Human Capital between Bourdieu and Foucault*
Luca Paltrinieri
It is commonly argued that the expression “human capital” was first coined by the theorists of the Chicago School in the mid-1950s, following the discovery of the existence of a source of inexhaustible wealth production: the human.1 From that classical definition of human capital as the knowledge and set of competences that individuals can make into objects of deliberate investment like education and training, the human has since grown to be understood as a miraculous resource, one able to regenerate itself continuously. Innovation—which Schumpeter argued saved capitalism from falling profit rates predicted by classical economics—in this sense has become the product of investment in the human, or in human capital. It is an almost trivial truth, to be found on the first pages of any handbook on human resources management, that this kind of investment enables an economy to rid itself of the zero-sum game between the scarce and conflict-bound resources described by classical economics and to reaffirm the virtuous circle of economic growth. Through investment in education and training, such growth is understood not only to lead to the accumulation of fixed capital and the growth of the workforce but also to a permanent workforce transformation.
The crucial point of human capital theory is its critique of a purely quantitative conception of labor that measures workforce in terms of hours—by claiming that economics, from Malthus and Ricardo onward, had forgotten the principle, however trivial, that an hour of qualified labor is more productive, and therefore of higher quality, than an hour of non-qualified labor. According to human capital theorists like Thomas Shultz and Jacob Mincer, it is precisely because the individual skills of the worker expanded during the postwar period that what they call the quality of the active population—or rather, its stock of competences and knowledge—has improved, productivity has increased and, as a consequence, the value of working time and of salaries have increased as well and in turn stimulated increased consumption.2 For Shultz and Mincer, this virtuous circle was to usher in the society of knowledge or the era of cognitive capitalism, depending on the point of view adopted.3
Eugenics and Future Discounting: A Short Genealogy of Human Capital
This sort of mythical narrative, to which Foucault himself falls prey,4 conceives of human capital as the genius discovery by Chicago economists of the qualitative aspect of labor, but it has the flaw of hiding this critique’s origins in the discussions of the Saint-Simonian circles of mid-nineteenth-century France. Indeed, by 1857 Henri Baudrillart had criticized the classical Malthusian relation between the size of a population and its means of subsistence by pointing out how such a relation worked mainly for those countries with mediocre human capital—by which he meant countries where people’s physical, intellectual, and moral capacities seemed atrophied. It did not hold, however, for countries with a high “quality of population.”5 A few years later, Charles Duveyrier explored the possibility of developing systems of education and professional accreditation to increase the human capital of children and, as a consequence, the technological productivity of society.6 Then, in 1903, Alfred de Foville defined human capital as the value of the human machine from the point of view of production and generating income.7
The concept soon after began circulating on the other side of the Atlantic, where in 1909 Karl Pearson, one of the protagonists of the eugenicist movement, claimed that, from a strictly economic point of view, a child is a product and thus, like any other asset, responds to demand and is part of the calculation of the ratio between cost and productivity. He argued that this explained the inverse relation between quality and quantity in terms of number of offspring, suggesting that couples should lower their fecundity level to have “children of higher quality.”8 Assigning an economic value to a child that situates childbirth within a rational calculation is precisely the topic subsequently taken up by Gary Becker, the most well-known theorist of human capital, who grounded the notion in a microeconomic theory that takes into account opportunity costs—the income parents give up in order to educate their children and improve their quality.9 Since opportunity cost increases in relation to parents’ income, the child of well-off parents, according to Becker will inevitably be more expensive than that of working class ones; for Becker this explained why the rising middle classes had less children than the working class but children of higher quality, endowed with more human capital.10 In Becker’s work, the idea of a differential investment depending on the quality of the individual is the same as the one found in eugenicist theories, but the decisional power gets transferred, at least in principle, to individuals themselves or to their families, who have incentives to enter the job market with strong human capital and to take every job or training opportunity as a chance to increase that capital. By reconstructing the genealogical lineage that ties Becker’s work to the eugenicists, Paul-André Rosental has shown the structural link between theories of human capital and the eugenicist movement, which similarly aimed to improve the quality of the population based on the premise that there is a qualitative difference among human beings measurable by experts and susceptible to modification at the level of the population.11 Far from disappearing after the Second World War, eugenicist theory, as a theory of the differential value of individuals and populations, informs the economic and moral justification underwriting theories of human capital.
This association with eugenics, however, does not and cannot fully explain the success of such an unorthodox economic theory. Indeed, Becker’s originality lies in having applied to the human a notion of capital that belonged to Erving Fisher and, before him, Martin Faustmann—a theory that consisted in the evaluation of capital not on the basis of accumulation of value in the past (capitalization) but its possible uses and therefore revenue streams in the future (discounted rate). This evaluation enables one to choose the best possible use for that capital in relation to its valorization.12 If capitalization shows the future value of an actual value by predicting the future value of actual capital to calculate return on investment, the “discounted cash flow” method expresses all future values in the present value of capital, which means the highest possible value is always today’s—since today holds the highest number of possibilities for valorization, while this value decreases as one moves into the future. Already in the 1920s, Fisher had extended the concept of human capital to every source of income, human beings included. When Becker appropriates Fisher’s formula, it is to indicate that the actual value of human capital is given by the income sources that certain skills can generate in the future: measuring human capital, or quantifying the quality of a child, means first of all putting into economic terms all of that child’s possible futures. This argument can clearly be easily generalized to labor. For instance, salary should be thought of not as a compensation in return for the alienation of one’s time but as the economic return on investment one gets from oneself in terms of time, education, and experience. The cognitive worker is thus a kind of “salaried rentier,” continuously exploiting his or her own human capital, or rather, him or herself, in order to produce income.13 Thus, as Schultz claimed, every individual becomes a capitalist, chasing the best opportunities by building forms of political support to help raise the value of his or her own portfolio of skills.14 Foucault, years later, would talk about this in terms of neoliberalism’s generalization and “democratization” of the capitalistic attitude by evoking the figure of the entrepreneur of the self.15 It should be noted that, precisely in this way, the theory of human capital pivots from the economic to the chiefly political: by describing society as involving a competition among capitalists-entrepreneurs-individuals who aim to valorize their own human capital and who above all have similar perceptions of it and equal opportunities for its valorization, it moves once and for all beyond the notion that obsessed and haunted economists from Marx onward: the notion of class. Human capital has no scale, and it can be applied as easily to an individual as to a group, to a company as to a state, to a nation as to the entire world.16 Quantifying the quality of the population by measuring public investment in education or assessing individual competences is part of the same operation of “discounting” possible futures, just at different scales and by different actors. In this sense, the theory of human capital succeeds in that incredible task of reducing the economic game to the pursuit of purely individual and atomistic interests in a manner that excludes (nominally) any type of racial, sexual, gender, or class difference, to the extent that it attributes to every individual the same type of instrumental rationality.
