Economy and Society Volume 37 Number 1 February 2008: 115 134

Michel Foucault and liberal intelligence

Jacques Donzelot
The twentieth anniversary of Foucaults death was celebrated throughout the world last year (2004) with a number of events which sought to demonstrate the enduring relevance of one of the greatest French intellectuals of the last century. But by just one year they missed the chance of coinciding with the issue that is currently haunting French minds and which came to a kind of climax with the recent referendum on the European Constitution, namely, the relationship between economic liberalism and politics. And yet this is the subject on which Foucaults thought might have seemed most directly pertinent. Michel Foucault invented a remarkable method for challenging the ways in which we think about supposedly universal objects like madness, delinquency, sexuality and government. He did not set out to show the historical relativity of these objects, or even to deny their validity, as has often been said, but postulated a priori their non-existence, thus dismantling all our certainties concerning them, including that of their pure historicity. This enabled him to reveal how something which did not exist could come about, how a set of practices were able to come together to produce a regime of truth with regard to these objects, a combination of power and knowledge which makes it possible to say, at least insofar as this regime of truth succeeded in being effective, what was true and false in matters concerning madness, delinquency, sexuality and government. On each of these subjects Michel Foucault produced a canonical work, apart from that of government or, which comes to the same in view of his analysis of government, of the relationship between economic and political liberalism. Why this omission? Was he prevented from doing so by an early death? It is hard to say since, after having treated the subject with remarkable passion, he suddenly put it aside in order to devote the rest of his life to the delights of a history of subjectivation, which, however

Translated from Esprit, November 2007, Michel Foucault et lintelligence du liberalisme by Graham Burchell, Il Mulino di Chimafucci, Apecchio, 61042 PU, Italy. E-mail: burchell.g@infinito.it Copyright # 2008 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online DOI: 10.1080/03085140701760908

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great its interest, might now be thought not to have the same importance as the subject he abandoned on the way.1 In a way, posterity has rejected this premature abandonment of the question of the government of men in favour of that of the conduct of self. Studies on governmentality are everywhere the most living part of his oeuvre.2 It is only in France that the Foucauldian analysis of liberalism has been accorded scant consideration.3 We would like to help make up for this while freely taking inspiration from his analysis in order to comment on the current political conjuncture in France which is marked, on the one hand, by the negative response to the referendum on the proposed European Constitution, which revealed, if it needed revealing, the extent of the rejection of liberalism, and, on the other, by the Lefts inability to get to grips with globalization rather than resorting to evasion or denial. Liberalism is seen in France as a suspect doctrine, perforce tolerated, but alien to our way of thinking. We think against it rather with it or on the basis of it. Measured against the values of the Republic, it seems to many to be their opposite, the sign of their decline, the mendacious promise of a harmony which in reality can be brought about only by the exacting imposition of the general interest by a State freed from the grip of particular interests. In the main, our political thought is established at a calculated distance from this Anglo-Saxon doctrine: far enough away to avoid succumbing to its evil charms, but not too far, however, to not be able to preserve its principle of resistance to an extremism which might otherwise stifle the universal claims of our republican virtues within the narrow confines of the national framework. In our determination to think against liberalism, without thinking it through and considering what it can teach us, we fail to grasp the reasons for its strength and unlimited expansion, and we adopt an increasingly rigid and sterile position in the development of the world. Foucault applied himself precisely to grasping the import of liberalism as a way of thinking about government and not as a foil to the republican art of government. His reflections occupy two courses of lectures at the Colle ` ge de France, in 1978 and 1979. The first was entitled Security, territory, population (2004a, 2007) and the second The birth of biopolitics (2004b, forthcoming 2008). Not having followed these series of Foucaults lectures nor indeed any of the others, and now occupying a position far removed from the group of devotees who maintain the cult of Foucaults memory, I must say that I undertook the reading of the transcripts of two years of my old teachers lectures without any particular expectation, with that strange curiosity that one may feel for a voice which was once familiar and stimulating before becoming irritating and somewhat foreign. However, rather than a musty odour of the past, what quickly struck me was the astonishing topicality of this analysis of liberalism more than a quarter of a century after it was formulated. Here was a way of showing wonderfully well how the power of the economy rests on an economy of power, both at the time of the emergence of liberalism at the end of the eighteenth century as well as at that of neo-liberalism between 1930 and 1950. The respect in which the

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analysis is topical and new is that it makes it possible to understand the bifurcation of French and Anglo-Saxon political thought, the insistence of the former on law as the expression of a will and its vision of the constitution as the fruit of the individuals voluntary renunciation of his sovereignty, in short, everything we have just lived through with the referendum on Europe. It is equally topical and new in enabling us to see how neo-liberalism calls for a completely different compromise with the idea of social justice than the one represented by the Welfare State in relation to classical liberalism. Or rather, it enables us to see how in order to retain its resources and effectiveness this compromise calls for revision and adaptation rather than for a tooth and nail defence of it as it is. First of all I would like to present these two moments of Foucaults analysis of the birth of liberalism and its renewal in the middle of the twentieth century, and then draw from this some comments on our present context more than twenty-five years later.

