Stephen W. Sawyer and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
A conversation took place in 2012 at the University of Chicago between the Nobel prize winner Gary Becker and two prominent scholars and specialists of Foucault, François Ewald and Bernard Harcourt. Their dialogue concerned Foucault’s writings on American neoliberalism and Gary Becker’s economics in particular.1 Becker opened the discussion with an observation on Foucault: “I like most of it, and I do not disagree with much,” he said, before concluding, “I also cannot tell whether Foucault is disagreeing with me.” Ewald then raised the importance of contextualizing Foucault’s work from the late 1970s in order to understand: “How was it possible that an intellectual, a French philosopher—someone perhaps known as a Left French philosopher, a radical—would deliver, at the end of the 1970s, a lecture at the Collège de France where he would make the apology of neoliberalism.” To which Harcourt responded that he hoped to introduce a set of issues that would “turn it from an apology to a critique” of neoliberalism. These statements captured three central themes in Foucault’s work and the intellectual politics around liberalism in the late 1970s: an interpretive ambiguity, a necessity for contextualization and an opportunity for critique. In so doing, they also highlighted some of the key legacies of Foucault’s work for thinking about the history of liberalism in the 1970s and its relationship to our current neoliberal condition.2
The title of this volume and its emphasis on moving beyond the question of a supposed Foucauldian neoliberalism is designed to do precisely that: to explore Foucault’s treatment of neoliberalism as a particularly fertile and complex moment in the history of the set of ideas and interpretations associated with liberalism and neoliberalism. Such a perspective, therefore, also seeks to historicize the very debate around Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism since the late 2000s, suggesting that a critical interpretation of this discussion may inform the legacy of the intellectual politics of the late 1970s and contemporary neoliberalism.3
In 2009, historian Michael Behrent’s “Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free Market Creed, 1976–1979” gave new consistency to the debate by providing a historically grounded and sobering account of the ways that Foucault’s interest in economic liberalism in the second half of the 1970s had combined with his earlier anti-humanism.4 The consequence, Behrent argued, was not a rejection of neoliberalism in the late 1970s, on the part of Foucault, but rather its endorsement. Behrent’s article set the stage for a reconsideration of Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism that raised the stakes for the 2012 conversation between Becker, Ewald, and Harcourt. It is perhaps not surprising then that the debate did not stop with their conversation. Instead it drew new attention and took a further turn in 2014 and 2015 when sociologist Daniel Zamora published an article in Jacobin Magazine, claiming that Foucault harbored a clear sympathy for neoliberal ideas. Foucault’s endorsement of neoliberalism, he polemically argued, could be found throughout Foucault’s later lectures, interviews and articles. Here, Zamora insisted, Foucault “imagine[d] a neoliberalism that wouldn’t project its anthropological models on the individual, that would offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state.”5
These arguments received an unusual amount of attention for an academic debate, as evidenced by the reception of his argument in the pages of the Washington Post.6 The debate seemed to feed off a sudden sense of urgency: Could neoliberalism be such a pernicious and overwhelming force that even those many thought to be an important source of resistance against it had actually contributed to neoliberalism’s rise? Was Foucault not only unhelpful in combatting neoliberalism, but actually seduced by it and complicit in its twenty-first-century hegemony?
Zamora was certainly not alone in responding yes. José Luis Moreno Pestaña and Geoffroy de Lagasnerie both argued that Foucault was either convinced by the neoliberal discourse or tacitly accepted it.7 A series of academic journals, blog forums featuring leading Foucault scholars, and a hefty tome devoted to the subject by the French philosopher Serge Audier appeared soon after. Audier’s more balanced and nuanced treatment of Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism seemed to feed the flames of debate.8 Complementing Zamora’s opening salvo, he and Michael Behrent also returned to the question with a co-edited volume that explored the question in greater depth largely confirming, while also qualifying and nuancing, some of the earlier more polemical claims of Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism.9
These at times sensationalist, but also increasingly sophisticated, attempts to investigate Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism hardly settled the question. Some scholars insisted that Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism had long been known. “Is this news?” Stuart Elden asked pointedly. “Foucault’s 1979 lectures on neoliberalism—the misnamed The Birth of Biopolitics—have been widely available for a decade. They were first published in French in 2004 and translated into English in 2008. Some people—Thomas Lemke being the standout example—were discussing them before then on the basis of the archived tape recordings. Others have made the suggestion that Foucault had some sympathy to neoliberalism as well—Paul Patton, for example.” He then concluded, “As far as I can tell, the ‘revelations’ are not based on any new material.”10 And by the fall of 2015, the question remained poignant and unsettled enough that the intellectual historian Matthew Specter could open his forum on “Foucault and Neoliberalism” in History and Theory by referring to Marcel Gauchet’s claim that “Even the most zealous disciples of Foucault have been forced to recognize, not without embarrassment, that he felt an affinity with the neoliberal turn then underway.” To which Specter juxtaposed Mitchell Dean’s claim that “the vast bulk of Foucauldian commentary and analysis would reject the idea of an affirmative relationship between Foucault and neoliberalism.”11
To be clear, what follows does not seek to take a stand in these debates. Rather, we interpret their intensity as a sign of the urgency of reckoning with the legacy of the intellectual politics of and around liberalism and neoliberalism in the last third of the twentieth century. This volume, therefore, explores Foucault’s engagement with key neoliberal texts with some historical distance while embracing the increasing political necessity of developing a sophisticated historical understanding of the period. It may therefore be helpful to begin by establishing a few relatively objective assessments of Foucault’s engagement with neoliberalism.
