Foucault and German Neoliberalism, Then and Now*
Serge Audier
As with events, so with ideas: the often contradictory succession of interpretations of a given work is profoundly linked to the historical context of its reception. And the misreadings of a work—which nonetheless often prove revealing in a theoretical sense—tend to accumulate as the passage of time renders this original context unintelligible. One needs look no further than Machiavelli: the citizen of Florence transformed by some interpreters in the 1930s, against all good sense, into the father of totalitarianism. Even when this temporal distance is much narrower, when the historical context is only minimally different from our own, it can become difficult to grasp what an author was aiming at. A remarkable case of these difficulties is the reception of Michel Foucault’s 1979 lectures at the Collège de France on liberalism and neoliberalism. An immense and growing body of work has found in these lectures a central contribution to a radical critique of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century neoliberalism. Given Foucault’s reputation as a radical thinker with ties to the far left, few have even imagined until recently that his position on neoliberalism could be anything but one of vehement hostility. For many years, one of the few exceptions was Alessandro Fontana, a philosopher who attended Foucault’s courses regularly and worked alongside him. As documented in Foucault’s Dits et Ecrits, Fontana was the only person to question Foucault on his neoliberalism lectures, however passingly. A close disciple of Foucault, he later wondered whether or not his master had been converted during those years to liberal or neoliberal ideas.1 If Fontana’s interpretation was marginal in its time, it has become even more so today. While some interpreters have not hesitated to cast Foucault as an explicit adversary of neoliberalism, others have been more prudent, suggesting merely that his work provides crucial ammunition for further critique. In recent years, Foucault has been particularly lauded for his analysis of “ordoliberalism,” or German neoliberalism. For many of Foucault’s European readers, this critique has been essential for the denunciation of the German socioeconomic and political model, increasingly seen as the basis for the project of European construction.
Chance has worked in the historian’s favor. By sheer coincidence, Foucault’s lessons on neoliberalism were published in 2004, one year before the debate over the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe (TCE) began to divide France, and in particular the French left. The successful partisans of the “No” campaign in the 2005 referendum insisted that the Treaty would “carve into stone” the rules of “free and fair trade.” The TCE was in this sense faithful to German “neoliberalism” and its project of short-circuiting the democratic will by constitutionalizing the rules of market competition. For the intellectual opponents of the TCE, one needed merely to open Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics to understand that “neoliberalism” was far from a doctrine of laisser-faire. Rather, it was a competitive constructivism, in which the mission of both state authority and the law was to bring to life a competitive-entrepreneurial model of society and economy. Was this not precisely the project of European construction starting with the 1957 Rome Treaty?2 Was it not in the name of this ordoliberal Europe that “the humanities” were being destroyed in the universities?3 The fact that certain German “neoliberals,” such as Wilhelm Röpke, had, in fact, been committed defenders of “the humanities” was apparently not seen as worth noting.
Thus, Foucault became a posthumous protagonist in the French debate over neoliberalism and the future of the European project. The critique of German ordoliberalism and of Europe did not always mention Foucault by name, but its emergence was nonetheless a major event in the reception of his lectures on neoliberalism. Since then, each development in the European Union’s difficult history—particularly after the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the drastic austerity plans imposed on Greece and other countries of Southern Europe—has been scrutinized in Foucauldian terms. Many scholars no longer hesitate to claim that the German neoliberalism forged in the 1930s, which explicitly highlights the role of public authority in establishing a competitive order, constitutes an ultra-authoritarian form of liberalism. In historical complicity with Nazism and fascism, it is suggested, this liberalism has always been motivated by a contempt for democracy and popular sovereignty. Once again, we find Foucault invoked as the thinker who saw first and most clearly the structural affinities between Nazism and these economists who supported it much more than had been thought.4 In any case, ordoliberalism appears as the breeding ground for the radically antidemocratic view that the only viable conception of liberty is that of the capitalistic entrepreneur. Foucault is also often credited with having understood that German social democracy was converted to ordoliberalism, starting in 1959 with the adoption of the Bad Godesberg Program, whose notion of the “social market economy” is often taken as the framework for the European project. According to his presumed heirs, Foucault allows us to understand that the moment the German and European social democrats supported the TCE and its “social market economy,” they in fact gave their consent to the competitive order that has destroyed the welfare state, and indeed democracy itself. Having aligned themselves behind this market model since the 1950s, they thereby sacrificed not only Marxism, but all content of the idea of socialism.5
My aim in this article is not to take a direct position on the nature of German neoliberalism, nor on post–Bad Godesberg social democracy, European construction, or the history of neoliberalism. I will have little to say about the increasingly common thesis, which I find overly simplistic, that casts the famous 1938 Colloque Walter Lippmann—in which the German liberals Röpke and Alexander Rüstow were participants—as the key moment in constructing a radical offensive against democracy.6 I intend solely to comment on the invocation of Foucault’s authority in these types of debates. Can we legitimately claim that in 1979, Foucault conceptualized German neoliberalism as an authoritarian and antidemocratic liberalism with profound affinities with fascism and Nazism? Did he condemn German social democracy by deploring its conversion to “social market economy” as a turn towards a competitive and authoritarian ordoliberalism? Reading his lectures in the proper context, I hope to show that this interpretation stems from a monumental misinterpretation. This misinterpretation not only fails to understand what Foucault was aiming at in his studies of German neoliberalism, but also misses the socioeconomic, political, and cultural singularity of the late 1970s in Germany and France.
A German Approach to “Neoliberalism”?