The modern art of government The real object of the first, 1978 series of lectures, Security, territory, population (2007), is the birth of political economy. What is the relation between the title of these lectures and their object? At first sight there appears to be no relation, and the reason for this is the progressive drift of the lectures from an analysis of power towards that of governmentality, the concept which Foucault coined that year in order to explain the introduction of political economy into the art of government. At the start of the lectures Foucault sets out to describe the transition, which takes place in the eighteenth century, from a form of power targeted on a territory to a form of power bearing on a population. The approach and periodization is similar to that adopted for the history of punishment in Discipline and punish from the spectacle of the supplice to the gentle way in punishment (Foucault, 1977) or in the conclusion of Volume 1 of the History of sexuality from the right of death to the power over life (Foucault, 1979) which announced a general reflection on bio-power which was due to be undertaken in these lectures. So we are on familiar ground ready to listen to an author who is a master of his art and his subject and who is about to restate in a new register the theses of his main work, Discipline and punish. He announces three themes for his demonstration of the shift of the point of application of power from the territory to the population: the town, scarcity and disease. rete) of the Within the framework of a power which aims for the safety (su territory, each of these three objects is treated by a precise logic of demarcation, separation and fortification. The territory is like an edifice which must be protected against internal and external threats. Towns must be fortified so they are suitable for commerce and manufacture by being protected from the outside and so that they bring their wealth only to the capital, the sovereigns seat. The countryside must also be controlled, by the law of the

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feudal lord, of course, but also and especially by the sovereigns restrictions with regard to everything concerning the grain trade, where high prices will affect those living in the towns, causing shortages and provoking riots. The sovereign also bans peasants from hoarding grain to force up prices and from selling abroad. They must make the smallest possible profit so that those in the towns are fed at the lowest cost. Finally, faced with epidemic diseases like smallpox, leprosy or cholera, one must proceed by separating and isolating those affected. In short, the safety of the sovereigns territory requires him to resort principally to measures of separation and interdiction.

Population and the birth of governmentality The mechanisms of power will change completely, Foucault explains, when the sovereign no longer has to concern himself with the safety of his territory but with the security of the population. With regard to the towns, the problem will no longer be one of enclosing them within fortified limits but of opening them up to allow for their growth in order to avoid urban congestion. The concern shifts, therefore, from one of what limit to impose to that of facilitating the proper circulation of people, of commodities and even of air. The same principle will prevail for the prevention of famine: instead of imposing a battery of restrictions on the grain trade, the preferred policy is to allow the free flow of commodities and achieve the self-regulation of prices, allowing profits to be made which will then be invested in new cultivation, increasing the amount of grain for sale the following year, and hence lowering prices, just as allowing the possibility of imports will discourage hoarding more successfully than prohibitions. Of course, this will not eliminate revolts entirely, but it will deprive them of their justification because in acting in this way the sovereign will be acting in conformity with the nature of things and not by means of prohibitions for whose ineffectiveness he will be held responsible. The same nature of things is found at work again with inoculation and vaccination, which consist in quelling the disease by permitting it to enter the body so that the latter learns to protect itself from it, just as allowing a high price of grain finally leads to the price rise subsiding. In place of the necessity to compel obedience in order to ensure the safety of his territory, the sovereign opts for the proper use of freedom in order to maximize the security of the population. But in what sense, then, is he still a sovereign? What is there in this notion of power applied to the population which involves the exercise of sovereignty? As Michel Foucault proceeds with his analysis, he finds an awkwardness in combining the terms sovereign and population: saying that the sovereign no longer rules over subjects but over a population makes the two terms jar on each other. As a result, in relation to the notion of population, he starts to use the term government in preference to that of sovereign. While I have been speaking about population a word has

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constantly recurred you will say that this was deliberate, but it may not be entirely so and this is the word government. The more I have spoken about population, the more I have stopped saying sovereign (Foucault, 2007, p. 76). But what precisely is involved in the need to couple the word population with government rather than sovereignty? Basically, it is the observation that with the emergence of population there is not only a change in the technologies of power but also in the model of government. At that point, government appears as something other than a technology of power. Or at least it now serves as a frame of reference for the exercise of power. In the universe of sovereignty, precisely, the key reference is to the family, and the central question is: how can the spirit of the family patriarch be introduced into the management of the State, that is to say, the economy, the concern for the good of all?
the essential component, the central element . . . in the Princes education . . . is the government of the family, which is called precisely economy . . . how to introduce economy that is to say, the proper way of managing individuals, goods, and wealth, like the management of a family by a father who knows how to direct his wife, his children, and his servants, who knows how to make his familys fortune prosper? (Foucault, 2007, pp. 94 5)