First, no doubt because of his tremendous influence across the social sciences and humanities, the ambiguity of Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism has found a particularly fertile terrain in our contemporary political and intellectual climate. But, if Foucault has once again played a starring role in critical investigations of our recent intellectual past, he has certainly not been alone. These studies have been part of a growing cottage industry devoted to histories of a perceived present crisis, penned by scholars on all sides of the political spectrum, seeking to locate where things went off the rails.12 Intellectual historians, in particular, have played an important role in these debates, looking toward the 1970s and early 1980s to explain how we have arrived at the present moment.13 Perhaps it then comes as little surprise that as many of the chapters in this volume suggest, intellectual historians and those inspired by this discipline have attempted to pinpoint the ideas and political contexts that may explain the twentieth-century origins of our neoliberal era.14
Second, Foucault’s specific interest and treatment of neoliberal texts themselves was relatively short-lived and quite precise. The actual discussion of the variety of forms of neoliberalism as such was almost entirely restricted to the year or two surrounding the lectures on biopolitics at the Collège de France in 1978–1979. This fact poses a specific challenge for elaborating a sophisticated intellectual history. In response, the authors in this collection have employed a range of interpretive strategies. Some of the chapters have established connections between his discussion of neoliberalism and other parts of his work, even reaching back to the 1950s. Others have reached into the context within which Foucault was writing, such as the rise of the “second left” in France and beyond or the global perspective of the Iranian Revolution. And still others have explored the political legacy of these concepts and how they developed in the work of other social theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu.
Finally, whether or not Foucault actually embraced, was optimistic toward, apologized or critiqued neoliberalism, he never offered anything approaching an obvious endorsement of neoliberal ideas in his interviews or other writings. At the same time, as opposed to his more explicit refutations of certain social scientific schools or categories—such as some specific Marxist categories or schools of psychoanalysis—Foucault never explicitly stated his disagreement with some of the key neoliberal texts and approaches that he discussed during this brief period. Whether or not either was necessary to demonstrate his sympathy or rejection of neoliberal ideas—especially considering the brevity of his treatment of this question, as opposed to his long-term dialogue with Marxism and psychoanalysis, for example—it would seem the result has been that any complex treatment of his relationship to neoliberalism requires an unusually high degree of interpretation and contextualization. Once again, both of these features make this subject particularly rich for developing a better understanding of the intellectual heritage of the last third of the twentieth century around questions of liberalism and neoliberalism.
What follows suggests then that beyond the particular question of our neoliberal present—which Foucault may or may not be particularly helpful for understanding, as Revel concludes—such interpretive ambiguity provides a rich standpoint from which to examine important themes in the history of thinking about the intellectual politics of the late twentieth century. Hence, consciously pushing beyond the question of whether or not Foucault was a neoliberal, this volume has two key ambitions: to provide a more nuanced perspective on this key moment in the history of ideas and in so doing, uncover new interpretations, analyses, or applications of Foucault’s work.