An economist who has sustained an interest in Foucault writes, “as Michel Foucault has shown in Naissance de la biopolitique, ordoliberal thought accompanied the rise of Nazism in a complex sort of complicity,” worshiping the same “strong state” loved by fascists and Nazis.7 Did Foucault really find collaborators with the Third Reich among the ordoliberals, as some have highlighted since? Did he conclude that these German “neoliberals” who went into exile for their anti-Hitlerian views were in fact “in continuity with Nazism”? Did he believe that ordoliberalism was derived from what Alessandro Somma called an “anti-democratic biopower”?8
Such a claim certainly does not appear in Foucault’s lectures. Where he does level accusations of intellectual complicity with Nazism, he does so against Werner Sombart, a radical critic of capitalism and liberalism and a partisan of fascist corporatism. Sombart actually did align himself with Hitler for a brief time—something Foucault was aware of—as well as the Third Reich’s Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht, whom Foucault described as a “Keynesian” economist. Foucault knew that the German ordoliberals’ had a very different conception from that of Sombart, whom Rüstow criticized on numerous occasions during the 1930s. There are perhaps paradoxical affinities to be found between the ordoliberals and Sombart or the Nazis, but this was not Foucault’s interpretation. Radical adversaries of Keynes’s economic solutions, they were also—as Foucault highlighted—adversaries of Schacht and National Socialism. As for the affinities often suggested today between the ordoliberals and the totalitarianism of Carl Schmitt—owing to their supposed shared defense of a “strong state”—Foucault never suspected this for an instant. On the contrary, as we will see, his view was that the “rule of law [État de droit]” championed by the ordoliberals had strictly nothing to do with the “fascist state [État fasciste].” For Foucault, it is totally wrong to “Nazify” the German liberal model. Finally, there is hardly a trace in Foucault’s work of an explicit critique of German neoliberalism, let alone a radical hostility. In contrast, his courses at the Collège de France contain virulent critiques of the Soviet Union, as well as the essential “racism” and “anti-Semitism” of socialism since the nineteenth century.
My approach will be to focus on Foucault’s course summary, in which he aims to understand liberalism and neoliberalism as forms of “critical practical rationality.”9 Curiously, few commentators have noted the fundamental importance of the word “critical” for the courses in general, and for the course summary in particular. What is important is less Foucault’s own critique of liberalism and neoliberalism—though far be it from me to suggest that there he did not offer one—than his position that liberalism and neoliberalism themselves contain a strong critical reflexivity. Take Foucault’s general presentation of the courses. Hostile to the classical approach to the history of ideas, Foucault intends to study “liberalism” solely as a “practice,” that is, as “a ‘way of doing things’ oriented towards certain objectives, regulating itself by continuous reflection.”10 Liberalism is both a practice and a critical reflexivity, not an ideology or a representation. It should therefore be understood as a method for the “rationalization of the exercise of government.” The singular characteristic of this rationalization is that it obeys the “internal rule of maximum economy.” For Foucault, therein lies the novelty of liberalism:
While any rationalization of the exercise of government aims to maximize its effects whilst reducing its costs as much as possible (in the political as well as economic sense of costs), liberal rationalization starts from the premise that government (not “government” as an institution, obviously, but as the activity that consists in governing people’s conduct within the framework of, and using the instruments of, a state) cannot be its own end. Its raison d’être is not found in itself, and even under the best possible conditions the maximization of government should not be its regulative principle.11
In this sense, liberalism’s novelty is that it “breaks with the ‘raison d’État’ that, from the end of the sixteenth century, sought in the existence and strengthening of the state the end which could justify an expanding governmentality and regulate its development.”12
Foucault is actually somewhat more nuanced in his courses themselves. There, he tends to characterize liberalism as a mutation internal to the notion of raison d’État rather than its replacement. But in either case, the novelty of liberalism is real, and Foucault attempts to prove it with an example that is highly significant for our discussion: the notion of Polizeiwissenschaft developed in Germany in the seventeenth century. He states the principle of Polizeiwissenschaft as the following: “Not enough attention is being given to things, too much escapes control, too many domains lack rules and regulation, order and administration are lacking. In short, there is too little government.”13 To the extent that Polizeiwissenschaft is a form of governmental technology that obeys raison d’État, it is almost natural that it attempts to address the problem of maintaining the largest and most active population possible for the benefit of state power. In this sense, the major elements of biopolitics—health, birthrates, hygiene, etc.—can easily find their place within it.
For Foucault, however, things are manifestly more complex with liberalism as he defines it in this period. There is a fundamental principle that underlies and guides liberalism, which Foucault articulates as follows: “‘One always governs too much’—or at least, one should always suspect that one governs too much.”14 Here, we see the reintroduction of the concept of “critique,” which plays an essential role in Foucault’s thinking during this period; however, neither what Foucault means by “critique,” nor why it is important is immediately obvious. Its meaning is philosophical. All throughout the course lectures, Foucault evokes the critical project of Immanuel Kant in both a theoretical and political sense. He claims “Perpetual Peace” and Kantian cosmopolitanism as his own, and interprets the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith in a Kantian vein. It should not be forgotten that only several months before the start of his lectures, Foucault gave a major speech to the Société française de philosophie devoted to the notion of “critique.”15 Foucault spends much of his speech on Kant, but also on Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Not only does he place this text in the Kantian tradition, but he also spends much of his lectures on neoliberalism highlighting its direct influence on the “formal” theoretical principles of ordoliberalism. In the lectures, Foucault also draws a parallel between the ordoliberals and Frankfurt School, both of which share a critique of capitalist “giantism.” Foucault insists that the utilitarian or calculatory horizon of liberalism, which observers have long stressed, does not exhaust its critical perspective:
Governmentality should not be exercised without a ‘critique’ far more radical than a test of optimization. It should not only question itself about the best (or least costly) means for achieving its effects, but also about the possibility and even legitimacy of its project for achieving effects. The question behind the suspicion that there is always the risk of governing too much is: Why, after all, is it necessary to govern?16
This is the constant background for Foucault’s lessons on liberalism and neoliberalism, though he does not recall it at every instant. On this basis, he establishes a profound connection, or at least a strong correlation, between the development of “liberal critique” and the emergence of a totally new approach not only to the state, but also to “society.”