In fact this model of the family as the standard for the sovereigns government is called into question with the appearance of population as the target of government, because, when it is taken as the object of government, population includes several phenomena which go beyond the family model. How are major epidemics to be managed as though by a good father? And how can a familial logic accommodate the upward spiral of work and wealth made possible by the regulation of flows which replaces the old prohibitions? The family is no longer the model for the population but a simple segment of the latter and, as such, an instrument, a relay which may help in its government (in the domain of sexuality, demography, consumption . . . ).
the family now appears as an element within the population and as a fundamental relay in its government. . . . It is therefore no longer a model; it is a segment whose privilege is simply that when one wants to obtain something from the population concerning sexual behavior, demography, the birth rate, or consumption, then one has to utilize the family. (Foucault, 2007, pp. 104 5)

This analysis of the transition from the family as the model of government to the family as a relay of government is not new.4 But Michel Foucault gives it a theoretical extension of great breadth by developing the concept of governmentality which, in contrast with the family model associated with sovereignty, he defines as that complex form of power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument (Foucault, 2007, p. 108).

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From this point his lectures pursue a completely different direction than the one announced. Instead of elaborating on the mutation of techniques of power due to the shift of target from territory to population, they focus entirely on this new concept of governmentality and undertake to show, first, how the idea of government is born; second, how, subsequently, this idea is introduced into tat, which appeared in the the State under the cover of the model of raison dE sixteenth century; and, last, how in the eighteenth century it conquered the entire State thanks to political economy, which constitutes an accomplished form of governmentalization of the State. Where did the idea of government come from? Not from the Greeks, where the king pilots the city-state exactly like a ship, concerned solely with its direction but without particular concern for its inhabitants, but rather in the Jewish people who are not concerned with the territory so much as with the population understood as a flock on the move over which the shepherd must keep watch while taking care for every sheep.
What is the shepherd (berger)? Is he someone whose strength strikes mens eyes, like the sovereigns or gods, like the Greek gods, who essentially manifest themselves through their splendor? Not at all. The shepherd is someone who keeps watch. He keeps watch in the sense, of course, of keeping an eye out for possible evils . . . in the sense of vigilance with regard to any possible misfortune. . . . He will see to it that things are best for each of the animals of his flock. . . . The shepherd (pasteur) directs all his care towards others and never towards himself. (Foucault, 2007, pp. 127 8)

From this Jewish origin, the idea of government enters Christian culture and organizes life to such an extent that the Wars of Religion can be read as directly linked to this question of the mode of government of men which is implied by questions of theology and religious practice. The same goes for the history of the Church which can be read as being organized entirely around responses to the counter-conducts (or resistances, if one prefers) of asceticism, religious communities, mysticism, the return to usury, eschatological beliefs. . . . Throughout this medieval period, the sovereigns government is that of a shepherd leading his people to eternal bliss, just like the father of a family or the abbot of a monastery. A first discontinuity appears after the Wars of Religion, with the idea that the sovereign needs an additional power in order to impose himself on his subjects, and this supplementary power will come from the idea of the Res publica understood as the stabilization of the State, and thus the source of the tat. With raison dE tat the end of government is not celestial model of raison dE bliss, but . . . the State itself. What exactly is meant by the word State? Sometimes it designates a domain, sometimes a jurisdiction, sometimes a condition of life (a status) and sometimes the quality of a thing whereby it remains in a state of good order (that is to say, without movement). Well, Foucault says, the sovereign Republic is nothing other than this: a territory,