Thus, to the extent that the notion of human capital connects to the question of the quality of the population, it implicitly extends the eugenicist question into political economy and into scientific measurement of human differences, contradicting the egalitarian claims allegedly embedded in our democratic societies. On the other hand, the distinction between the respective economic values of good or bad filiations, as the operations concerning the improvement of the self are delegated to individuals in the form of free and rational choice, and the general improvement of the quality of the population are henceforth entrusted to a kind of a private eugenics, one that Foucault interpreted in terms of a possible genetic intervention, a form of delegated biopolitics.17 These elements led Rosental to claim the triumph of the notion of human capital in the increasingly similar domains of education and labor as evidence that a good part of the values of contemporary society rest upon eugenicist grounds.18
Bourdieu: Cultural Capital and the Future of “Class” as a Critique of Human Capital
In the introduction to The Social Structures of the Economy, Bourdieu writes that his notion of cultural capital, introduced in his 1964 Héritiers,19 should be considered antagonistic to the concept of human capital advanced by Becker, which Bourdieu defined as “vague and undetermined, burdened by unacceptable sociological underpinnings.”20 Bourdieu’s project of widening the notion of human capital, which he later also repeated with the concepts of economic, social, and symbolic capital, can in fact be read as a double critique of the notion of “human capital”: on the one hand, it counters the economic paradigm of the rational agent calculating costs-benefits in order to maximize his interest, and on the other, it refutes the eugenicist-naturalizing tradition, which links the notion of human capital to the interest of the national community rather than to the individual.
At the time Bourdieu was writing, this latter tradition underpinned a naturalistic explanation of the differential outcomes and inequalities of the French education system by appealing to the concepts of “gifts” and “natural aptitudes” of individuals. Alain Girard, at the forefront of this paradigm and pioneer of the study of the sociology of education, showed that differences in academic achievement among middle-class and lower-class students was not only due to the “will to success” of their parents but also to the transmission of “intellectual capital,” or rather, to a set of psychosocial aptitudes developed over the course of generations, “but in which it is strictly impossible to discern the part of heredity, of the environment, and of personal effort.”21 This tangled pseudo-psychological explanation reveals the true aim of Girard’s inquiry.22 Rather than reconstructing the social factors informing educational inequality in order to democratize it, his objective was to enable a type of preliminarily differentiation among individuals on the basis of their “natural” gifts and psychophysical aptitudes. This would allow for development of a meritocratic system, in which the more “gifted” students of the lower classes would ideally be able to reach the higher levels of education.23 Yet this approach affirms the social and economic biases of education, ignoring the structural inequalities informing its choice of academic content and methods and the ways it sanctions and reproduces those inequalities through the language of naturalism. Indeed, Girard’s approach indirectly and discreetly sidelines those who cannot be expunged more overtly yet does so without contradicting the principle of formal equality that underwrites the education system’s democratic ideals.24
From a Bourdieusian point of view, the ideology of the gift, of the “natural” predisposition, masks the way that cultural needs are created as well as the way in which they determine the reception of education culture—and hence obscures the fact that the reception of education as a cultural product always already requires a deciphering code. Bourdieu’s breaking away from such a naturalistic and naturalizing paradigm is mediated by the concept of disposition—the tendency to act in accordance with past actions that have been incorporated into the habitus. In this case, greater or lesser propensity to submit to the arbitrary culture conveyed by the school. As has been well noted, Bourdieu’s research in the Heritiers showed that the global cultural level of the familial group has a straightforward relation to scholastic success, because every family indirectly transmits to its children a certain cultural capital and ethos, or system of implicit values that are deeply interiorized.25 This body of information on curriculum, taste, and know-how, on language and knowing how and when to speak is distributed unequally within society and transmitted naturally, in an osmotic manner, without method or intention, and yet nonetheless does not cease to be the product of an investment in terms of time.26 It is thus possible to understand how critique of the paradigm of natural aptitudes is at the same time a critique of the theory of “human capital,” a notion that, notwithstanding its “humanistic” connotation, does not escape economicism. It, in fact, measures only the strategies of economic investment in education without taking into account the domestic transmission of the cultural capital or the contribution the education system makes to the reproduction of the social structure sanctioning the hereditary transmission of cultural capital.27
A fundamental moment in this twofold critique of the French paradigm of natural aptitudes and of the American theory of human capital occurred at the conference held on June 12–13, 1965, in Arras in Northern France, when sociologists and economists such as Paul Dubois, Renaud Sainselieu, and Alain Darbel gathered together with the aim of investigating the true relation between economic development, “mass welfare,” and the reduction of inequalities.28 The article “La fin d’un malthusianisme?” signed by Bourdieu and Darbel challenges economic theories on human capital by asking the classic question of the relation between the birth rate and economic development of a country. It is not by chance that the article presupposes the basic underpinnings of the theory of human capital, the idea that procreation is an act with economic stakes, and that the attitude of predicting and mastering the future is intimately connected to fecundity.29 But the article soon proves to be more complex than Becker’s, because it poses procreation as the domain within which rational intention is least explicit but also as one in which a number of factors intervene, such as the nation, the ethnic group, religious confession, knowledge of birth control techniques, etc. It maintains that the value intrinsically attached to a child remains the function of a system of collective values concerning the image of the woman, her role in society, the meaning attached to one’s number of children, and the desire for distinction. The influence of these factors on procreative choices shows that natality is not uniformly the object of a rational calculation about the future—and therefore that the relation between passive and intentional fecundity varies according to social class. Every social group exerts a pressure (through moral reprobation or economic sanctions) on rational fecundity. Thus, the individual’s choices in relation to the future, represented by the child, are never purely individual but always assume the form of an attitude with respect to a collective future, the future of a rising or descending class, dominating or declining.
