History and Theory 54 (October 2015), 367-371

Wesleyan University 2015 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10765

Forum: Foucault and Neoliberalism

1.
INTRODUCTION
MATTHEW SPECTER

Liberalism, on the other hand, is imbued with the principle:

One always governs too much.
Michel Foucault, 19791

In the summer of 2015, at a debate in Paris between the philosophers Elizabeth

Roudinesco and Marcel Gauchet, Gauchet mentioned the trouble around Foucaults 1979 lecture course at the Collge de France, The Birth of Biopolitics2:
Even the most zealous disciples of Foucault have been forced to recognize,
not without embarrassment, that he felt an affinity [il se sent en affinit] with
the neoliberal turn then underway.3 Yet as Mitchell Dean, one of the contributors to this forum, notes, The vast bulk of Foucauldian commentary and
analysis would reject the idea of an affirmative relationship between Foucault and
neoliberalism.4 Under the title, The Birth of Biopolitics, the lectures barely
touched on the promised theme, instead delving into the intellectual history and
significance of the neoliberal economic and social theories of Germanys postWorld War II social market economy (Ordoliberalism) and the representatives
of the Chicago School (Milton Friedman, Theodore W. Schultz, Gary Becker):5
This years course ended up being devoted entirely to what should have been
only its introduction.6
Last year, a French sociologist, Daniel Zamora, published an edited volume on
Foucault and the neoliberal temptation,7 which has attracted new attention to a
debate that has been brewing in the last five or six years on the questions raised
by the 1979 lectures.8 One of the contributors to this forum, American historian
Michael Behrent, was the first to raise the hypothesis of an affirmative relation1. Michel Foucault, Course Summary, in The Birth of Biopolitics, ed. Michel Sennelart, transl.
Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
2. Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collge de France, 197879 (Paris:
Seuil-Gallimard, 2004).
3. See http://tinyurl.com/ohtlywl (accessed August 26, 2015).
4. Mitchell Dean, Foucault Must Not Be Defended, History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 390
(this issue).
5. Schultz and Becker were recipients of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1979 and 1984 respectively.
6. Foucault, Biopolitics, 317.
7. Daniel Zamora, Critiquer Foucault: Les annes 1980 et la tentation neoliberale (Brussels: Editions Aden, 2014).
8. For an archive of this growing body of debate and commentary, see http://foucaultnews.com/
category/neoliberalism/ (accessed August 26, 2015).

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matthew specter

ship to neoliberal economic thinking in a series of essays he published in 2009

and 2010. (Behrent and Dean are contributors to the English translation of Zamoras book.9) The debate has been advanced still further by the 2015 publication of
a major new study of Foucault by one of the leading historians of neoliberalism,
Serge Audier.10 Our contributors are therefore partisans in an unfolding debate,
but they eschew the extremes of presentist and historicist reduction to which
it has been prone. Neither Behrent, Dean, nor Audier goes as far as Jos Luis
Moreno Pestaa, who argues in Foucault, la gauche, et la politique (2010) that
Foucault was totally convinced by the neoliberal discourse,11 or philosopher
and sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, who, in La dernire leon de Michel
Foucault (2012) argues that Foucault offered little criticism of neoliberalism, but
that, on the contrary, he seemed caught up in it and was prepared to give it his
tacit assent.12 Although the contributors do share the contextualist ambitions
of the Zamora contributors to locate Foucault in the French intellectual-political
field of the late 1970s (for example, his proximity to a non-Marxist but still left
critique of the welfare state), they are more interested in these essays in the philosophical dimensions of Foucaults lectures, and are more careful to distinguish
neoliberalism as a political program from neoliberalism as an epistemology or
style of thought.
The contributors also avoid the presentist temptation among some scholars to
develop a Foucauldian critique of contemporary neoliberalism out of Foucaults
1979 lectures, conflating or ignoring the differences between the contexts of
1979 and 2015. In their 2009 La nouvelle raison du monde: Essai sur la socit
nolibrale,13 for example, philosopher Pierre Dardot and sociologist Christian
Laval assume that Foucault is an unproblematic theoretical ally and resource for
contemporary critique. In her recent book, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalisms
Stealth Revolution, Wendy Brown takes a more nuanced position but succumbs
to some of the same errors. She alternately emphasizes the extraordinary prescience that makes his conceptualization a useful springboard for theorizing
neoliberalisms dedemocratizing effects,14 but recognizes that Foucaults assessment of neoliberalism in 1979 is of very limited utility for critical democratic
theory today: Foucaults relative indifference to democracy and to capital constitutes the major limitations in his framework for my specific purposes.15 The
contributors do not suggest that a Foucauldian critique of neoliberalism is not
9. Foucault and Neoliberalism, ed. Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent (Cambridge, MA, and
Oxford, UK: Polity, 2016).
10. Serge Audier, Penser le nolibralisme: Le moment nolibral, Foucault, et la crise du
socialisme (Lormont: Le Bord de lEau, 2015).
11. Jos Luis Moreno Pestaa, Foucault, la gauche, et la politique (Paris: Editions Textuel, 2010),
120.
12. Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, La dernire leon de Michel Foucault. Sur le nolibralisme, la thorie et la politique (Paris: Fayard, 2012), 18
13. P. Dardot and C. Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde: Essai sur la socit nolibrale (Paris:
La Dcouverte, 2009).
14. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalisms Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone
Books, 2014), 50.
15. Ibid., 77.