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a set of rules, a set of individuals with their respective status, and all living in the greatest stability. The sovereign is no longer defined in reference to the salvation of his flock and the final happiness of each of his sheep after its passage through this world. He is defined in relation to the State: The end of tat is the state itself, and if there is something like perfection, raison dE happiness, or felicity, it will only ever be the perfection, happiness, or felicity of the state itself. There is no last day . . . nothing like a unified and final temporal organization (Foucault, 2007, p. 258). At this point the sovereign does not follow divine laws so much as exercise command over the laws, and he commands the laws in order to preserve the State, to increase its strength and its wealth and, in order to do this, to increase its population, within the framework of its territory whose physical extension he defends against the encroachments of other sovereigns. Liberalism asserts its superiority as a new governmental rationality against tat. And here again Foucault encounters the question of this model of raison dE population which had got in the way of his plan and which he can now integrate with more confidence thanks to this detour through the history of government. For the point of considering this first form of governmentalizatat, is that it makes it possible to account for tion of the State, with raison dE the way in which the relation to population changes from one regime of tat is the government to the other. What matters in the framework of raison dE quantity of population. It is an absolute commodity, a quantifiable wealth on which a careful eye must be kept because the sovereigns wealth depends on its number, its work and its docility. This is the objective of police, which takes care of the population in this respect through the regulation of its health, production and circulation. Likewise, mercantilism, understood as the tat, required economic theory corresponding to raison dE
first, that every country strive to have the largest possible population, second, that the entire population be put to work, third, that the wages paid to the population be as low as possible so that . . . one can thus sell the maximum amount abroad, which will bring about the import of gold. (Foucault, 2007, p. 337)

Within the framework of political economy, on the other hand, population is no longer a matter of numbers, a pure quantity or the greatest number possible, but a substance whose optimum size varies according to the evolution of wages, employment and prices. This substance is not controlled but regulates itself according to resources which involve the development of commerce not only between private individuals, but also between countries. Instead of commanding mens actions, one should act on the interactions between them, conduct their conduct, in short, manage rather than control through rules and regulations:
number is not in itself a value for the economistes. Certainly, the population must be of a sufficient size to produce a lot. . . . But it must not be too large . . .

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precisely so that wages are not too low, that is to say, so that people have an interest in working and also so that they can bolster prices through their consumption. (Foucault, 2007, p. 345)

tat to The progress of governmentality in the transition from raison dE liberalism consists in the contribution of a reflection on governmental practices. Governing is no longer ruling, asserting a power, but recognizing that truth is told elsewhere than at the centre of the State, or at least one truth, that of the market, which suggests that action is no longer to be conceived as the imposition of a will but as a balance between too much and too little. The intelligence of liberalism as a mode of government resides entirely in this pragmatism, this endeavour to determine what it is advisable to do (the agenda) and not do (the non-agenda).5 The intervention of governmentality will have to be limited, but this limit will not just be negative: An entire domain of possible and necessary interventions appears within the field thus delimited [by the principle of respect for natural processes]. . . . It will be necessary to . . . manage and no longer to regiment through rules and regulations (Foucault, 2007, pp. 352 3).

The State and the social irrationality of capitalism With political economy, the end of governmental reason is no longer the State tat but society and its and its wealth as with the model of raison dE economic progress. Its role is no longer to curb a freedom which is the expression of mans inevitably evil nature, but to regulate it, by means including prohibition if necessary. For there is no freedom that is not produced, that is not to be constructed, and this construction takes place through interventions by the State, not by its mere disengagement. But how far can and must this interventionism go without turning into its opposite, into an insidious or avowed anti-liberalism? This is the question which is the starting point of neo-liberal reflection and whose origins and reasoning Foucault analyses and reconstructs in the lectures of the following year, 1979, The birth of biopolitics (Foucault, 2004b, 2008 forthcoming). The steady growth of the States role in all the democracies, however diverse its manifestations, provokes the emergence of a neo-liberal reflection which reaches its peak between the 1930s and 1960s. The idea that this tendency of the role of the State to increase should be contained, indeed reversed, occupies liberal economists to the point of becoming an obsession. Although Keynes is a liberal, in his way, or anyway a thinker hostile to socialism, the success of his theories disturbs the pure liberals because potentially it puts the State in the position of directing the market rather than just producing it. But the neoliberals fear is based on the uncertain drift of the democracies and the rise of Nazism and Stalinism. What commonality does an ultimately liberal doctrine

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like Keynesianism have with these monstrous figures of power? Just one, but an important one: the growth of State power. According to the neo-liberals, the destruction of the State from within by Nazism only goes to prove that the State cannot meet the demand for its own indefinite extension without disintegrating and that it is not the bulwark one thought it was against the irrationality associated with capitalism. The neo-liberals want to answer the challenge of what Max Weber called, the irrational rationality of capitalism. But, as Michel Foucault shows, they mean to do so in a way that is strictly opposed to that of the Marxists. In the thirties the latter were grouped around Horkheimer and Adorno in the celebrated Frankfurt School, looking for a social rationality whose application could counter the effects of economic irrationality. At the same time, the neoliberals were grouped together in another German city, Freiburg and would regroup after the War around a journal called Ordo. Among them there were many economists, some of whom would make important contributions to the guiding ideas of the post-war German Federal Republic and others to the neoliberal Chicago School organized around Milton Friedman. They were not seeking a social rationality to correct economic irrationality, but rather an economic rationality capable of nullifying the social irrationality of capitalism:
and history had it [Foucault adds] that in 1968 the last disciples of the Frankfurt School clashed with the police of a government inspired by the Freiburg School, thus finding themselves on opposite sides of the barricades, for such was the double, parallel, crossed, and antagonistic fate of Weberianism in Germany. (Foucault, 2004b, p. 110)