Differences among social classes firstly determine the marginal cost of the “quality of the son,” which must be calculated not in absolute terms but as a function of attitudes with respect to the future and the system of values relative to each social class. For instance, the cost of a child is greater the more the child itself is interpreted as an instrument of social mobility: this is especially the case for the lower-middle class which, according to a famous definition by Bourdieu, “is a proletarian who shrinks himself,” or ascetically reduces his offspring “in order to pass through the narrow door of the middle-class,”30 whereas the marginal cost of the child is still low among the more disadvantaged classes, which do not invest in education with the same hope for a better future. This is also distinct from the upper classes for whom income grows proportionally with respect to the number of the children and whose investments in education are distinct in relation to lower-middle class Malthusianism.31
Furthermore, as was already noted by Becker, the newborn has a minimal cost in traditional societies that raises in those societies that are more developed from an economic point of view, but at any rate this cost is a function of the way each social class interprets the future and, above all, of the part it plays in the social fabric of the present. The feeling of security itself, a basic precondition for engaging in procreation, is socially differentiated, because it is a function of the conditions of existence and of class norms, which already entail stronger or weaker mastery of the future. In other words, individuals are more prone to rational anticipation if they consider their future able to be rationally calculated. Ambition to master the future is thus already proportional to the effective power we have on the future: “relation to the possible is already a relation to power”32 in so far as the possession of economic and cultural capital allows for the exercise of power on the instruments of reproduction. For instance, the lower classes’ fatalistic surrender to a generally high birth rate, often scornfully defined by demographers as “natural,” does not derive from a stronger sense of security but from a feeling of distrust about the controllability of the future that manifests as a complete absence of economic calculation.33 Economic rationality and the “spirit of calculation” aimed at the maximization of individual interest are neither universal dispositions available to all classes nor the sort of “universal utilitarian consciousness” that the anthropology of the homo œconomicus suggests.34
As a consequence, the very same state measures, such as tax exemption for large families, which are intended to influence the reproductive strategies of a population, do not have the same effects on the whole social spectrum. Their success instead depends on the disposition of the agent: in a general situation of economic growth, their effect will be stronger on rising middle-class civil servants, who are already used to planning and limiting their progeny as a strategy for social progress, but their effect will be minimal on the classes for whom education is not even considered a strategy for social progress. Inversely, the same average income may correspond to different procreative strategies, dependent, for example, on a feeling of security that has been preserved from the past and projected onto the future. As Bourdieu would affirm some years later, “(the habitus) adjusts itself to a probable future which it anticipates and helps to bring about because it reads it directly in the present of the presumed world, the only one it can ever know.”35 For this reason, according to Bourdieu and Darbel, we need to substitute the notion of objective income with one of subjective income that includes collective production of the feeling of security. On the other hand, the notion of economic naturalization advanced by Becker implies that rational agents are interchangeable and tacitly argues that all economic agents have the same dispositions, in particular the propensity to control their own calculation practices, the conscious desire to appropriate the future through economic calculation, and the possibility of objectively measuring human capital through understanding the relation between investments in education and future incomes.36
Critique of the rational agent as the universal and timeless economic model is at the heart of Bourdieu’s 1974 article, “Avenir de classe et causalité du probable,” probably his most convincing and definitive published critique of the theory of human capital.37 The article links the problem of Becker’s economic theory and of its extension to all social behavior38 not only to its description of all human action as rational action—transferring to the consciousness of the agents theories that economists developed in order to explain their own practices—but also to the oscillating meaning that Becker attributes to rationality itself.39 On the one hand, rationality can be described as a sort of mechanic reaction to the variation of market prices, with economic agents considered as indiscernible particles subject to the laws of Walrasian equilibrium to which they adjust automatically. On the other hand, economic individuals can be described as “autonomous” authors of projects consciously pursued. In this sense, the theory of human capital can then claim to “give man center stage.”40 The substantial unrealism of the two alternatives had already been highlighted by the theorist of “limited rationality,” Herbert Simon, for whom the model of the rational allocation of resources could be considered “real” only by admitting that agents were always conscious of the complete list of possible strategic choices, of the consequences of those different strategies, and of the objective criteria of evaluation relative to any explicit design.41
For Bourdieu, however, even if an economic agent were not a purely rational and conscious calculator, he or she would nevertheless pursue objective strategies, behave reasonably, intelligibly and coherently, even without pursuing an explicit plan, and deliberate according to a sort of objective finality when organizing an action plan. Description of the practice in terms of habitus in this sense means pointing to a system of incorporated dispositions generated by past conditions of production and generating practices adequate to objective present conditions, and thus eschewing the ambivalence of economic rationality. On the one hand, the habitus, the “not chosen principle of all choices,”42 does not simply appeal to the consciousness and express the freedom of the homo œconomicus; nor does it coincide with the mere mechanic reproduction of a fatum, a fate inscribed beforehand into the objective conditions of its formation. If nothing is “chosen” by the agent in his or her habitus, it is also true that the habitus itself is continuously transformed by the effect of the choices it generates.43 It is not by chance that an immediate correspondence between the dispositions entailed by the habitus and the objective structure of what is possible only occur when the conditions of the production of the habitus (interiorized dispositions) are identical or homothetic to the conditions of their functioning. The constitutive dispositions of the habitus thus tend to generate expectations and practices that are objectively compatible with needs. But this is obviously just a particular case, more often practices are inadequate to existing conditions because they are objectively adjusted to the conditions of the formation of practices that themselves are no longer up to date.44 In other words, rooting action in the habitus, rather than in the rational consciousness of economic agents, means contradicting the premises of the theory of the homo œconomicus underlying neoliberal theories of human capital: the presumption of the autonomy of an individual who interacts with his peers solely with the universal aim of maximizing utility, expressed as economic profit, and who thus exhibits instrumental behavior based on a means/ends dualism.45 If the notions of rational calculation and preference, to the extent that they are part of the habitus, are not the features of an abstract individual, always identical to itself,46 but are collectively and socially constituted, we need to understand the habitus as a sort of “individual collective.” In this sense, the habitus is instinctive and spontaneous, but that spontaneity is also conditioned by a patrimony of social, economic, and cultural capital that affects the domain of what is possible and situates strategies as more or less safe and risky. If propensity to seize the occasions that present themselves to the agent is directly linked to the endowment of capital individually owned, an agent’s practices are not coherent with respect to an ideal rationality but are consistent with the practices of all members of a class and owe their style to the fact that they are the product of continual transfers of capital from one field to another. The habitus is therefore also a form of collective capital, in the sense that it is a type of social heredity that preserves the acquisitions of predecessors and defends the way of existence of the group more profoundly than familial traditions and conscious strategies.47 This does not mean that every agent is doomed to reproduce the habitus of his class but that the habitus itself changes continuously, both in a preconscious way, following the ascending or descending strategies shaping the future of class, and in terms of individual conscious strategies of social development that depend on the structure of what is possible and on the agent’s ways of investing in these possibilities in the world that is presumed, or rationally imagined and predicted by the agent himself.48
Against the idea of an identical relation to the future pertaining to the very structure of human capital, we can contrast the concept of a “causality of the probable” that affirms that “heredity, not only economic, is a set of rights of first refusal on the future, on social positions liable to be occupied, and hence of the possible ways to be man.”49 If the endowment of capital possessed by an individual always represent a way of mortgaging the future, our relation to the future is already a function of a class in the process of becoming and of the concrete possibilities that are actually available to that given class, in the sense of the relation between the objective structure of its possibilities and its distribution of different kinds of capital. The 1974 article ends up confirming Bourdieu’s 1966 conclusions but widens them remarkably: the power exerted by a given class in a specific economic situation has a claim on the future because the predisposition to acquire dominating positions is a function of the power one already has within the institution.50 More practically speaking, competence for rational choice is unevenly distributed, because the cognitive structure that allows one not only to be mechanically subject to market variations but also to seize opportunities and make the most of them is itself a social structure, a rational habitus.