Within this somewhat idiosyncratic perspective, Foucault justifies his choice to study thinkers he designates as “contemporary examples,” namely German liberalism from 1948 to 1962, and American Chicago School liberalism. It is noteworthy that the distinction between “liberalism” and “neoliberalism,” which many of Foucault’s disciples and admirers have made much of, does not immediately appear in his general summary of the course lectures, as if it was of little consequence for him. If in the lectures the German liberals are described as representatives of “neoliberalism”—Foucault takes care to make clear that their competitive constructivism is not the classical laissez-faire—they are at the same time included within the older and more general category of “liberalism.” It appears as if for Foucault their intervention consists primarily in bringing about a renaissance of older liberal ideas and practices. Foucault mentions “neoliberalism” again in the summary in his presentation of the Chicago School, but this time only in order to clarify that the label is not his own. Rather, he treats it as a mere convention (“what is called American neoliberalism”), and therefore not as a definitive category. Though Foucault does indeed establish some real distinctions in the courses themselves, the separation is not always as clear as later interpreters have often imagined.
Finally, but no less significantly, in the course summary Foucault tends to stress the similarities between German and American liberalisms. He observes that both emerged in a particular historical context, each presenting itself as “a critique of the irrationality peculiar to excessive government, and as a return to a technology of frugal government, as Franklin would have said.”17 The reference to Franklin as a foundational figure would seem not only to erase the differences between the national contexts of the two liberalisms, but also to diminish the supposedly absolute novelty of neoliberalism that Foucault is said to have discovered. In reality, Foucault finds in these two liberalisms that came of age beginning in the 1930s and 1940s a rediscovery of the fundamentals of eighteenth-century American liberalism, ideas that were already quite old at the time.
One word appears often throughout Foucault’s lectures that is easy to miss at first glance, but that is in reality one of the most essential concepts of his work in this period. This word, “excess,” is inseparable from the notion of “critique.” For Foucault, liberalism’s exercise of critique is inextricable from the practice of reacting to the excesses of power. A recurring theme in his writings of the late 1970s is the danger of an unreflexive and therefore uncritical “hypertrophy” of power. In a 1978 article, for example, he describes “excessive forms of power” and “malignancies [excroissances] of power,” notably in reference to the totalitarian power of the Soviet Union.18
The targets of the German and American liberals’ critiques of power were concretely different from Foucault’s. In the German case, the aim was to criticize not only the wartime regime of the National-Socialist government, but also in a deeper sense “a type of directed and planned economy that was the outcome of the 1914–1918 period and the general mobilization of resources and men,” which one might also call “state socialism.”19 Here, Foucault specifies more precisely the corpus he means to study. By “German liberalism,” he refers to what he also calls the “Freiburg School.” According to Foucault, this school began in the late 1920s, and one of its main focal points was the journal Ordo. In reality, here and elsewhere Foucault uses the label of the “Freiburg School” as a sort of catch-all for a list of authors including Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm, Wilhelm Röpke, and Alexander Rüstow (curiously written as “von Rustow,” perhaps an unconscious reference to “von Hayek”). Many of these thinkers, like Röpke and Rüstow, did not belong to this school in a strict sense, though they did maintain ties to it. By conflating these distinctly diverse German liberals throughout his courses, Foucault commits a non-negligible factual error.
Like many of Foucault’s other questionable amalgamations, this one is instructive in what it reveals about his interpretive biases. Short of outright misreadings, but no less disputable, these biases are of singular use in understanding the logic underlying Foucault’s discourse on liberalism. They are apparent once again when Foucault attempts to articulate the philosophical and conceptual background of German ordoliberalism by situating it “at the point of intersection of neo-Kantian philosophy, Husserl’s phenomenology, and Max Weber’s sociology.”20 The inclusion of neo-Kantianism is an obvious allusion to the German critical tradition, and indirectly, once again, to the Kantian notion of “critique.” Foucault’s allusions to Husserl and even Weber follow a similar logic: both are mentioned in Foucault’s 1978 conference as the heirs of the German Kantian tradition of critique. In the course lectures, Foucault describes at length the affinities between Eucken and Kant—the former was the son of the Kantian philosopher Rudolf Eucken—and highlights the fact that Röpke’s book The Social Crisis of Our Time is a direct reference to Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences.21 This latter rapprochement is perhaps a strange one, since the conservative discourse animating Röpke’s thought was leagues away from Husserlian phenomenology.