The ordo-liberals ask: what is the deficiency of classical liberal thought which exposes the economy to increasing pressure for State intervention? And they find this flaw to be its naive confidence in the virtue of laissez-faire, in the illusion that the market is a natural phenomenon that only has to be respected. This naturalistic naivety then obliges the State to intervene to deal with problems and needs that the market cannot resolve or satisfy on its own. Treating the market as a natural entity really amounts to making it bear the blame for everything that does not work, playing off the nature of needs against the nature of the market, in short, gradually discrediting the latter in the name of the former. The State must thus intervene because of the market, in order to compensate for its deficiencies and to limit dysfunctions in the mechanism of exchange. But in doing this one is setting the State to work against the market. The neo-liberals then say this is a double misunderstanding, first of the primacy of the market in regulating exchange and, second, of what makes the market work, which is inequality rather than equality or, rather, an equality of inequality. Because what is important in the market is not the principle of more or less satisfactory exchange but that of more or less effective competition. The principle of exchange assumes a principle of equality: that kind of original and fictional situation imagined by eighteenth century liberal economists. The essential thing of the market is elsewhere; it is

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competition . . . that is to say, not equivalence but on the contrary inequality (Foucault, 2004b, p. 122). Competition is not a natural phenomenon but a formal mechanism, a way of getting inequalities to function effectively, of leaving no inequality sure of itself and master of its position. The role of the State is to intervene in favour of the market rather than because of the market, in such a way that the market is always maintained and that the principle of equal inequality produces its effect.6 Competition is not a natural given: the effects of competition are due only to the essence that characterizes and constitutes it. . . . Competition is an eidos . . . a principle of formalization. . . . It is, as it were, a formal game between inequalities (Foucault, 2004b, p. 124). What does this theorization of competition imply in terms of governmental rationality? What change does it call for in the role of the State? If what counts is no longer, in the first place, the man of exchange, the man of need and consumption, but the man of competition, the man of enterprise and production, then we should encourage everything in him that partakes of this spirit of enterprise and place our reliance in man as entrepreneur: as the entrepreneur of an economic activity, of course, but also as an entrepreneur of himself the wage-earner is only ever someone who exploits his own human capital and as a member of a local collectivity taking care for the maintenance and increase in value of their goods. And what does this mean for the social, for the compensation for the economic and the injustices generated by its irrationality? Its meaning is no longer exactly that of a remedy for competition and so of the reduction of inequalities, but solely that of maintaining each individual within the system of inequalities, a means of keeping the individual in the framework of equal inequality which ensures competition precisely because there is no exclusion. In short, social policy is no longer a means for countering the economic, but a means for sustaining the logic of competition.

The way of sovereignty versus the way of utility: the example of the referendum on the proposed European Constitution Here, then, is an analysis of the birth of liberalism, and of its aggiornamento in the middle of the twentieth century, which gives us a new understanding by integrating it within the question of the art of government, or of governmentality in the neologism invented by Foucault. Produced at the end of 1970s, this reading may still surprise today by the singularity of a position which undertakes to link liberalism and politics together methodically, instead of distinguishing or opposing them as we usually do in France. It is precisely for this reason that we can find material here for commenting on a recent debate between the partisans of the political meaning, for us in France, advocates of the role of the State and national sovereignty, and of the European social model, for which we provide the model par excellence and, on the other hand, the supporters of liberalism, who, within the framework of globalization, are prepared to do without both this national sovereignty and the famous social

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model for the sake of a projected European Constitution which pays scant deference to either principle, while promising their better protection, and/or of an advance of modernity. Not that Michel Foucaults analysis enabled this debate to be decided in advance.7 But it does allow us to clarify the presuppositions of the opposing forces thinking. What is the situation of public law when political economy includes an internal principle of self-limitation of governmental action? How can this selflimitation be given a legal basis? Starting from this question, Foucault develops a distinction which enables us to understand a substantial difference in attitudes towards liberalism, including, it seems to us, those deployed on the occasion of the recent referendum in France. He suggests that two schemas of thought were forged in response to this question and then perpetuated until the present, although with unequal fortune. The first consists in returning to the basis of right as it was affirmed against tat. At that stage, law applied itself to holding back the excesses of raison dE tat by basing itself on the natural and original rights of every raison dE individual, thus defining imprescriptible rights and determining on that basis what falls within the sphere of sovereignty and is therefore, through legitimate concession, within the competence of government, and what is outside this sphere, falling within that of nature.8 Foucault calls this the juridico-deductive approach which he identifies with the French Revolution and with Rousseau:
this approach consists in starting from the rights of man in order to arrive at the limitation of governmentality by way of the constitution of the sovereign. . . . It is a way of posing right from the start the problem of legitimacy and the inalienability of rights through a sort of ideal or real renewal of society, the state, the sovereign, and government. (Foucault, 2004b, p. 41)