Through this approach, these chapters bring forward three central historical themes for understanding the legacy of political and social thought from this period. First, how did Foucault’s and others’ interpretations of liberalism and neoliberalism relate to the general trend toward a decline in Marxism and Marxist thought during this period.15 The general decline of Marxism as a dominant approach in social and human sciences across the 1970s and early 1980s has become a truism of twentieth-century intellectual history.16 Beyond condemnation or celebration however, a more thorough understanding of how and why this shift took shape requires a careful investigation of specific trajectories. Étienne Balibar has offered a convincing, schematic interpretation of Foucault’s engagement with Marxism in the years following his entry into the Collège de France.17 Balibar suggests that Foucault engaged in nothing short of a systematic reckoning with the foundational categories of Marxist thought beginning with his refutation of the Althusserian conception of the “state apparatus” in the 1971–1972 lectures. Foucault then, he proposes, set out to provide an alternative to the Marxist conception of the conditions of capitalist reproduction (and specifically the proletariat) in his 1972–1973 lectures. And finally, Balibar evokes the idea that in his 1975–1976 lectures Foucault challenged the notion of class struggle in favor of his genealogical method and a new notion of the political. Some of the following chapters suggest that The Birth of Biopolitics lectures in 1978–1979 may have been yet another perhaps, final, moment in Foucault’s long-term critical engagement with Marxism.
This moment of dialogue with Marxism was perhaps less systematic than previous ones—in that it did not focus on some specific foundational dimension of the Marxian conception, as Balibar suggests Foucault was pursuing earlier. Nonetheless, Foucault’s dialogue with Marxism clearly continued in these years. Michael Behrent, for example, questions both the coherency and the politics of Foucault’s claim that he was a Marxist of “the Capital-vol-II type,” while Aner Barzilay and Duncan Kelly both explore how Foucault’s exploration of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics lectures was part of his explicit rejection of a Marxian “anthropology” in favor of Foucault’s Nietzchean post-humanism. Together, what these chapters suggest is that Foucault’s brief investigation of liberal and neoliberal thought participated in yet another attempt to confront a Marxism that he had been challenging for a decade. Indeed, Foucault’s relationship to Marxism may not be understood as a blanket rejection or endorsement of some specific element of the Marxian canon, but must grasped as a history.
Second, Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism contributes to a more elaborate understanding of the political and intellectual influence of the “second left” in France in the intellectual history of the late 1970s. Foucault’s exploration of neoliberal texts took place against the broader backdrop of a refusal, among key members of the socialist party and some left intellectuals, of a traditional socialism and its attachment to a state-centered society. This broader rejection of classical conceptions of the state-society relationship, as Daniel Zamora highlights in his chapter, has played an important role in critiques of the intellectual politics of this period, interpretations of Foucault’s interest in liberal and neoliberal ideas first among them. Did Foucault’s turn against Marxism and then traditional socialism and his equally ambiguous relationship to the “second left” pave the way for a potential embrace, or at least collusion, with neoliberalism? Was this the fatal step?
Here, too, a specific focus on Foucault provides a more complex understanding of the interest in liberalism in the late 1970s. In particular, it must be noted that Foucault’s engagement with figures of the “second left,” and Rosanvallon in particular, was multifaceted. As Rosanvallon has suggested, it was around the period of the Biopolitics courses that he and Foucault were in the most regular contact.18 Furthermore, even as they both pursued an interest in eighteenth-century liberalism during this period—Rosanvallon was completing and published his Le capitalisme utopique19—their explorations of these liberal themes took very different directions as a result of their dialogue. Rosanvallon argued that the discovery of the socioeconomic sphere as an autonomous realm of human activity, especially within the Scottish Enlightenment, had a radical depoliticizing effect, giving birth to what he called a “utopian capitalism.” He further suggested that Marx was, from this perspective, one of the great students of eighteenth-century laissez-faire thinkers because he evacuated politics in favor of a social solution to modern injustice. While Foucault examined some of the same authors, he profoundly disagreed with Rosanvallon on at least one key point. For Foucault, the fundamental innovation of this period was not a depoliticization of the social, but the very ability to make the distinction between the political and the socioeconomic in the first place. From his perspective, hiving off the political from the socioeconomic was a mode of governance, not an evacuation of the political.20
This particular debate suggests two important elements in Foucault’s relationship to the “second left” and the broader relationship between critiques of traditional socialism and neoliberalism during this period. First, while a whole set of intellectuals on the left and right were dissatisfied with what they considered traditional conceptions of a state-centered society in the late 1970s, they did not engage in this critique in a monochromatic or one-dimensional way. It is simply too reductive to draw a straight line from some supposedly coherent “second left” political critique of Marxism and traditional socialism in the late twentieth century to the rise of twenty-first century neoliberalism. The critical motivations and intellectual conclusions to be drawn from such investigations were necessarily multiple and sometimes even contradictory. Second, a thicker description of the context within which these explorations of the “second left” took place reveals that figures like Foucault have come to overshadow a much larger set of discussions taking place on these issues. As Serge Audier highlights, the broad range of discussions around the reform of the left generated a great variety of competing positions. Foucault’s attempt within the biopolitics lectures to ground his own exploration of ordoliberalism and Gary Becker in a discussion of early modern political economy was also a means of unsettling some of the very categories the “second left” was using to frame the political debates of the period, such as the potentially depoliticizing effects of an autonomous civil society.