Foucault also puts the German liberals alongside the “Viennese economists,” notably Hayek. For Foucault, the Austrian and Freiburg schools appear close, particularly in light of their shared concern for the historical correlation between “economic processes” and “legal structures.” There is certainly a rapprochement between these Austrians and Germans here that could have been better developed. What is most important, however, is to observe how Foucault makes the attempt to isolate what the German critique of the excesses of power is aiming against: namely, “Soviet socialism, National Socialism, and Keynesian interventionist policies.” All three of these are rejected as stemming from a “type of economic government that systematically ignores the market mechanisms that alone can ensure regulation of the formation of prices.”22 Following Foucault’s interpretative angle, German liberalism as a “liberal technology of government” tries “to define what a market economy could be, organized (but not planned or directed) within an institutional and legal framework, which, on the one hand, would offer the guarantees and limitations of the law, and, on the other, would ensure that the freedom of economic processes did not produce any social distortion.”23
After enumerating the major features of the German liberalism, Foucault proceeds in the course summary to the second section of his study, devoted to “American neoliberalism.” Foucault does not present the neoliberalism of the Chicago School as an apology for capitalism as such, and even less so as an offensive on behalf of the dominant classes; rather, in Foucault’s point of view—a highly significant one—the neoliberalism of the Chicago School appears as a form of “critique.” And as in the case of German liberalism, this critique deals with an identical theme: “too much government.” In his lectures, Foucault meticulously examines the “Public Choice” school’s fixation on the excesses of state bureaucracy as a form of “critique,” a word he employs constantly in reference to the approach of Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan. The main difference in America is that the target has shifted: Starting with Henry Simons, one of the founders of the Chicago School, “too much government” was meant to attack the policies of the New Deal, wartime economic planning, and the vast economic and social programs of the postwar era, primarily under Democratic presidential administrations.
Foucault believes to have identified as a common point between the two liberalisms a shared rejection of wartime economies.24 More broadly speaking, just like in the case of the German “ordoliberals,” the aim of the “critique” of the Chicago School’s economic liberalism is to call attention to a dangerous machinery that leads from economic interventionism to bureaucracy and the “rigidification of all the power mechanisms.” This latter element is crucial for Foucault’s interpretation, given the constant presence of the question of power in his investigations. Both liberalisms take aim at “new economic distortions,” which themselves go on to generate new interventions in the economy. In short, they seek to eliminate not only the “excess” of power, but also, according to Foucault, a “hyper-excess” of power created by blind cumulative mechanisms.
But after having insisted on the convergences between the German liberalism and the Chicago school, Foucault explains that he also intended in his lectures to identify an opposition between them. Under the banner of the “social market economy,” the former contends that while “regulation of prices by the market [is] the only basis for a rational economy,” in reality this regulation is so fragile left on its own that it must be “ordered” and sustained by a policy of social intervention, including in matters of unemployment or health care. American neoliberalism, on the other hand, takes as its goal “to extend the rationality of the market, the schemes of analysis it offers and the decision-making criteria it suggests, to domains which are not exclusively or not primarily economic,” such as the family or the penal system.25 While the two liberalisms share similar preoccupations, they seem to disagree as to the means that ought to be employed in order to address them. And this disagreement seems to stem from strong variations in their confidence in the mechanisms of the market, and therefore the possibility of extending it. In his lectures, Foucault suggests that compared to the purer and more coherent American neoliberalism, German neoliberalism is riddled with ambiguities most likely linked to the Bismarckian past that it was unable to overcome.
Foucault, German Liberalism, and Contemporary Europe
To avoid the shortcomings of a purely “internalist” reading, let us consider what Foucault was aiming to accomplish by attaching such importance to the renaissance of liberalism in Germany. Foucault himself answers this question on several occasions: his aim is to better understand our time, what he has already taken to calling our “actualité.” He repeatedly states his ambition to become, by understanding what is happening in the present, a sort of philosopher-journalist in the footsteps of not only Kant—the author of famous pamphlets on the Aufklärung and “perpetual peace”—but also Nietzsche. For Foucault, if the actualité of his time was American, it was also to a large extent German. Curiously, or perhaps logically, it does not occur to Foucault to include England, even as Thatcher was preparing her rise to power; even further from Foucault is the experience of the “Chicago Boys” in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship. This is for several reasons that are intimately linked to one another. First, the 1979 courses took place during a period marked by debates in left circles concerning the terrorist group Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) and its vigorous repression by the German government. The French left and far left were quick to condemn German “fascism,” or at least the authoritarian traces within the German state. Not so much Foucault, who made an effort to distance himself from the terrorist group as well as the “demonization” of liberal, social-democratic Germany.
At the head of this German government—and here is the second reason for Foucault’s focus on Germany—was Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Starting in 1974, Schmidt led a coalition between the social democrats and the liberals, supported both by the SPD and the liberal FDP. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the liberal vice chancellor and minister of foreign affairs, became known for having contributed substantially to the 1975 Helsinki Accords, whose emphasis on human rights would earn it the support of the anti-totalitarian dissidence movement. Foucault followed this dissidence movement closely, and probably did not fail to notice the German role in bringing about its rise. The ideological framework of the Schmidt coalition was therefore both socialist and liberal, remaining largely that of Willy Brandt, and retaining the slogan of the Bad Godesberg Program: “As much competition as possible, as much planning as necessary.” The conclusions of the Bad Godesberg conference lend themselves to a variety of interpretations besides the common claim that they merely represent an alignment of the social democrats with ordoliberalism. In reality, Schmidt’s socioeconomic policy had little in common either with “neoliberalism” in the contemporary sense of the term, or even with the ordo-liberal doctrine of the 1930s and 1940s.
Schmidt was, however, of a notoriously liberal sensibility, and his considerable international prestige loomed in the background of the relaunch of the project of European construction (a project that was no doubt connected, for Foucault, to the Kantian cosmopolitism and liberalism discussed in his courses on neoliberalism). As for Schmidt, together with his friend Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, elected president of France also in 1974, he helped develop the plan for the European Monetary System (EMS). The year 1979 was also the first year in which the European Parliament was elected by a direct vote. This marks another decisive dimension of Foucault’s interest in contemporary events: in this period when France appeared to be turning away from Gaulist dirigisme, it also appeared to be going through a sort of liberal moment, which was also a German moment. First, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was elected on the promise of bringing about an “advanced liberalism,” echoing the liberatory aspirations of the post-1968 era. But on economic matters, he remained prudent, adopting a policy that was more or less a return to Keynesianism. After his party’s surprise parliamentary victory in 1978 and his choice of Raymond Barre as prime minister, his presidency underwent a marked liberal inflection when it came to economics. His government abolished price controls—even those on the price of baguettes, causing many French to begin to worry—and all evidence suggests that he found in Germany a source of inspiration for such reforms.