This is the way of sovereignty . . . but he is anxious to stress, clearly mischievously, that it is by nature a retroactive approach, even retroactionary he says, coming close to insulting the fathers of the French nation. The second approach does not start from the rights of the governed that must be preserved, but from governmental practice itself, and from the limits that should or should not be imposed on it according to the objectives of governmentality themselves. It refers to a conception of the law (la Loi) which is not conceived as the effect of a will, that of the sovereign or of the sovereign people, but as the effect of a transaction between the legitimate sphere of intervention of individuals and that of the public authority. The law is not the result of a transfer, of a division, but of a compromise, of an interest common to the two parties. Finally, and above all, it brings into play a conception of individual freedom which is not so much juridical in essence as a de facto recognition and consideration of the independence of the governed. The limits of governmental competence will be defined by the limits of the utility of governmental intervention (Foucault, 2004b, p. 42). This is, of course, the approach of utility, of the English utilitarianism of Bentham, understood as the

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way of putting the following question to every government at every moment: is what you are doing useful? Within what limits? Beyond what point does it become harmful? Evidently this is not the revolutionary approach, the way of sovereignty, but that of utility. Foucault tells us that these two approaches, the juridico-deductive approach of sovereignty and the approach of utility, have remained both heterogeneous and co-present in modern history, although the tendency has been for the second to prevail:
of the two systems, one has been strong and has held its ground, while the other has receded. The one that has been strong and has stood firm is, of course, the radical approach which tried to define the juridical limitation of public power in terms of governmental utility. . . . Utility . . . will ultimately be the main criterion for working out the limits of the powers of the public authority . . . in an age in which the problem of utility increasingly comes to encompass all the traditional problems of law. (Foucault, 2004b, p. 45)

Departing from Foucaults text, we could add that this progressive supremacy of the line of utility over that of sovereignty throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is seen in France as well as in Great Britain. Better still, its dominant position appears more clearly in France because it is confronted with a very strong expression of the juridico-deductive approach. It succeeds in asserting itself only inasmuch as the path of sovereignty clearly appears to be in an impasse. Its introduction which cannot be formulated in the English terms of utilitarianism for obvious reasons of national pride will justify resort to a specific theorization. This impasse of sovereignty appears in France with the 1848 revolution which, on the question of the right to work, pits partisans of a minimum State against those of a maximum State. And we see how, at the end of the nineteenth century, the doctrine of social solidarity mile Durkheim constitutes a justification of French acceptance of inspired by E the utility approach, because it questions the State and its intervention in terms of its utility for society rather than of its sovereign basis. Thus, according to this doctrine, the State must act so as to encourage the solidarity of society, but it must act only for this purpose. The State must compensate for the weaknesses of the market in the protection of the population, and so it must produce the social, but it must also refrain from going further and take care not to pave the way for socialism understood as an alternative to the market. Paradoxically, the art of neither too much nor too little as the form of governmentality in the name of utility found a more methodical formulation in France than in most other European countries, the United Kingdom included, since it called upon a different form of knowledge than political economy, that of sociology, and employed a different terminology, that of solidarity.9 The utility approach prevails everywhere in Europe, including here in France, the natural homeland of the sovereignty approach. Even so we should take care to note that the ideological pre-eminence of the latter was never