This leads to a third important theme in Foucault’s treatment of neoliberalism: the question of the state. A supposed ambient anti-statism of the 1970s—perhaps best captured by the work of Pierre Clastres’s Society Against the State—has also contributed to the idea that this period may have opened a back door to neoliberalism. Without a doubt, as Zamora’s article in this volume suggests, Foucault’s perspectives on the state significantly contributed to the idea that he may have found some validity in neoliberal critiques of state power. Contemporary neo-Marxists21—and more recently, those who have rekindled key Marxist critiques of Foucault—have established a parallel between Foucault’s turn away from a critique of traditional political institutions and what has become the central critiques of our neoliberal age.22 Here too however, the points made above regarding the historical shifts within Foucault’s relationship to Marxism also apply. Indeed, the place of the state shifted widely within Foucault’s work. For example, he primarily took aim at the “state apparatus” in his early Collège de France lectures, targeting one of the central elements of Althusser’s critique of political institutional power.23 Then after 1976, the critique of the Marxist state slowly gave way to a more ambivalent—though still critical—approach to state power in the same years he became interested in neoliberalism.24
At the same time, the reception of Foucault’s treatment of the state has also changed radically since the late 1970s. A first generation of Foucault scholars, many of whom were writing in the context of Thatcher’s and Reagan’s neoliberal surge, used his critique of the traditional conception of the state to open up a study of power “beyond the state.”25 Here, the ambition was to show that critiques of power needed to change in a neoliberal context because the attempts to dismantle the state, they argued, hardly marked the end of power relations as such. In recent years, however, a new set of works has begun to more explicitly focus on a Foucauldian conception of the state.26 There is little doubt that Foucault was attempting to unsettle two of the dominant interpretations of both liberal and Marxist conceptions of bureaucracy and the power of state institutions.27 In so doing, he clearly pushed the state out of the center of the history of power and politics. The question, however, remains whether he was therefore interested in setting the state aside entirely or, as Duncan Kelly shows in his chapter in this volume, if Foucault steadily pursued a set of novel interrogations about how one might more effectively understand the state as one specific and historical set of power relations among many.
This volume brings together these perspectives—Foucault’s relationship to Marxism, to the “second left,” and to the State—to offer a deeper understanding of his work and the intellectual politics and history of liberalism and neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. It is precisely in this spirit that we open the volume with three of the leading voices on this subject. By asking Behrent, Audier, and Zamora to revisit a question that they have played an essential role in posing—from a variety of angles—our aim is to more effectively anchor this historical moment in its multiplicity. Insisting on the diversity of positions and methods employed by those who have thought seriously about Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism more effectively opens up, we hope, the historical, philosophical, and sociological stakes of our neoliberal moment. While these three papers speak to one another, they are also written from three overlapping, and yet distinct, methodological perspectives: intellectual history, philosophy, and sociology. These three positions, and their different conceptions of Foucault’s relationship to the political context of the period as well as liberal and neoliberal ideas, suggest that there is no clear consensus as to how convinced, tacitly accepting, apologetic, critical, or hostile Foucault was toward neoliberalism. Indeed, they are gathered here precisely to suggest that whether or not Foucault was a neoliberal is not the most interesting, important, or lasting contribution of this debate. Instead, each of these chapters provides a novel perspective on Foucault’s work and the broad set of interlocutors on these questions during this period, thereby contributing to an intellectual history of this critical moment in modern history.
The volume, therefore, opens with a chapter by Michael Behrent, which provides an overview of the positions taken on Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism and attempts to historicize them. According to him, there are four basic views concerning Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism: scholars who see him as promoting a type of liberalism analogous to Richard Rorty’s idea of a non-foundationalist liberalism and find this attractive; those, like José Luis Moreno Pestaña and Daniel Zamora, who agree that Foucault’s later thought turned in the direction of neoliberalism, and find this objectionable, specifically due to its implication for Leftist politics; the perspectives of Pierre Dardot, Christian Laval, and to some extent Wendy Brown that interprets him as an anti-liberal and therefore a resource for critiquing neoliberalism; and finally those, such as Mark Lilla and Michael Walzer, who view his anti-liberalism as being politically incoherent and dangerous. Behrent spends the rest of his chapter showing that there are limitations to all of these positions. In doing so, he explains why Foucault described himself as being a Marxist insofar as he was influenced by the second volume of Capital, why he thought of contemporary liberalism as not being fascist, and explains his assertion that under neoliberalism, state power would likely decrease.