As a final point, if the legislative elections of 1978 were a victory for the liberal right, they were a humiliating defeat for the left, whom the polls had long predicted to win. Liberal intellectuals such as Raymond Aron had feared the left’s program as a possible radical turn in socioeconomic policy.26 Even though the common program signed in 1972 by the Communist Party and the Socialist Party was broken in 1977, when the Communists demanded increases in the number of proposed nationalizations, the left’s aim remained, achieving radical dirigiste transformations of the economy. This shared perspective collapsed on the night of the 1978 elections, when Michel Rocard—François Mitterand’s main socialist adversary—became a major popular figure. The main representative of what later became known as the deuxième gauche, Rocard frequently urged his fellow socialists, and public opinion in general, not to demonize the idea of the market economy as such. This became one of the major ideological debates of the Metz Congress of the Socialist Party, which took place April 6–8, 1979, right in the middle of Foucault’s course lectures. It was, however, Mitterrand who won out at Metz, supported by Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a fervent partisan of rapprochement with the Communists, and a fierce adversary of Rocard’s “liberal” tendencies. In February 1979, also during Foucault’s lectures, Chevènement published a book castigating the Socialist Party for these liberal tendencies within its midst. Chevènement also denounced the German Social Democratic Party and the Bad Godesberg conference for having destroyed socialism, and worried that what he had on numerous occasions identified as “neoliberalism” was also present in the French deuxième gauche.27 There are numerous signs that appear to show that though Foucault stayed largely out of these debates, his sympathies were with the deuxième gauche (though he did not explicitly adhere to it) rather than with the Communist Party, whose program he detested.
My claim is that without understanding this French political context—which few, even in France, have been aware of—one cannot understand Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism, and especially his positions on German neoliberalism. As early as 1978, the French specialist of the liberal and German social democratic model, Joseph Rovan, denounced a “radical left that decries the premises of a new fascism through the alliance of social-democracy and liberal capitalism.” The title of the book, published by the influential editor Le Seuil, was entitled L’Allemagne n’est pas ce que vous croyez.28 These polemics were also part of the context surrounding Foucault’s lectures, which sought to challenge the characterizations of Germany, ordo-liberalism, and social democracy by the French left and anti-German far left. Foucault himself makes this clear on several occasions. First, his conviction is that capitalism, in Europe and particularly in France, has been transformed under the influence of German ordoliberalism and its critique of gigantism (whether capitalist or communist). As a result, those in 1979 who still denounced mass society, mass consumerism, or the gigantism of the manipulative apparatuses of capitalism completely misunderstood the era they were living in. Worse than that, they were repeating the politically troubling German anti-capitalism of Werner Sombart:
In Sombart, and in fact already from around 1900, we find that well-known critique which has now become one of the commonplaces of a thought whose articulation and framework we do not know very well: the critique of mass society, of the society of one-dimensional man, of authority, of consumption, of the spectacle, and so forth. That is what Sombart said. What’s more, it is what the Nazis took up in their own way.29
He goes on to claim that critics of “consumption society”—in a charge clearly directed at Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Herbert Marcuse—have been totally misled in that they miss how the ordoliberals had long before radically transformed society and capitalist modes of production.
By condemning the adversaries of “consumption society,” Foucault condemned by extension much of the far-left circles that he was breaking with at the time. In a similar vein, he insisted that German ordoliberals helped set the foundation for the rule of law in Germany, radically undoing the Hitlerian state. For Foucault, the issue is a fundamental one. As he attempts to persuade his undoubtedly dismayed audience, his reason for “dwelling on these problems of neoliberalism” is one of “critical morality.”30 It is worth recalling that Foucault once again advances the concept of “critique” during this period in which he undertakes his work on Kant’s “critique,” as well as on liberalism as a critical attitude and practice. Concretely speaking, Foucault believes that the will to adopt a “critical morality” makes it necessary to break with a certain number of stereotypes on the left and the far left concerning the meaning of the contemporary state—whether in the West in general or in Germany in particular. And so, Foucault attempts, perhaps surprisingly, to escape the charges against a certain anti-statist mode of thinking that he himself had contributed to developing. “Going by the recurrence of certain themes,” he observes, “we could say that what is currently challenged, and from a great many perspectives, is almost always the state.”31 In his view, this anti-statist vogue is the vehicle for a stereotypical vision of the state, not only intellectually false, but also politically dangerous: “The unlimited growth of the state, its omnipotence, its bureaucratic development, the state with the seeds of fascism it contains, the state’s inherent violence beneath its social welfare paternalism.”32
From the beginning of his lectures on German neoliberalism in 1979, Foucault makes clear that he understands them as a way of facing the challenges of contemporary socialism:
It may become clearer what is at stake in this—for, after all, what interest is there in talking about liberalism, the physiocrats, d’Argenson, Adam Smith, Bentham, and the English utilitarians, if not because the problem of liberalism arises for us in our immediate and concrete actuality? What does it mean when we speak of liberalism when we apply a liberal politics to ourselves, today, and what relationship may there be between this and those questions of right that we call freedom or liberties?33