The thesis, reclaimed by the theorists of human capital, that “every economic agent is a sort of entrepreneur trying to obtain the best possible profit from the capacity of rare resources”51 should be understood precisely as a critique of the fictio juris of economy that posits the particular dispositions of the habitus as universal norms and thus implicitly legitimizes the general configuration of the monopoly of what is possible. Bourdieu’s hypothesis of the habitus shows, to the contrary, that resources are not equally accessible for all agents and that imagination of the ways to make those resources bear fruit, tied up in a conception of the future and its connection to the feeling of security, itself changes according to the starting point. Whereas Becker’s “barbarianism” consists in extending the rational logic of interest beyond the usual domain of classic economy to the totality of human behaviors, Bourdieu instead tries to reframe rational conduct within the larger domain of symbolic exchange and consumption, thus putting into play dispositions that can be found at the intersection of social conditions and class strategies. In this sense, Bourdieu’s sociological critique of economy works to unmask the economic and cultural conditions of the judgments of economic agents.52
Foucault: A Genealogy of Interest as Moral Conduct
The idea of an entrepreneur of the self producing its own capital and thus its own income was popularized by Foucault as part of his reading of neoliberalism as anti-naturalism that differentiates itself from classical liberalism by not interpreting the market as a free space opposed to state interventionism but the result of continuous regulation. What distinguishes neoliberalism from liberalism is precisely its artificiality—according to which competition, instead of being a natural condition of the homo œconomicus that must be respected by the government through principles of laissez-faire, is instead an objective to be continuously constructed through state intervention.53 Foucault’s analysis of the “policy of society” (Gesellschaftspolitik) of ordoliberalism shows that the “temporary choice” of the market consumer needs a juridical framework that bears on the regime of property, contracts, company policy, currency, banking, etc. Indeed, it bears on a whole series of contingent legislative interventions that expose the institutional and instituted character of the market as such.54
The idea of artificiality assumed by neoliberal policies is not a far cry from Bourdieu’s reading of the economy, according to which the market is a social construction “which has nothing to do with the natural and spontaneous movement of competition of which neoliberal theory speaks”; here the state appears not only as a central actor in market regulation but also as a warrant of the moral order and of the trust necessary for the functioning of the economy.55 However, as we have seen, for Bourdieu the artificiality of neoliberal policies is constantly denied by the precondition of the rationalization of individual interest, the fiction enabling the foundation of the neoliberal account of the economic game on naturalistic presuppositions that are shielded from sociological relativism, so to speak. For this reason, Bourdieu reads Becker and American and European neoliberalism more generally as a “coup in theory,” or rather as a return to neoclassical ideas about complete information and perfect competition that had already been refuted by Simon.56 As he would claim later, during the 1990s, the neoliberal “revolution” essentially consisted in the reestablishment of a “free trade faith” and in the systematic dismantling of all collective and social objections to it, in order “to bracket the economic and social conditions of natural dispositions” that actually allow for the functioning of the market.57
Foucault, to the contrary, insists on the novelty of neoliberal rationality.58 As he explains in a passage of the manuscript for his 1979 lectures on neoliberalism, Foucault is interested in precisely the way in which Becker’s theory problematized in a different way “all the domains of education, culture, and training that sociology has taken up.”59 These domains of anthropology, ethics, and labor policy, which Bourdieusian sociology had integrated in the form of cultural capital analysis and of the “reproduction of the relations of production,” according to Foucault are “directly integrated in the economy and its growth in the form of a formation of productive capital.”60 For Foucault, the neoliberal question thus goes well beyond a mere battle between disciplines or simple return to neoclassicist doctrines. Indeed, his genealogical perspective aims to highlight the historical intertwinement of continuity/discontinuity between liberalism and neoliberalism. Foucault already defines liberal governmentality against a set of “freedom-consuming” practices: liberalism must always and continuously cause, produce, and construct the conditions for the freedom of choice through a set of duties and constraints, rules and evaluations that assure the neutrality of the market and the satisfaction of personal interest. It is not without reason that the disciplinary individual described in Discipline and Punish was already the hidden twin of the subject of liberal law.61 In the interplay between security/freedom thus established, the counterpart of individual interest is the extraordinary extension of market control mechanisms and the problems of cost that they imply. In other words, the management of the conditions upon which we can be free implies an ambiguous game of production/distribution of freedom itself.62
These remarks, rather abstract, have been interpreted as a rejection of social security apparatuses that seem to confirm at least a certain amount of ambiguity in Foucault’s account of neoliberalism.63 But Foucault’s aim is certainly not “apologetic”;64 rather, he aims to understand the new dialectic between security/freedom created by neoliberal politics. In this sense, his reading of the notion of “human capital” is strategic, because it locates itself at the threshold of the dialectic between freedom construction/consumption. The point of view of theories of human capital instead reveal a neoliberal subject who goes beyond the eternal opposition between freedom and control and for whom the “freedom” of neoliberalism is produced continuously in the form of the possibility of choice in a competitive market—but this is a freedom consumed through continuous valorization of one’s self, that is, of one’s human capital. This production of the self in terms of the accumulation and improvement of one’s human capital is also a form of consumption of the assets offered by the market, children included: consuming is nothing other than producing one’s own satisfaction.65 This lack of distinction between production and consumption, affirmed first of all by labor itself, enables us to understand all human behavior in terms of investment in one’s self through consumption of utility.