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possible,16 but they insist that the 1979 lectures not only lack an incipient critique,
but may in fact have been describing very different terrain from a very different
set of perspectives.
The question of Foucaults normative perspective in these lectures is at the
root of the very public controversy that has emerged. Methodologically, too,
they are a puzzle: neither archaeology, nor genealogy, neither techniques of the
self nor problematizations, but an elusive hybrid of these modes of Foucaults
histories.17 This uncategorizability may be an attribute of his public lectures,
which Foucault utilized as an experimental, exploratory, and provisional form,
and which therefore requires of us an extra degree of interpretive caution, as one
of Foucaults editors, Bernard Harcourt, has urged.18 However, one can begin
to locate the 1979 course methodologically by noting that a shift in Foucaults
account of the relationship of subjects to power occurs between the publication
of the first and second volumes of the History of Sexuality, that is, in 1976 and
1984 respectively.19 The 1979 lectures do not mark a liberal turn per se; rather
they appear to form one node in a longer reworking of his ontology of power. As
Foucault wrote in 1984: Power is not an evil/ Power is strategic games. . . . The
more open the game, the more attractive and fascinating it is.20 One wonders
whether part of what drew Foucault to his comparative study of German ordoliberalism, American neoliberalism, and French neoliberalism was that all three
conceptualized the economy as a kind of game,21 and that this game was intellectually or epistemologically suggestive. As he puts it in one of the lectures, neoliberal analyses are epistemologically significant because they claim to change
what constituted in fact the object, or domain of objects, the general field of
reference of economic analysis.22 And this purchase of neoliberal epistemology
on the constitution of domains appears to have spoken to his methodological
concerns as a historian. What I wanted to doand this is what was at stake in
the analysiswas to see the extent to which we could accept that the analysis of
micro-powers, or procedures of governmentality, is not confined by definition to
a precise domain determined by the sector of the scale, but should be considered
simply as a point of view, a method of decipherment which may be valid for the
whole scale, whatever its size.23
16. See for example, Behrent, in Zamora and Behrent eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism, 180.
17. Gary Gutting, Foucaults Mapping of History, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault,
ed. Gary Gutting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
18. Bernard Harcourt, cited in Colin Gordon, A Note on Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker: American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucaults 1979 Birth of Biopolitics Lectures. A conversation with Gary Becker, Franois Ewald, and Bernard Harcourt, Foucault News (February 2013), 10.
19. See Thomas McCarthy, The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and The Frankfurt School,
in Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 65; Gary Gutting, Foucaults Mapping of History, in Gutting,
ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 37.
20. The quote is from Foucault, The Ethics of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom (January
1984). Cited in McCarthy, The Critique of Impure Reason, 67.
21. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 201.
22. Ibid., 222, italics mine.
23. Ibid., 186, italics mine.