The allusion to this liberal policy—and let us observe that Foucault refers to liberalism rather than neoliberalism—that we “apply to ourselves,” refers primarily to the policies put in place by the Barre government under Giscard. On top of this, Foucault immediately appears to refer to something else: “What is going on in all this, in today’s debate in which Helmut Schmidt’s economic principles bizarrely echo the voice of dissidents in the East, in this problem of liberty, of liberalism?”34 Here, he clearly evokes the problems of socialism—as he does throughout the course—in two distinct modalities. First, there are the policies of Schmidt, a social democrat in a West Germany sometimes referred to as “socialist,” but in a way that has nothing to do with the socialism of East Germany, the French Communist-influenced common program, or with most of historical socialism. Schmidt’s “socialism,” in other words, seems in many respects to be “liberal.” But second, there is Foucault’s crucial evocation of the “dissidents,” whom he had already mentioned frequently in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1978: the resistance against Communist power, or “real socialism.” Putting the struggle of these “dissidents” alongside the supposedly “liberal” economic policy of the social democrats—and with “liberalism” more generally—would have likely aroused his commentators’ and readers’ attention. This came at the same moment when Foucault, like many intellectuals coming out of the Maoist left, had for some time been passionately interested in the question of the “dissidents” of the East and supported their cause openly and with fervor. One might notice that Foucault on two occasions associates the concepts of “liberalism” and “liberty” in order to justify his interest in liberalism and neoliberalism, which is at the same time an interest for contemporary actualité:
Fine, it is a problem of our times. So, if you like, after having situated the historical point of origin of all this by bringing out what, according to me, is the new governmental reason from the eighteenth century, I will jump ahead and talk about contemporary German liberalism since. However paradoxical it may seem, liberty in the second half of the twentieth century, well let’s say more accurately, liberalism, is a word that comes to us from Germany.35
Foucault’s extreme fixation on the French situation, and specifically on the governmental experience of Raymond Barre, is palpable here. After all, in 1979, it would have been easy to claim that the word “liberalism” comes from elsewhere: the United States, obviously, but also perhaps Great Britain, or even the Chilean dictatorship. If Foucault adopts such a German-centric point of view, it’s because he is chiefly concerned with the future of France and of socialism circa 1979: if the “liberal” policies of Barre and Giscard seem to imitate in part the social-democratic policies of Schmidt, what does socialism mean today? Similarly, if the “dissidents” are calling for “liberty”—and thus, as Foucault suggests, for liberalism—in the face of their Communist oppressors, what does that tell us about the future of socialism?
This context helps to explain Foucault’s interest in the Bad Godesberg conference, which for him not only marks a strict break with Marxism, but also represents the conversion of the German socialists, generally speaking, to the ordoliberal idea of the “social market economy.” It is important to highlight Foucault’s sources. He had learned the history of ordoliberalism thanks to the only book available at the time: the remarkable panoramic work published fifteen years earlier by the liberal economist François Bilger. We can surmise that Foucault was fascinated by several aspects of Bilger’s synthesis: first, the emphasis on the ordoliberals’ anti-Nazism; second, their fidelity to Kant’s philosophy; and finally, their influence on social democracy. Examining in detail the evolution of the German SPD, particularly since the Bad Godesberg conference that took place only five years before, Bilger underscored the fact that German socialism gradually abandoned its “Marxist fundament” in favor of a “liberal fundament.” There was a real convergence—though a partial one, the welfare state remaining a point of contention—between “social liberalism and liberal socialism, [in which] there is no difference of nature, but only of degree.”36 Bilger even went so far as to compare German ordoliberalism to Yugoslavian autogestion, a much-discussed topic in the late 1970s; Foucault himself suggested to Pierre Rosanvallon, a theorist of the second autogestionnaire left, to devote a report to the subject. We should also note that Foucault had read the Giscardian liberal theorist Christian Stoffaës, whose ideas seemed to him close to the German liberal and social-democratic model. The author of La grande menace industrielle, then in vogue, himself referred to the German social market economy, and saw convergences between the “Giscardian liberals” and socialist reformist liberals of the French deuxième gauche concerning the benefits of the German model.37
My suggestion is that if Foucault did not show enthusiasm for the Bad Godesberg Program, neither did he reject it outright. His position was a subtle one. Concerning the Bad Godesberg conference, he believed that it was possible to say that “German social democracy [came] over, albeit somewhat late, but fairly easily, to these theses, practices, and programs of neoliberalism.”38 Some historians of the Bad Godesberg conference have judged that Foucault went too far in this analysis.39 Returning to the contemporary debates of Foucault’s time on the “true nature” of socialism—i.e., was it to be found in the Communist GDR, or in the liberal FRG?—Foucault questioned whether this issue might be poorly formulated, even if there is some meaning to it:
Should we not say instead that socialism is no truer here than there for the simple reason that socialism does not have to be true. What I mean is that socialism is anyway connected up to a type of governmentality: here it is connected up to this governmentality and there it is connected up to another, yielding very dissimilar fruit in both cases and, in the event of course of a more or less normal or aberrant branch, the same deadly fruit.40
However one interprets Foucault here, it is clear that he is warning his audience that he will not be following the Marxist approach. This approach could have no other response to the Bad Godesberg Program than to condemn it in the most radical terms, finding in it nothing but treason and hypocrisy. Foucault chooses not to plant himself on the sterile terrain of strict exegesis that the Marxist scholars find so pleasing, a manner of approaching these questions that is to his mind an evasion.