The following chapter by philosopher Serge Audier presents a strong critique of a commonly held view that Foucault’s biopolitics lectures sought, in part, to show the connection between the authoritarian and antidemocratic views of the German ordoliberals and fascist views of the state. This reading, he observes, asks if Foucault condemned German social democracy “by deploring its conversion to ‘social market economy’ as a turn towards a competitive and authoritarian ordoliberalism?” Audier challenges this view through an attempt to further contextualize the set of questions Foucault was posing. Most importantly, Audier argues, such an interpretation fails to understand Foucault’s principal aim in his studies of German neoliberalism, and also misses the socioeconomic, political, and cultural singularity of the late 1970s in Germany and France. Ultimately, Audier insists that accusations of intellectual complicity with Nazism and ordoliberalism are to be found nowhere in Foucault’s Biopolitics lectures.
In his chapter, “Finding a ‘Left Governmentality’: Foucault’s Last Decade,” Daniel Zamora continues to refine his own thinking on Foucault’s proximity to neoliberalism. Through a contextual reconstruction of his last decade, Zamora argues that Foucault came to see neoliberalism as a tool to invent a left governmentality in the hope of rethinking the left’s conceptual foundations. This leads to Zamora’s thesis that neoliberalism provided Foucault with a framework for a new kind of politics. The last political decade of Foucault’s work, Zamora affirms, was an attempt to participate in a growing opposition to the postwar left, and at the same time promote in the intellectual and political field a “new political culture.” This engagement with key themes of the “second left” participated in a broader program of social transformation by incorporating some key ideas of neoliberal thought. On this reading, far from being foreign to Foucault, neoliberalism offered him a way to rethink resistance, or a way to be “less governed.”
The necessity of contextualizing Foucault’s engagement with neoliberalism within his own work is pursued in the essays that follow. The intellectual historian Aner Barzilay’s chapter provides rebuttal to attempts to read The Birth of Biopolitics lectures in the politicized historicist manner championed by Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent by highlighting its connections to a deep thread in Foucault’s oeuvre. Although he grants that a significant methodological shift occurred in Foucault’s thought after the publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Barzilay nonetheless stresses its philosophical continuity with his earlier works. The Biopolitics lectures, he argues are no exception, as evidenced by several allusions to the argument of The Order of Things (1966). Uncovering these links are all the more important in that the short horizon of the “political” reading of Foucault obscures, he claims, an abiding interest in the use of Nietzsche’s philosophy for thinking beyond the anthropological limits of the modern episteme.
Dotan Lesham’s “Foucault, Genealogy, Critique” similarly places the question of neoliberalism within Foucault’s oeuvre by focusing on the context of the Collège de France lecture series starting in 1970. This allows Lesham to reverse the question Zamora (and others) have posed: instead of asking whether or not Foucault was a neoliberal, he explores the role the neoliberalism courses played in Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France. Read in this light, the neoliberal lectures, claims Lesham, ended a decade-long genealogical inquiry into the histories of specific forms of truth and power. Lesham grants that what Foucault discovered in neoliberalism was indeed a novel form of government. However, he shows that this form of government did not free the individual from the grip of power but rather reinforced it.
Chapter 6 offers a third perspective on placing Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics within the larger context of Foucault’s thinking on the history of political thought from the nineteenth century to his own times. The lesson to be drawn from this, argues Duncan Kelly, is that Foucault’s thinking about neoliberalism aligns with his historical investigations into the dethroning of the idea of a singular sovereign state, a state that “has no interior” and therefore must be critically examined from the outside. Neoliberalism, affirms Kelly, forced Foucault to explore the state anew by reintroducing the global economy as a point from which new discursive and political games of uncertainty would be played out. If Foucault remains relevant for understanding neoliberalism today, Kelly concludes, it is surely in his challenge to take up that task from the outside in reconsidering the relationship between the nation-state and global economic policy. These three essays show that when one investigates a specific intellectual’s relationship to liberalism and neoliberalism during this period, a complex and wide-ranging intellectual engagement may emerge that in some cases reaches back far beyond the immediate context of a supposed “liberal turn” in the mid-1970s–1980s.