According to Foucault, the first break this figure of the “entrepreneur of the self” instantiates with regard to liberal governmentality is in fact rather superficial: the advancement of economic theory into previously unexplored domains, that gives rise to a definition of economy as a study of substitutable choices relative to rare resources and that marks the passage from macro-economic study of the global processes of capital distribution to analysis of the internal rationality of the strategic planning of individual activity, considered as universal.66 This means that neoliberal analysis for Foucault does not imply a simple return to neoclassicist analysis but a new way of conceiving individual choices against the background of the normative conceptions that agents develop about their own choices. If the individual naturally thinks of himself or herself as an investor in a portfolio of skills and competences (his or her human capital) whose value increases or diminishes according to the market value, his or her project will consist in investing in the values that are on the rise.67 The subjectivity of the neoliberal individual, or rather, the way the individual thinks of himself or herself as a subject owning competence-capital that can be valorized through investment projects, situates the individual at a point of rupture with respect to the liberal paradigm of a subject in search of truth in the deepest parts of the “self.”68 Yet believing that this rupture automatically means “liberation” by making the neoliberal individual ungovernable is an illusion, precisely because, once this premise established, all society becomes a society of knowledge, and hence an educated society in which individuals are amenable to being guided by the stock market of their own competences.69
In a deeper sense, the theory of human capital taken to its extreme consequences can foster a kind of liberal governmentality that cancels itself out as an influencing or constraining power over individuals and becomes redefined as a sort of pure “descriptive” force of evaluation. On the basis of the maximization of individual interest, neoliberal governmentality puts into place a central inclination of modern power: since the emergence of the “population” as a subject/object is no longer exerted in the form of obedience but as encouraging and subsidizing strategies of subjectivation, it consists in differentiation within a competitive market.70 Behind the apparent discontinuity of the new economic theory thus lies a deeper continuity concerning the field of action for individuals who regulate themselves and employ strategies of interest and the ways it has already been structured by liberalism.
However, the neoliberal revolution represented by theories of human capital can also be read more radically as a moral revolution, literally overturning the Kantian categorical imperative that rejects confounding the human with the means to an end. The idea itself of a “human resource,” which turns man into a resource that is exploitable and capitalizable, entirely subverts these premises. That the family is the object not only of love but also of strategies of reproduction is a very old idea, but that these strategies can be calculated and framed in utilitarian (and I would add hedonistic) rational terms—that the children can be treated as consumer goods—is a remarkable innovation not only in terms of governmentality but also in terms of morality. Investment in oneself and one’s offspring becomes, in a certain sense, the moral background against which ethical strategies of neoliberal subjectivation are possible. The interpretation of all human behaviors on the basis of interest, investment in oneself, and subsequent profits is more than an economic theory; it was already a moral theory in the moment of its first expression in the eighteenth century.71 It is not by chance that at the end of his 1979 lectures Foucault returns to the moment of the Scottish Enlightenment, which affirmed interest as fundamental first and foremost to the theory of sociability, even before economic theory.72 Perhaps it is not mistaken to interpret all of Foucault’s successive returns to antiquity, to the ancient forms of problematization of the self and of the relation to the self, as part of an effort to think the unconscious as the modern habitus: the pre-reflexive structure of interest. Already, in his opening to the 1980 lectures, speaking on “alethurgy” as a non-utilitarian manifestation of truth in the domain of government, Foucault testifies to this will to turn back to forms of government of one’s self and of others that are quite independent from the neoliberal model of subjectivation based on the calculation of individual interest.73
What is certain is that, at the end of Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism, the latter appears as neither a radicalization of liberal governmentality nor a species of economic imperialism extending neoclassicist theories, but rather as a symptom and as an agent of a transformation that is at once economic, political and moral—a phenomenon that, due to its own complexity, requires the historical examination of its ambiguous relationships with liberalism.
The Triumph of Competition and the End of the Future
If we insist on the ambiguity of the legacy of liberalism within neoliberalism, it is because that ambiguity enables us to see the difference as well as the complementarity of Bourdieu and Foucault’s respective readings of the concept of human capital. The deconstruction of “human capital” performed by Bourdieu and Darbel allows us to better understand what Foucault means by the “production/destruction” of freedom in the neoliberal epoch: On the one hand, the individual acts according to his own interest—he “objectivizes” himself through free procreative choice—on the other hand, that choice is free and subjective only when agents have a differential perception of security and the future. This feeling of security is continuously created at the intersection of governmental politics (e.g., taxation measures for large families) and class strategies determined by the structure of capital. Governmentality emphasizes the former, Bourdieu’s point of view the latter, but both share the common target of denaturalizing the dialectic between construction/destruction of free choice at the heart of neoliberal societies.
Bourdieu and Foucault employ two different strategies of denaturalization. Foucault’s is essentially historical-genealogical: it reconstructs the history of the notion of interest, comparing the governmental strategies of the eighteenth century with the economic theories of the twentieth, in order to retrace the continuities and differences between liberalism and neoliberalism. Bourdieu, at least until the end of the 1980s, instead insists on the narrowness and approximation shaping the economical reading of human capital. He tries to expand the notion of “capital” not only to economic but also to the cultural, symbolic, and social aspects and to relocate economic analysis within the larger framework of a sociology of dispositions and of the struggle for class affirmation in a given field. However, in the 1990s Bourdieu increasingly insisted on the historical conditions underwriting affirmation of the economic order and on the importance of such conditions being forgotten for the persistence of a discipline that presents itself as “fundamentally anti-historical and anti-genetic.”74 The economy “accepts as given some modes of action and some modes of thinking that are the product of an extremely complex historical construction.”75 Access to economic rational calculation, to saving and investment practices, implies a “series of inventions” that are collective and the creation of specific individual dispositions: “The habitus is history and every system of preferences is the product of the social history within which we live . . . and of our social trajectory within this universe.”76 In 2000, Bourdieu published The Social Structures of Economy, in which he defined “economicism” as a particular form of ethnocentrism, disguised as universalism, which consists in the attribution of an aptitude and capacity for calculation to every agent and that obscures the question of the economic and cultural conditions of the access to this aptitude. The cause of this naturalization is a kind of amnesia about the historical genesis of rational economic conduct—an amnesia that has to be corrected through the genealogical method, revealing the partiality and the contingency of the historical structures which present themselves as necessary givens.77
To put it otherwise, the critique of the de-socialized individual of the theory of human capital here becomes a critique of the de-historicized individual of neoclassical theories, which continually hide the genesis of economic structures and of dispositions, including preferences and tastes. The distinctions between Foucault’s method and the genealogical method advanced by Bourdieu in his lectures on the state notwithstanding,78 Bourdieu is close to a kind of Foucauldian analysis that reclaims the use of history in order to show the non-necessity of the present using the specific case of rational conduct based on the pursuit of individual interest. From this point of view, Bourdieu’s mention of the “historical transcendental” indicates a historical construction of perceptive categories and of forms of sensibility; as products of the internalization of objective structures,79 they cannot but make one think of pages from the Archaeology of Knowledge,80 to the point that we might wonder whether Bourdieu understood the implicit historical-genealogical critique of the idea of interest as universal. In a certain sense, Bourdieu applies to economy the same critique Foucault had addressed to philosophy, denouncing its dehistoricization and universalization and insisting on the historical conditions that have enabled the development of certain categories of a “pure” theory.81 As could be expected, however, it is not the works of Foucault but those of Polanyi, Hirschmann, and Veblen that are cited by Bourdieu,82 as if his general theory of genealogic structuralism would find its fundamental limit in the incapacity of “appropriating history.”83 “History,” for Bourdieu, remains in this sense a “structural history,” in which the genesis of moral dispositions means insistence on the “persistence” of categories whose historicity must be forgotten before they can be “rediscovered.”84 Bourdieu’s theory of capital itself, while effectively renegotiating the homogeneity and neutrality of capital’s initial conditions, cannot criticize universal interest (meant also in a noneconomic sense, for instance in terms of the framework of an economy of symbolic goods) with the same efficacy. Indeed, Bourdieu seems to address not the features of a particular habitus but a preconscious aspect more or less present in all strategies of reproduction.