So he takes steps to establish his distance: “Whether or not there is a theory of the state in Marx,” he declares, “is for Marxists to decide.”41 For Foucault, however, the fundamental question lies elsewhere:
As for myself, I would say that what socialism lacks is not so much a theory of the state as a governmental reason, the definition of what a governmental rationality would be in socialism, that is to say, a reasonable and calculable measure of the extent, modes, and objectives of governmental action.42
There is ultimately no “autonomous socialist governmentality.” In other words, concretely speaking, socialism has never been and is not able to be put into place except to the extent that it is “connected up [branché] to diverse types of governmentality.” One of these forms of governmentality has been “liberal governmentality,” and in this case socialism has been able to serve “as a corrective,” or a “palliative” to some of its “internal dangers.”43 Foucault also adds immediately that liberals might consider socialism itself to be a danger, even if it operated along these lines nonetheless. Here, one can surmise in passing that this “connection [branchement]” to liberal rationality has not necessarily been—as many of Foucault’s readers have claimed—an absolute catastrophe for the later development of socialism. In any case, one can join the liberals in criticizing the dangers of socialism itself, though as Foucault explains, this is not the most essential point.
Socialism has at times had the opportunity to turn toward other “connections.” It has functioned, for example, within the governmentality of the “police state,” otherwise known as the “hyper-administrative state in which there is, so to speak, a fusion, a continuity, the constitution of a sort of massive bloc between governmentality and administration.”44 If Foucault does not provide an explicit judgment here, we can guess that this sort of connection has produced something other than positive effects, to say the least. And as Foucault concludes, there are possibly alternative forms of these socialist “connections.” But these two principal types attest to the fact that there is no “autonomous governmentality of socialism”: we have yet to see one emerge, and we do not see it on the horizon. We can therefore ask whether neoliberalism, following this reasoning, might not have the possible virtue of serving paradoxically as a sort of stimulant for the left, or even a source of inspiration. By activating the left’s political imagination, it may ultimately assist, however indirectly, the invention of a socialist governmentality.
The Lessons of German Neoliberalism
After having applauded certain decisions of the socialist government elected in France in May 1981—notably on the death penalty and immigration, all the while remaining silent on the economy—Foucault later became very critical of the socialists’ manner of governing. Foucault’s friend and colleague at the Collège de France Paul Veyne attests to this, while asserting (though there is no possible way to prove it) that Foucault had not voted for Mitterand, and was even shocked to learn that Veyne had done so.45 Preferring Rocard to Mitterand, Foucault planned as late as 1983 to edit a white paper devoted to the socialist policy on the following question: “Do the socialists have a problematic of government, or do they only have a problematic of the state?”46 Toward this aim, he had even begun to put together a reading list—including Jaurès, Blum, and Mitterand—and had gathered a collection of press clippings, but the project ultimately did not go very far.
Foucault never returned directly to the topic of German liberalism, though one does find some of Röpke’s language in his reflections on the necessity of decentralizing the French welfare state and social security system, judged too bureaucratic and uniform.47 Another extremely valuable allusion, however, appears in an unpublished dialogue from a conference at Berkeley on “Ethics and Politics” in April 1983.48 In these remarks, Foucault clarifies his relationship to liberalism:
I would respond that I believe that in the historical-political analyses conducted during the twentieth century, we have perhaps too often forgotten the problems posed by liberal thought, in the strict sense of the term, in eighteenth-century England and nineteenth-century France . . . in favor of [reflections on] themes such as consensuality and democracy, which I do not believe have produced very positive results. I think that there is a re-evaluation to be done on these problems—I won’t say problems of liberal thought; I don’t believe much in these stories . . . there is a certain thought that exists at a given moment, and one has to return to it. But there are a certain number of problems that have generally been posed within a dynasty, or a family of thought, problems that are strictly of liberalism, and I think it would be interesting if we could understand them. We can’t forget that this liberalism was constituted in critical opposition to the administrative states of the eighteenth century, with what we call the Polizei, which you all know was not the police, but the administration, the regimented administration.
Now it is certain that beginning in a period of the twentieth century—and in very different regimes: whether Marxist or dictatorial regimes, or in democratic regimes, and particularly those whose economic policy is inspired by Keynesianism—an administrative power was developed against which there is now manifestly a reaction. I believe that reactivating some of these problems—not simply taking them up in the same terms, returning to John Stuart Mill—but taking up these questions that were those of Benjamin Constant, of Tocqueville . . .
Here, Foucault is asked, “And you think these are more pertinent than socialist analyses?” Foucault responds, “What I think in any case is that in any socialist regime one must pose these sorts of questions.”49
Posing the question; This is the formula that Foucault had used in the 1979 course summary to describe the liberal attitude toward addressing the problem: “Why, after all, is it necessary to govern?”50 Is this attitude not also for Foucault that of neoliberalism, notably German neoliberalism? One might think, wrongly, that by evoking the necessity of posing the relevant questions of “strict liberalism,” Foucault wants to distinguish this notion from that of neoliberalism as he had studied it in 1979. But nothing seems less certain. The liberalism that has become obsolete, at least in his judgment, is the liberalism of Keynes and Beveridge: the social liberalism that had produced the welfare state of the twentieth century itself, in Foucault’s eyes, fundamentally bureaucratic and thus partially obsolete. In 1979, Foucault never ceased to highlight that this Keynesian liberalism was also the direct foundation for the financial and economic policy of the Third Reich, under the direction of the very Keynesian Hjalmar Schacht, a policy that the ordoliberals ceaselessly fought against. The true heirs of the questions of “pure liberalism,” for Foucault, are on the side of the Kantian adversaries of National Socialism—those ordoliberals who, thanks to Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard, made it possible to rebuild Germany on an entirely de-Nazified foundation after 1945.51 Also obsolete, more than ever, as Foucault sees it, is socialism in its historical configuration. It is hard not to see in Foucault’s late confidence in the great virtues of liberalism, at least in a heuristic sense, the echoes of his 1979 lectures, and specifically his close reading of chapter 13 of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. Hayek, whom Foucault sees as the junction between the German and American neoliberalisms, was, like his ordoliberal friends, haunted by the catastrophe of Nazi Germany. He defended German “rule of law,” singularly formulated by Kant, against the dangers of the “police state,” but also as an alternative model to the revolutionary French tradition of all-powerful sovereignty.