At the same time however, the immediate global context does matter. Hence, beyond the broader themes of Foucault’s oeuvre, it is also important to highlight what was taking place globally beyond the narrow confines of France as Foucault engaged with neoliberal texts. Claudia Castiglioni’s contribution follows this line of argument in chapter 7 by teasing out the relationship between Foucault’s engagement with the Iranian Revolution and The Birth of Biopolitics lectures. Noting that Foucault delivered the first of his lectures shortly upon his return from Iran, in early January 1979, Castiglioni seeks to pinpoint the link between his engagement with the revolution and the redefinition of his approach to issues such as power, resistance, and population, and his thinking on liberalism broadly conceived. Most importantly, what emerges in this analysis is that far from later readings that privileged the global context of the rise of neoliberalism, especially in Britain and the United States, Foucault’s eyes during this period were turned toward revolutionary moments taking place in an entirely different part of the world.
To the extent that these chapters provide an investigation of Foucault’s oeuvre and the historical and intellectual moment within which he was writing, they also raise a historical question on how his work in this period—specifically on liberalism and neoliberalism—relates to the rise of neoliberalism in the twenty-first century. There is of course the issue that Foucault may have opened a door to some of the key neoliberal practices of our contemporary politics. But there is also another issue as the full weight of a mature neoliberal order has descended upon us: no matter how apologetic or critical he was of neoliberalism as it was understood in the late 1970s, how helpful does Foucault’s reading of neoliberalism remain today? Here, it is not so much a matter of the predictive power of Foucault, or of his contemporaries, as it is of recognizing, once again, that neoliberalism itself has a history and situating Foucault’s relatively short interest in this question into the history of neoliberal orders.
In chapter 8, Luca Paltrinieri takes up this question by considering to what extent Foucault’s analysis from the late 1970s provides the best means for understanding our present. He highlights the ways that Foucault’s understanding of one of the key neoliberal themes, human capital, has fundamentally changed, opening up a powerful alternative intellectual history of this notion. Far from being an invention of the Chicago School of Economics, Paltrinieri demonstrates that human capital has deep roots in nineteenth-century European social thought. He then explains how Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu understood the notion in complementary ways, the latter having the advantage of witnessing the extraordinary expansion of the concept after Foucault’s death.
Finally, the philosopher Judith Revel concludes asking if Foucault’s thinking on neoliberalism provides insight into how European countries have dealt with the current refugee crisis since the mid-2010s. Revel argues that Foucault’s pithy formulation “make live and let die” from 1976 does not seem to fit the paradigm of how migrants are governed today. Instead we are witnessing a shift in governmentality that breaks with Foucault’s analysis of human capital and toward a model of “not making live, and letting die.”
Together these essays provide a perspective on a key moment of transition in the intellectual politics of our contemporary age. As the neoliberal order shifts, along with our interpretations of its genealogy, a critical history of the present becomes increasingly meaningful and urgent. At the heart of these analyses is the idea that Foucault’s courses and the reception of neoliberalism provide a privileged window into this history. By drawing out deep connections to his work, as well as some of the highly contingent events surrounding his courses, we are reminded that one of the most dangerous paths we could follow is to reify and dehistoricize the variety of engagements with neoliberalism and therefore tacitly see neoliberalism as an ahistoric, stable, and ineluctable force resulting from a limited set of intellectual choices. In contrast, this volume explores how neoliberalism emerged as a theme within Foucault’s work and the contours and stakes of how and why this engagement unsettled and provoked debate decades later. In so doing, it seeks to offer a better foundation for thinking about the present, neoliberal or otherwise, through the past.
NOTES
1. See Gary S. Becker, François Ewald, and Bernard Harcourt, “Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker: American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 ‘Birth of Biopolitics’ lectures.” Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics 614 (2012).
2. As such, this volume continues the exploration of a set of questions raised in a previous collection of essays, which included both of the editors of this book and some of the authors of the chapters, Stephen W. Sawyer and Iain Stewart, eds., In Search of the Liberal Moment: Democracy, Anti-totalitarianism and Intellectual Politics in France, 1950 to Present (New York: Palgrave, 2016). This larger collective enterprise investigates the prospects, interrogations, and impasses that have arisen out of a range of French political and social theorists—especially those of the supposed “liberal moment” in the 1970s—from a historical perspective. See also Pierre Rosanvallon’s Interdisciplinary Political Thought, Oliver Flügel-Martinsen, Franziska Martinsen, Stephen Sawyer, and Daniel Schulz, eds. (Bielefeld, Germany: University of Bielefeld Press, forthcoming).