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matthew specter

In Can the Critique of Capitalism be Antihumanist?, Michael Behrent leaves

synchronic political and intellectual contextualization to the side, to focus exclusively on Foucaults philosophical project: If Foucault displayed an affinity
for neoliberalism, it was, in part, because he believed that neoliberals were, like
him, attempting to think beyond the category of man.24 Through a startling
intertextual analysis of the 1978 and 1979 lectures on the one hand, and The
Order of Things (1966) on the other, Behrent offers a compelling hypothesis:
the reinterpretation of the homo economicus of classical economics by neoliberal
economists of the Chicago School as a subject with interests rather than an
anthropological essence, represented an intriguing escape route from the anthropologism of the modern episteme he analyzed in the sixties: the very idea of
a subject of interest functions as a butea doorstop, as it werethat blocks
transcendentalizing claims.25
While Behrent privileges The Order of Things in his interpretation of the neoliberalism lectures here,26 Audier recovers three neglected contemporary texts
for his intertextual analysis. Like Behrent, Audier makes Foucaults relationship
to Kant central to his analysis. The question of whether Foucaults attention
to Kants essay What is Enlightenment? in several key texts of the 1980s,
including his first lecture at the Collge in 1983, represented a fundamental shift
in his thought has received close scrutiny elsewhere.27 Audier draws our attention to several overlooked texts: an essay on What is Critique? Critique and
Aufklrung (May 1978); a lecture, The Analytical Philosophy of Power (June
1978); and an interview with a magazine, Gai Pied (July 1978), which together
illuminate why Foucault found the neoliberalisms of the postwar era a fruitful
vocabulary for analyzing opportunities afforded by the crisis of disciplinary
society. Audier helps us to grasp why, as he writes, for Foucault, one cannot
say that neoliberalism is either good or bad. . . but rather in Foucaults recurrent phrasing, that it is interesting or worthwhile.28
In Foucault Must Not Be Defended, Mitchell Dean offers his appraisal of
the Zamora-Behrent volumes efforts to contextualize Foucault and a critique of
the field of governmentality studies that is also a legacy of Foucaults 1978
and 1979 lectures. Dean underscores that Foucaults neoliberal moment is not
the same context as our own. This move permits him to privilege reading Foucaults work of the late 1970s in its French intellectual and political contexts, to
conclude like Behrent that there was a certain elective affinity that obtained
between Foucaults own political-intellectual trajectory and neoliberalism,29 and
at the same time to resist the accounts of those who would give us a Foucault
24. Michael Behrent, Can the Critique of Capitalism be Antihumanist?, History and Theory 54,
no. 3 (2015), 374 (this issue).
25. Ibid., 384.
26. However, see Behrents caveats, at 385, n. 54.
27. See, for example, Christopher Norris, What is Enlightenment? Kant and Foucault, in Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 159-196.
28. Serge Audier, Neoliberalism through Foucaults Eyes, History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015),
412, 415 (this issue).
29. Dean, Foucault Must Not Be Defended, 397.

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consistent with [contemporary] economic liberalism30 (as evidenced by the

appreciative readings of Foucault by contemporary economists associated with
the Chicago and Freiburg schools).31 Finally, like Audier, Dean argues that there
is a tendency [in the 1979 course] for liberalism and neoliberalism to lose their
substantive character and become identified with the ethos of criticism,32 and it
is this ambiguity that has permitted governmentality studies to be appropriated
by neoliberals themselves.33
With the publication of all thirteen volumes of Foucaults Collge de France
lectures (19701984) completed in May 2015, the time is right for a reassessment
of the broader question of Foucault as historian of the present. Behrent, Audier,
and Dean all emphasize the late 1970s as a liminal period in Foucaults political
thought. But their careful readings also help us approach the 1979 lectures as a
species of contemporary history-writing, one that asks of us now what Foucault
asked of historians then: what would it mean to write history if you do not
accept a priori the existence of things like the state, society, the sovereign, and
subjects?34
Central Connecticut State University

30. Ibid., 403.

31. Ibid., 390, fn. 4.
32. Ibid., 401.
33. Ibid., 402.
34. Foucault, Biopolitics, 3.