Moreover, it is Bourdieu’s interpretation of notions like capital and field that allows him to complete, if not to correct, the Foucauldian analysis of neoliberal market policies. As has been noted, for Foucault the neoliberal government, both in its “ordoliberal” and its American version, is grounded on the extension of the logic of the market to every aspect of reality, more than on the sensationalization of goods.85 However, the essence of the market in neoliberal theories is based less on exchange than on the idea of “perfect competition”—logical and structural formalization of “the game among inequalities” that must always be made possible, “produced,” by governmental politics.86 As has been recently noticed,87 Foucault does not seem to worry about the anti-egalitarian aspects of neoliberal policies aimed at competition in democratic societies. Focusing on the description and interpretation of neoliberal theories as a “new way of exerting power,” he does not seem to be interested in how neoliberal policies destabilize the egalitarian project of Western democracies and constantly construct the inequality demanded by the economic game itself. It was certainly his will to eliminate the theme of class, something he pursues in his previous lectures on Security, Territory, Population,88 that prevented Foucault from seriously analyzing the inequality underwriting the production and reproduction mechanisms implicit in neoliberal competitive governmentality. Only much later does he seem to counter the competitive subjectivation of the entrepreneur of the self with the antidote of “agonistic” subjectivation, a notion that is nevertheless flawed in its unrealistic assumption of a parity of initial conditions.89
Similarly, for Bourdieu competition does not simply coincide with the market. On the market, agents’ strategies consider not only the price or the client, but first and foremost competition within the same niche or same “field.” One can therefore replace the abstract notion of the market with that of the “field of competition,” in which producers fight for monopoly of the production of a certain kind of goods but also to affirm their distinction.90 Bourdieu specifically distinguishes this competition from simple agonistic competition and from overt, conscious rivalry.91 Here the agent’s action is not fully comprised in the conscience or within the representation that he or she makes of his competitors but also in a “structural unconscious” determined by the objective position that everyone occupies in the field.92 The fact that the constant search for distinction is experienced as rivalry is already the sign of a dominated position in the field, a “form of daily class struggle” that represents the lower-middle class’s constant desire for social development:
This competition is a particular case of all competing relations, through which the privileged class tries hard to humiliate the claims (to nobility, to education or other) of the class right below itself, treating its aspirations and desires as a sort of subjective delirium, founded upon a too big self-esteem, and trying to set them off as ambitious, disproportionate, excessive, arrogant, ridiculous or at least premature.93
Bourdieu’s move, as we have seen, consists in rewriting class within the political agenda of neoliberalism, showing that the strategies of reproduction are never those of the isolated and rational individual but rather rational strategies elaborated more or less consciously within a group. Contradicting Marx, here “class” is no longer defined as a reified entity connected to a social position but is an unstable entity, continuously produced at the intersection between classification and individual strategies of distinction in the more general context of a struggle for what is possible.94 In this sense, complication of the notion of capital as a way to indicate how social reproduction takes place in a wider economy that also comprises social and cultural dimensions allowed Bourdieu to describe the mechanisms of neoliberal competition more thoroughly than Foucault.
These two different strategies of denaturalizing “hard core” neoliberalism—the progressive correspondence between the economic and political spheres and their definitions of the relation between security and freedom—lead to two alternative critiques of neoliberalism. Foucault’s critique of neoliberalism is cautious.95 More than looking for an explicit condemnation, he maintains that one has to comprehend the novelty neoliberalism entails, the “threatening coefficient” of its environmental governmental technology, and hence the blend of risks and possibilities connected to its policy of growth built upon investment on human capital.96 Starting from diagnosis of a changing present, one would therefore need to imagine a “socialist governmentality” and to invent new forms of subjection that would set one free from the neoliberal “quantified self.”97 But Foucault’s premature death and the recent evolutions of neoliberalism make it necessary to re-discuss the research lines Foucault delineated. For the theory of human capital has taken hold not only in the domain of economic theory. Indeed, during the 1980s, the notion gained supremacy in the business world, making possible a shift from the “human relations” model to one based on “human resources.” “Competences” (savoir faire, savoir être, savoir devenir) have since became assets, measured from an early age and continuously developed through education and training. The “entrepreneurship of the self” has become, more than a semi-utopian economic hypothesis, a reality experienced by every worker for whom all that falls under the umbrella of the “self” becomes capital to be managed and invested: not only one’s own education, but also one’s relations (social capital), home, belongings (real estate capital).98 From the moment in which the “self” becomes a portfolio of competences and goods that agents try to promote on a market, the already blurred boundaries between subjection and subjectivation disappear. Neo-managerial techniques try to obtain a permanent willingness to investment in one’s self while at the same time neoliberal politics dismantle social security and fragment career paths: the result is a subject who cannot stop perfecting himself if he wants to remain competitive.99 Foucault’s remarks on “agonistic subjectivation” thus risk not only being inadequate but also counterproductive in a context in which the ancient practices of the self have already been intercepted by the theories of personal development. Parrhesiastic practice is trivialized by leadership training and business ethics, as managers are pushed to tell “all the truth” on brutal and anti-egalitarian power relationships in order to build a reflexive and critical authority grounded on acceptance of the status quo.100
Bourdieu, for his part, not only took up the issue of human capital before Foucault, he was also able to see the extraordinary expansion of the concept after Foucault’s death, in a globalized economy in which knowledge is now first and foremost a resource. At the end of the 1990s, Bourdieu described neoliberal “utopia” as a paradoxical “subversion aimed at the conservation” of extant power relations. The destruction of the collective structures guaranteeing consistent social security to some strata of the population, the incessant search for short-run profit, and the generalization of the precarity informing the “habitus of the temporary worker” have led to the creation of new forms of inequality.101 According to Bourdieu, if it is impossible to avoid the game of investment in capital and the consequent struggle for domination of the field, we must increase the possibility of access to institutionalized instruments for social development for the disadvantaged classes. If the sociologist “is king” in this context, it is not so much because he has a monopoly on reflexivity but because the “tension towards freedom” implies the unveiling of the conventional and conditional stimuli to which individuals are subjected.102 Undermining the epistemological bases of economic discourse means, once again, showing the political consequence implied by such a discourse and its fiction of a mythic initial state of equality that is contradicted by the differential patrimony of capital shaping the composition of the different classes.