3. In this book we have specifically chosen not to offer a single definition of neoliberalism, but rather to approach it as a historical phenomenon. As each chapter reveals, we consider the wide variety of interpretations of neoliberalism to be a key part of the history of neoliberalism and its study.
4. Michael Behrent, “Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976–1979,” Modern Intellectual History 6(3) (November 2009): 539–68. Aner Barzilay’s chapter in this volume is partially a response to this article in that it offers a different interpretation of Foucault’s critique of humanism.
5. Daniel Zamora, “Can we Criticize Foucault,” Jacobin Magazine, December 10, 2014: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/foucault-interview/. One might readily note that the debate exploded in the pages of Jacobin Magazine, the publisher of Zamora’s much-read essay and interview devoted to the subject, which has been one of the central publications behind a growing interest in Marxist thought.
6. Daniel Zamora, “Foucault’s Responsibility,” Jacobin Magazine, December 15, 2014: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/michel-foucault-responsibility-socialist/; Daniel Drezner, “Why Michel Foucault Is the Libertarian’s Best Friend,” Washington Post, December 11, 2014: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/11/why-michel-foucault-is-the-libertarians-best-friend/?utm_term=.55f0a7deb5a3.
7. José Luis Moreno Pestaña, Foucault, la gauche, et la politique (Paris: Textuel, 2011); Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault. Sur le néolibéralisme, la théorie et la politique (Paris: Fayard, 2012).
8. For a blog discussion of the Zamora debate in which a number of leading Foucault scholars commented, such as Stuart Elden, Stephen Shapiro, Michael Behrent and others see Stuart Elden, “Foucault and Neoliberalism—a few thoughts in response to the Zamora piece in Jacobin,” December 17, 2014: https://progressive geographies.co/2014/12/17/foucault-and-neoliberalism-a-few-thoughts-in-response-to-the-zamora-piece-in-jacobin/. The ongoing history of the debate can be found here at the Foucault News blog: https://michel-foucault.com/category/neoliberalism/; Serge Audier, Penser le néolibéralisme : Le moment néolibéral, Foucault et la crise du socialism (Lormont: Editions Le Bord de l’eau, 2015).
9. Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent, eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism (New York: Polity Press, 2015).
10. Stuard Elden, “Foucault and Neoliberalism.” Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics, Working Paper No. 614 (Chicago: University of Chicago Law School, 2012), 4.
11. See Mathew Specter’s introduction to History and Theory’s special forum devoted to the topic which includes contributions by Michael Behrent, Serge Audier, Matthew Specter, and Mitchell Dean: “Forum: Foucault and Neoliberalism,” History and Theory 54(3) (2015): 367–418.
12. From this point of view, the argument over Foucault’s supposed neoliberalism might also be productively understood as a kind of proxy debate on a set of much larger questions such as: Did the left take a fatal turn in the 1970s when it began to advocate more for those on the margins of society than for the traditional working class? On this reading, during the last forty years the left has fragmented and lost its way. Having once identified itself as a major force fighting against economic exploitation, much of the left in the 1970s abandoned its faith in the possibility of radical socioeconomic change and took a more comfortable, and conservative, seat at the political center. There is also a neoconservative reading of this history, which, in trying to make sense of this same period, blames the New Left for undermining the postwar welfare state, and for ushering in the neoliberal era that prioritizes the politics of identity. For an example of the former reading, see Perry Anderson, The New Old World (London: Verso, 2011); Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2012). For the latter, the list is very long but for the most notable recent example see Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: Harper, 2017) and Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018). The best scholarly example that presumes something like these narratives concerning Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism can be found throughout the various contributions to Zamora and Behrent’s edited volume, Foucault and Neoliberalism. It should not be overlooked that this debate erupted on the eve of Brexit and Trump’s presidency, and thus prefigured an explosive discussion on the liberal-left of the political promises and perils of so-called “identarian politics.”
13. The pressure has risen to the point that a number of scholars of this period have sought to understand the shifts in their own intellectual trajectories across the last third of the twentieth century. One of the best examples is Pierre Rosanvallon’s Notre histoire intellectuelle et politique (Paris: Seuil, 2018).
14. See, for instance, Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Great Depression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2015); Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2017).