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renounced. No more was socialism democratic socialism at least which was seen by many as the major form in which sovereignty is accomplished. That there is no consistent idea of a specific socialist governmentality, that it can lead only either to an administrative government, a re-actualizing of raison tat, or to a covert and timidly unavowed liberalism (in the manner of Guy dE Mollet), matters little as long as one ensures the survival of the sovereignty approach which is still experienced as offering a minimal defence against the excesses of liberalism. On the very eve of the moment when we were passing with Mitterrand from darkness into light, Michel Foucault lays stress in his lectures on the absence of a specific, socialist governmental rationality. During the last referendum the line of sovereignty does seem to have served this function of appeal against the dangers of liberalism. The strength of the rejection of liberalism, within the French Left at least, obviously indicates a resurgence of the sovereignty approach. To give a crystal-clear reading of the referendum we need only take up the three points on which the two approaches are distinguished and apply these to the partisans of a yes or no vote. The utility approach, 1) starts from the exercise of government and the question of its desirable extent; 2) puts to work mechanisms of compromise between that which falls within the jurisdiction of the public sphere and that which falls within the sphere of individuals; and 3) understands by freedom the real independence of people. These three characteristics are in fact found in the reasoning of those in favour of a yes vote. The project of a Constitution was born within the government of Europe from the difficulties arising from its size and from the consequent utility of adopting a constitutional regime which improves its governability. So much for the first criterion, that is to say of legislative concern as the starting point. It is born within governmentality and not from the sovereign will of the citizens of Europe. Second, the project of a constitution also belongs to the utility approach since it rests on an art of compromise. Compromise is an essential term in the development of the project. It takes into account the common rules and traditions specific to each country, not forcing any country beyond what is possible as regards its regime of social protection, for example. And if there was a problem in this regard, it arises more from the fear of an abuse of the rules than from a concern for compromise with the so-called affair of the Polish plumber. Finally, freedom is not so much juridical, a commodity that one does or does not give up, as a reality in the form of the independence of people who do what they wish according to their civil traditions in the matter of abortion, for example. As for those who campaigned for a no vote, on this occasion they methodically reproduced all the characteristics of the sovereignty approach. For them, it was not a question of starting from government and its problems, but from peoples constitutive rights. In their eyes, was not the first defect of this constitution that it did not come from a constituent assembly elected by the inhabitants of each country and mandated to decide on the form of collective sovereignty with which they would decide to endow themselves? Nor, for them, was there any question of accepting a law that was the product

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of compromise rather than the expression of their will. The latter must be collective and total or not exist. There was no question for them of giving up their will unless it was to engage in a project conforming to their requirements. The discussion of every article of the law and, a fortiori, of the earlier treatises they were asked to ratify, reached the heights of passion, as if it was a matter of rebuilding the world, rather than of the best way of adapting oneself to it. As for the juridical conception of freedom, they engaged in a universalism of rights and duties incompatible with the relative singularity of peoples in the domain of customs and morals. Thus, the Portuguese were accused of threatening the right of women from other European countries to abortion because they had not yet proclaimed this right. In short, the supporters of a no vote behaved with regard to the project of a European Constitution as if tat. it was a matter of re-enacting the social contract against raison dE Liberalism goes hand in hand with technical progress in matters of governmentality, in the face of which the way of sovereignty seems retroactionary, and recourse to the State an insidious way of returning to raison tat. Does this mean that liberalism and, a fortiori, neo-liberalism have so dE defeated their adversaries that all that they now confront are reactive attitudes which allow their advocates to win only by making the societies to which they belong lose? The question arises especially with regard to neo-liberalism and its role in globalization. Is the political dilemma summed up as having to choose between adherence to ultra-liberalism, the name for neo-liberal doctrine preferred by those taking the sovereignty path and by the extreme Left, and a retroactive, outdated attitude which is incapable of offering any effective purchase on the exercise of government? There is in fact a middle way between neo-liberalism and the retroactive approach dear to the traditional Left, and this is precisely the third way represented by Bill Clinton and adapted to Europe by Tony Blair. But in France we are usually told that this famous third way is no more than a scarcely improved copy of neo-liberalism, which in turn is nothing more than a revival of the old liberal theories, with their original harshness prior to intervention by the State to compensate for their damaging effects. It is on this point that the Foucauldian analysis can usefully help us to get out of the current impasse in which political reasoning finds itself in France. In this analysis we find the demonstration that neo-liberalism is anything but the revival of old liberal theories, because it carries out a decisive shift with regard to both the role of the State and the conception of exchange. To start with, this shift enables a completely different approach to the question of the content of the political option represented by the third way and enables us to compare the latter favourably with the solidariste philosophy of progress which has served as the French Lefts doctrine for more than a century. Foucaults analysis aims to counter the false ideas which have spread about neo-liberalism and, increasingly, about the relationship between the economic and the social. At the forefront of these erroneous claims about neo-liberalism should be placed, Foucault says, that which would see it as no more than a reactivation of old liberal theories in their original harshness. This is a major