The last ten years of neoliberal policies have been characterized by a furthering of these processes, to the point that one can say that the same security/freedom contract described, albeit with different points of view, by Bourdieu and Foucault, seems to refuse once and for all and to make room for the precarious existence of a whole generation, which has no reserves left for planning or thinking the future. If, as Becker prophesized, education and training increasingly become the privileged vehicles on which the “entrepreneur of the self” relies, the university itself seems to have abandoned its traditional mission of constituting and criticizing the political structures of civic life in favor of the formation of professional competences amenable to increasing human capital. OCDE economists now rule over school programs—which have become, without distinction, “professional schools”—and psychologists assess the competences of three-year-old children in order to understand which should be developed and which should not.103 In this context, it is not enough to look for new models of subjectivation that by some miracle would be available for everyone, nor simply to underscore the role of inequality in shaping social conditions. It is instead necessary to question the neoliberal discourse of economic rationality, which enables our very articulation of the concepts of education, competition, governmentality, market, and neoliberal subjectivation.104 Foucault’s interest in, and Bourdieu’s widening of, the notion of capital represent only the first steps in this analysis of neoliberalism—which needs to be reenergized if it is to meet the challenge of becoming both an ontology of the present and a new form of a critical sociology.
NOTES
* This text was translated from the French by Matteo Vagelli.
1. For an intellectual history of the notion of human capital, which understands the term chiefly as a neoliberal answer to the Marxian theory of the crisis, see Luca Paltrinieri, “Biopolitics in the Twenty-First Century: The Malthus-Marx Debate and Human Capital Issue,” in Philippe Bonditti, Didier Bigo, and Frédéric Gros, Foucault and the Modern International. Silences and Legacies for the Study of World Politics (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), 255–74.
2. Jacob Mincer, “Investment in human capital and personal income distribution,” Journal of Political Economy 66 (1958): 281–302; Theodore W. Schultz, “Investment in Human Capital,” American Economic Review 51 (1961): 1–17.
3. One of the first uses of the term “society of knowledge” is management guru Peter Drucker’s The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). The term spread in the 1990s and became ubiquitous after a famous report published by UNESCO in 2005. On cognitive capitalism as a critical category, see Yann Moulier-Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism (London: Polity, 2012).
4. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (London: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2008), 219.
5. Henri Joseph Léon de Baudrillart, Manuel d’économie politique (Paris: Guillemin, 1857), 426–27. Quoted by Paul-André Rosental, Destins de l’eugénisme (Paris: Seuil, 2016), 496–97.
6. Charles Duveyrier, La Civilisation et la démocratie française: deux conférences suivie d’un projet de fondation d’institut de progrès social (Paris: Aux bureaux de l’Encyclopédie, 1865).
7. Fernand Faure, “Alfred de Foville,” Journal de la société statistique de Paris; 54, (1913): 551–81, 573.
8. Karl Pearson, The Problem of Practical Eugenics (London: Dulau, 1912), 22–23.
9. Gary S. Becker, A Treatise on the Family, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Human Capital. A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975). On these themes, see Luca Paltrinieri “Quantifier la qualité. Les théories du Capital humain entre démographie, économie, education,” Raisons Politiques (2013/4): 52, 89–107.
10. Gary S. Becker, “An Economic Analysis of Fertility,” in Ansley J. Coale, ed., Demo-graphic and Economic Changes in Developed Countries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 209–31.
11. Paul-André Rosental, Destins de l’eugénisme, 29.
12. Irving Fisher, The Nature of Capital Income (New York-London: MacMillan, 1906). Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 224. On the genealogy of the notion, from Faustmann onwards, see Liliana Doganova, “Décompter le futur. La formule des flux actualisés et le manager-investisseur,” Sociétés contemporaines 93 (2014): 67–87.
13. Antonella Corsani, “Rent and Subjectivity in Neoliberal Cognitive Capitalism,” Knowledge Cultures 1(4) (2013): 67–83.
14. Theodore Schultz, Investing in People. The Economics of Population Quality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
15. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 230.
16. Paltrinieri, “Biopolitics in the Twenty-First Century,” 273–74.
17. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 227–30.
18. Rosental, Destins de l’eugénisme, 29.
19. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Les héritiers (Paris: Minuit, 1964), translated as The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979). The term “cultural capital” is not yet present in 1964, but the whole theory is already there.
20. Pierre Bourdieu, Les structures sociales de l’économie (Paris: Seuil, 2000). English translation: The Social Structures of the Economy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). Pierre Bourdieu, Sociologie Générale 2: la notion de “Capital” (Paris: Seuil, 2016), 247–53.
21. Alain Girard, “L’écologie des hommes illustres. Une enquête sur les facteurs de la réussite,” Population 12(2) (1957): 261–68.
22. Alain Girard, “Enquête nationale sur l’orientation et la sélection des enfants d’âge scolaire,” Population 9(4) (1954): 597–634.
23. Philippe Masson, “La fabrication des héritiers,” Revue Française de sociologie 42(3) (2001): 477–507; 482–83; 494–95.
24. Bourdieu and Passeron, The Inheritors, 67.
25. Pierre Bourdieu, “La transmission de l’héritage culturel,” in Le partage des bénéfices (Paris: Minuit, 1966), 383–420.
26. The notion of “cultural capital” is itself actually built to enable thinking of this “hidden transmission “independently from any pedagogic intention: Bourdieu, Sociologie générale vol. 2, 249–50.
27. Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite School in the Field of Power (Oxford: Polity, 1996), 275–76; “Les trois états du capital culturel,” in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vol. 30, (Novembre 1979), 3–6; Bourdieu, “L’institution scolaire”, 3–6; Bourdieu, Sociologie générale vol. 2, 248–53.
28. Bourdieu, Le partages de bénéfices, 18.
29. Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, “La fin d’un malthusianisme?” in Le partage des bénéfices, 135–54.
