastic” qualities.

56. Ibid., 615.

57. Ibid., 416.

58. Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 196.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid., 197.

61. Ibid.

62. Michel Foucault, “Colloque ‘Le nouvel ordre intérieur,’ Partie 3: ‘Le nouveau contrôle social,’ avec les interventions de Hubert Dalle, Louis Casamayor, Louis Joinet, et Michel Foucault” (March 23, 1979).

63. Simon Nora and Alain Minc, L’informatisation de la société (Paris: La Documentation française, 1978). On this report, see Andrée Walliser, “Le rapport ‘Nora-Minc.’ Histoire d’un best-seller,” Vingtième Siècle 23 (1989): 35–48.

64. Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 197.

65. Ibid., 197.

66. Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 201–02.