15. On Foucault and Marx, see C. Laval, L. Paltrinieri, and F. Taylan, eds., Marx & Foucault: Lectures, Usages, Confrontations (Paris: Découverte, 2015).
16. Perry Anderson, The New Old World (London: Verso, 2009), 137–213; Mark Lilla, “The Legitimacy of the Liberal Age,” in Mark Lilla, ed., New French Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3–34; Tony Judt, Thinking the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 2013).
17. Étienne Balibar, “Lettre d’Étienne Balibar à l’éditeur du cours,” in Michel Foucault, Théories et institutions pénales. Cours au Collège de France, 1971–1972 (Paris: EHESS/Seuil/Gallimard, 2015), 285–89. See also, Étienne Balibar, “L’anti-Marx de Michel Foucault,” in Laval, Paltrinieri, and Taylan, Marx & Foucault, 84–104.
18. On Rosanvallon’s account of his relationship with Foucault at this time, see his 2016–2017 Collège de France lectures: https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/pierre-rosanvallon/course-2016-2017.htm. Foucault also makes a number of references to Rosanvallon’s work in the Birth of Biopolitics lectures, stating, for example: “The market as reality and political economy as theory both certainly played an important role in the liberal critique.” However, as Pierre Rosanvallon’s important book has confirmed, “liberalism is neither their consequence nor their development.” (Michel Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchel [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008], 320).
19. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le capitalisme utopique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1979).
20. This disagreement went deep enough that Foucault apparently stated in the context of a seminar at the Collège de France that if Rosanvallon was correct, then he was necessarily wrong. (Personal interview with Pierre Rosanvallon by Stephen Sawyer.)
21. Nicos Poulantzas suggested, for example, that “Foucault’s indisputable merits are therefore to be found in another region. What is truly remarkable is the fact that such discourse, which tends to blot out power by dispersing it among tiny molecular vessels, is enjoying great success at a time when the expansion and weight of the State are assuming proportions never seen before” (State, Power, Socialism [London: Verso, 1980].)
22. See for example, Daniel Zamora, “Foucault, the Excluded, and the Neoliberal Erosion of the State,” in Zamora and Behrent, Foucault and Neoliberalism, 79–80.
23. Foucault wrote in his 1971–1972 lectures: “Tout cet ensemble de transformations est lié à la naissance d’un État” (Théories et Institutions Pénales), 232.
24. Foucault claims, for example, in the Birth of Biopolitics lectures: “The problem of bringing under state control, of (étatisation) is at the heart of the questions I have tried to address.” (Birth of Biopolitics, 77). As Michel Senellart notes in his comments on the Security, Territory, Population lectures, “it is neither a question of denying the state nor of installing it in an overarching position.” (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 494). On this, see Stephen W. Sawyer, “4ème Session : Autour De Michel Foucault, ‘La Société Punitive (1972–1973)’” EHESS, https://www.canal-u.tv/video/ehess/4eme_session_autour_de_michel_foucault_la_societe_punitive_1972_1973.13921; S. Sawyer, “The State that Wasn’t Brought Back In: Foucault and the Neo-Weberian Episteme,” Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, Columbia University, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u2JG40_y4I; S. Sawyer, “Foucault’s Notion of the State,” Journée d’étude autours de M. Foucault, Théories et institutions pénales Cours au Collège de France 1972–1973 (June 2, 2015), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHOSv16moLM.
25. See, for example, Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, “Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government,” The British Journal of Sociology 43(2) (1992): 173–205.
26. A number of recent works have highlighted the place of the state in Foucault’s work and scholarship on Foucault. See, for example, Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen, State Phobia and Civil Society: The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Thomas Lemke, “An Indigestible Meal? Foucault, Governmentality and State Theory,” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 8(2) (2011): 43–64; Timothy Mitchell’s “Society, Economy, and the State Effect” in George Steinmetz, ed., State/Culture: State-formation After the Cultural Turn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Stephen W. Sawyer, “Foucault and the State,” The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 36(1) (2015): 135–64; Arnault Skornicki, La grande soif de l’État. Michel Foucault avec les sciences sociales (Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2015).
27. Arnold Davidson notes, for example, that Foucault’s critique of the state takes aim at both liberal and Marxist conceptions of state power: “Michel Foucault’s central contribution to political philosophy was his progressive development and refinement of a new conception of power, one that put into question the two reigning conceptions of power, the juridical conception found in classical liberal theories and the Marxist conception organized around the notions of State apparatus, dominant class, mechanisms of conservation and juridical superstructure” (Psychiatric Power, Collège de France lectures, introduction).