That Foucault’s reading of German neoliberalism is problematic and debatable in historical terms; that it underestimates the conservative, reactionary, or even authoritarian dimensions of neoliberalism—that is a separate question. At the very least, we can start to ask our contemporary radical critics of German ordoliberalism and of the project of European construction that they no longer appeal to Foucault as a source of authority.
NOTES
* This chapter was translated from the French by Jacob Hamburger.
1. See Alessandro Fontana, Une éducation intellectuelle (Mémoire d’habilitation à diriger des recherches), in Id., L’exercice de la pensée. Machiavel, Leopardi, Foucault (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015), 93. This text published in 2015 had, in fact, been written in the 1990s. Its suggestion that Foucault had been converted outright to neoliberalism is, in my view, an excessive and partial conclusion.
2. Éric Mollet, “Le projet de constitution européenne à la lumière de Foucault,” Labyrinthe (3) (2005): 111–17; Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, “La nature du néo-libéralisme: un enjeu théorique et politique pour la gauche,” Mouvements (50) (2007): 108–17.
3. Isabelle Bruno, Pierre Clément, and Christian Laval, La grande mutation. Néolibéralisme et éducation en Europe (Les Lilas-Paris: Institut de recherches de la FSU-Syllepse, 2010).
4. Alessandro Somma, La dittatura dello spread. Germania, Europa e crisi del debito (Rome: Derive Approdi, 2014).
5. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde. Essai sur la société néolibérale (Paris: La Découverte, 2009).
6. This is the position of Dardot and Laval’s La nouvelle raison du monde. For a different take on the Colloque Lippmann, see Néo-libéralisme(s). Une archéologie intellectuelles (Paris: La Découverte, 2012); Serge Audier and Jürgen Reinhoudt, eds., The Walter Lippmann Colloquium: The Birth of Neoliberalism (New York: Palgrave, 2018). On French neoliberals, see Serge Audier, “‘Néo-libéralisme’ et démocratie dans les années 1930: Louis Rougier et Louis Marlio,” Revue de philosophie économique 17(1): 57–101.
7. Andera Fumagalli, “La libertà negata in nome della proprietà,” review of Somma, La dittatura dello spred, in Il Manifesto, October 24, 2014, 11. (Translator’s note: the English translation here is original, based off of Audier’s translation from the Italian.) An economist noted among the theoreticians of “cognitive capitalism,” and close to the ideas of Antonio Negri, Andrea Fumagalli also cites in this article the work of Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, published in Italy by the same editor that published Somma’s book, Derive Approdi, one of Italy’s major publishers of the radical and neo-communist left.
8. Somma, La dittatura dello spread, 56.
9. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 317–24.
10. Ibid., 318.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 319.
15. Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce que la critique? Critique et Aufklärung” (“Address to the Société française de philosophie,” 27 May 1978), Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 84(2) (1978): 35–63.
16. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 319.
17. Ibid., 319. We will see that this quasi-definition is essential in order to understand Foucault’s thinking on liberalism and neoliberalism as a whole.
18. Michel Foucault, “Gendai no Kenryoku wo tou” (“The Analytic Philosophy of Politics”), in Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. 2, no. 232, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 536–39.
19. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 322.
20. Ibid.
21. Wilhelm Röpke, The Social Crisis of Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950); Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, David Carr, trans. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 322–23.
24. It is worth noting that the critique of war also comes up in Foucault’s lectures on Kant’s liberalism and the project of “perpetual peace,” the foundation for a peaceful and liberal Europe.
25. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 323.
26. Raymond Aron, Les élections de mars et la Ve République (Paris: Julliard, 1978).
27. Jean-Pierre Chevènement, Être socialiste aujourd’hui (Paris: Cana, 1979).
28. Joseph Rovan, L’Allemagne n’est pas ce que vous croyez (Paris: Seuil, 1978).
29. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 113–14.
30. Ibid., 186.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 22.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. François Bilger, La Pensée économique libérale dans l’Allemagne contemporaine (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence, 1964), 263.
37. Christian Stoffaës, La nouvelle menace industrielle (Paris: Pluriel, 1978), 447.
38. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 89–90.
39. Cf. Karim Fertikh, “Bad Godesberg dans le langage social-démocrate en 1959,” Cahiers d’histoire. Revue d’histoire critique 114 (2011): 137–51.
40. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 93.
41. Ibid., 91.
42. Ibid., 91–92.
43. Ibid., 92.
44. Ibid., 92–93.
45. Paul Veyne, Et dans l’éternité je ne m’ennuierai pas. Souvenirs (Paris: Albin Michel, 2014), 209.
46. Daniel Defert, “Chronologie,” in Dits et écrits, vol. 1, 87.
47. Michel Foucault, “Un système fini face à une demande infinie,” in Sécurité sociale. L’enjeu (Paris: Syros, 1983), 39–63, reprinted in Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 1190.
48. This discussion is now available thanks to the research of Michael Behrent.
49. 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 1:4 “Ethics and Politics,” April 1983. My sincere thanks to Michael Behrent for having provided me these documents.
50. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 319.
51. Even if it is true that the “ordoliberals” went far beyond the old liberal metaphysics of “laissez-faire” as Foucault justly notes.