30. Pierre Bourdieu, “Avenir de classe et causalité du probable,” Revue française de sociologie 15(1) (1974): 3–42; P. Bourdieu, Distinction. A Social Critique of the Jugement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 331–38.
31. Bourdieu and Darbel, “La fin d’un malthusianisme?”, 147.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 148.
34. Pierre Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique. Cours au Collège de France 1992–1993 (Paris: Seuil, 2017), 61, 94–97.
35. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (London: Polity, 1990), 64.
36. Bourdieu, Sociologie générale vol. 2, 294.
37. A much more complete critique of “economicism” and of the Homo Oeconomicus, as well as of the theory of the rational agent in neoclassical doctrines, can be found in the lectures of Anthropologie économique.
38. According to Becker, the economic approach can be extended to the explanation of all human behavior, cf. in particular the introduction to The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976).
39. Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique, 94; 130–31; 156; 235.
40. See Becker’s arguments in Gary S. Becker, François Ewald & Bernard E. Harcourt, “Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker: American Neoliberalism ; and Michel Foucault’s 1979 ‘Birth of Biopolitics’ Lectures,” Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics, Working Paper, No. 614 (2012).
41. Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, Human Problem Solving (Englewoods Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1972); Pierre Bourdieu, Sociologie générale, vol. 2, 985; Anthropologie économique, 249–55.
42. Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique, 240.
43. Ibid.
44. Bourdieu, “Avenir de classe,” 4–7.
45. Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique, 235–40.
46. As, on the contrary, George J. Stigler and Gary Becker themselves used to think: “De gustibus non est disputandum,” The American Economic Review 67(2) (March 1977): 76–90.
47. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 52–66; Anthropologie économique, 240–45.
48. Bourdieu, “Avenir de classe et causalité du probable,” 16–27.
49. Ibid., 15.
50. Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique, 188–89.
51. Bourdieu, “Avenir de classe et causalité du probable,” 12.
52. Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique, 134. He also writes: “The plain and simple economic theory which aims to reduce the symbolic to the economic has something comical within a society where the symbolic lies in the fundaments themselves of the most fundamental economic mechanisms” (228).
53. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 119–21.
54. Ibid., 161–65.
55. Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique, 222; The Social Structures of the Economy, 89–125.
56. Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique, 249–55.
57. Bourdieu, “L’essence du néoliberalisme,” Le monde diplomatique (March 1998), 3.
58. On the idea of “government rationality,” see Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (London: Verso, 2017).
59. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 233.
60. Ibid.
61. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977).
62. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 63–65.
63. Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent, eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism (Polity: London, 2015).
64. See the comments by François Ewald in Mitchell Dean “Michel Foucault’s ‘Apology’ for Neoliberalism,” Journal of Political Power 7(3) (2014): 433–42.
65. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226.
66. Ibid., 223.
67. Michel Feher, “Self-Appreciation, or the Aspirations of Human Capital,” Public Culture 1(21) (2009): 21–41.
68. Massimiliano Nicoli and Luca Paltrinieri, “Du management de soi à l’investissement sur soi: remarques sur la subjectivation post-néo-libérale,” Terrains/Théories 6 (2017): https://teth.revues.org/929.
69. Ibid.
70. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 78, 238, 292–93, but also Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 85.
71. Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
72. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 267–314.
73. Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living, Lectures at the Collège de France 1979–1980 (London: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014).
74. Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique, 150. See also 78–81.
75. Ibid., 89; 150–55.
76. Ibid., 248.
77. Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy, 17–20.
78. Pierre Bourdieu, Sur l’Etat. Cours au Collège de France 1989-1992 (Paris: Seuil, 2012), English translation: On the State. Lectures at the Collège de France (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 86–93; 114–116.
79. Available in the lectures at the Collège de France of 1992–1993, “Les fondements sociaux de l’action économique,” Anthropologie économique, 243–44, but also see Pierre Bourdieu, Manet. Une révolution symbolique (Cours au Collège de France 1998–2000 (Paris: Seuil-Raison d’Agir, 2013), 77–78.
80. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books), 126–31. But this point is, of course, also very strongly influenced by Canguilhem and the French epistemological tradition, which Bourdieu knew well.
81. Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique, 165. For a similar approval of Foucault, see Pierre Bourdieu, “La philosophie, la science, l’engagement,” in D. Eribon, L’infréquentable Michel Foucault (Paris: EPEL, 2001), 189–94.
82. Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique, 166; 174; 91–93; 155–56.
83. Michel Foucault, “A propos des faiseurs d’histoire,” in Dits et écrits, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 413.
84. See Christian Laval, “Foucault and Bourdieu: to Each his Own Neoliberalism?” Sociologia & Antropologia 7(1) (2017): http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2238-38752017000100063.
85. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 119–21; 243–45. This is consistent with the critique of the Debordian idea of “the society of the spectacle” (ibid., 116) that Bourdieu raised against representatives of the idea that the market is now a kind of “imperialism,” Anthropologie économique, 124–28.
86. See, on this point, Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (New York: Zones, 2017); William Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (London: Sage, 2014), 35–69.
87. Ibid., 73–110.
88. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 107–8.
89. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8(4) (1982): 777–95.
90. Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique, 204–5, 175–78.
91. Ibid., 206–9.
92. Ibid., 195, 216.
93. Bourdieu, “Avenir de classe et causalité du probable,” 27.
94. Bourdieu, Distinction, 106–9; Sociologie générale, vol. 2, 1125.
95. David Newheiser, “Foucault, Gary Becker and the Critique of Neoliberalism,” Theory, Culture and Society 5 (2016): 3–21.
96. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 232–33.
97. Luca Paltrinieri, “Managing Subjectivity. Neoliberalism, Human Capital and Empowerment,” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 10(4) (2017): 459–71.
98. James S. Coleman, “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital,” The American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988): 95–120 ; Gerald F. Davis, Managed by Markets. How Finance Re-Shaped America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 154–90; 236.
99. See Vincent De Gaujelac, La Société malade de la gestion (Paris: Seuil, 2005).
100. Wim Vandekerckhove and Suzan Langenberg, “Can we organize courage? Implications of Foucault’s parrhesia,” EJBO. Electronic Journal of Business Ethics and Organization Studies 17(2) (2012): 35–43; Erik de Haan, Fearless consulting. Temptation, risk and limits of profession (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006).
101. See Bourdieu, “Le néo-liberalisme, utopie.”
102. Bourdieu, Anthropologie économique, 247.
103. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 151–74; Noonan, M. Coral, “The Tyranny of Work: Employability and the Neoliberal Assault on Education,” Alternate Routes 26 (2015): 51–73.
104. Sonja M. Amadae, Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).