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misinterpretation since the problem the neo-liberals confront is no longer that of introducing an unregulated space in order to make way for laisser-faire, but is to work at producing the conditions for competition, without which the market is only an empty word. Now in order to produce competition the State must not confine itself to laisser-faire; it must produce an adequate framework. To illustrate what the neo-liberals mean by the notion of framework Foucault provides an example which is not without a certain piquancy for us in 2005: the emergence of the Common Agricultural Policy. In 1952, Eucken, one of the most prominent neo-liberals of the Freiburg School, put forward all the reasons why German agriculture, as well the agriculture of other European countries, has never been fully integrated into a market economy due to customs barriers and all kinds of protection made necessary by the unequal degree of technical development of agriculture in each country and by an evident rural overpopulation. Action is therefore necessary on each of these points: it is necessary to intervene in such a way as to facilitate migration from the countryside to the town, to make available improved equipment along with the training needed for people to use it, and to transform the legal regime of farms and encourage their expansion. In other words, to make competition possible the State must act on a level which is not directly economic, but social in the broad sense. The fact that the Common Agricultural Policy has since become perceptibly less a means of social transformation to encourage competition than a system of subsidies in order to avoid this competition in no way detracts from the spirit of the initial approach. What this amounts to saying is that the government is not to intervene on the effects of the market through a policy of welfare but on society itself so that it can be regulated by the market. No doubt it is possible to create a competitive capability in this way. But for how long can it be sustained? As the Common Agricultural Policy shows, competition has no assured duration. Competition is even certain to disappear according to Schumpeter, who prophesied the eventual and regrettable advent of socialism, given that competition ineluctably calls forth a monopolistic situation which will justify State intervention when one wants to satisfy peoples needs by avoiding the harshness resulting from all those situations in which the absolute hegemony of a supplier deprives them of necessary goods. We find here all the interest of the second stage of neo-liberal reasoning according to Foucault. If, they say, we want to avoid this tendency for economic processes to be absorbed by the State, we should act on the initial error from which it gets its strength. This is the error which consists in giving the man or woman of exchange, the consumer, precedence over the entrepreneur. The homo conomicus of neo-liberalism is an entrepreneur, even an entrepreneur of himself. The wage is the profit of someone who is the entrepreneur of a capital which is him or herself, of the human capital that he or she must maintain. The homo conomicus of the classical liberals was the man of exchange. He was posited as a partner of someone else in an exchange. The homo conomicusentrepreneur, however, as entrepreneur of himself, has only competitors. Even consumption becomes an activity of enterprise by which consumers undertake

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to produce their satisfaction. This means that the opposition between an active production and a passive consumption no longer has any meaning. One is living in the wrong century when one denounces consumer society or the society of the spectacle; one is mistaking neo-liberal man for the man of exchange and consumption, whereas he is first and foremost an entrepreneur. It is the problem of redistribution and reduction of the gap between incomes which makes man a consumer. The policy of society, on the other hand, as defined with respect to the necessity of competition, makes man an entrepreneur, someone who situates himself in a game and applies himself to increasing his successful outcomes within a system in which inequalities are necessary and which are more effective and stimulating the greater their disparities. However, the neo-liberals say that a limit must be introduced into this game of inequalities. This limit is that of exclusion. Everything must be done to avoid some players being definitively excluded from the game; otherwise it loses its sense and credibility. One should therefore see to it that those who find themselves on the borders of the game can return to it. Keeping everyone in the game increases its dynamism and this is therefore a dimension of the policy of society. Much more than a charitable concern, the struggle against exclusion was first of all, on the theoretical level, an economic concern highlighted by the neo-liberals.10 But according to the neo-liberals it is above all important that one stays in the game so as to remain a homo conomicus, an entrepreneur, that is to say, someone who is eminently governable, unlike his liberal predecessor, the man of exchange, who had to be left to fit in naturally. He is governable because he governs himself. He governs himself according to economic laws and one can act on the environment in such a way as to modify his conduct. In his regard one can establish a conduct of conduct because he enjoys the autonomy of an entrepreneur of his life and as such one can make him responsible for it. It was important to reconstruct this analysis of neo-liberalism in order to see that the third way is not entirely what it is said to be but really a way of getting through the Caudine Forks of the old Left and the new liberalism. Its value can be assessed at the triple level of the relationship to the role of the State, then of the relationship between the economic and the social and, finally, of the mode of government. Indeed there is one dimension which closely links the third way to neoliberalism, it is this question of the role of the State. It clearly rejects everything that the French Left continues to maintain is the States domain: nationalizations, public services established as a State clergy, etc. But this does not mean that it wants to reduce the State to a role of symbolic representation. It behaves as a declared enthusiast for the policy of society, to use the neo-liberal expression for designating the interventionism intended to bring this or that activity of society into the regime of competition. There is a recognized reason for this which is the sure advantage of this type of policy in a world in which globalization determines a nations wealth and employment according to the competitiveness of different sectors. Laisser-faire is no longer appropriate in this situation, any more than is nationalization.

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Neo-liberalism wants intervention only if it serves competition. It neglects the social and even condemns it by only accepting social policy as a struggle against exclusion on condition, again, that it is not aiming to reduce inequalities. Could we not accuse the third way of adopting a culpably imitative attitude towards neo-liberalism in this domain of the social? It seems clear that the British government, for example, concentrates its action on poverty more than on the reduction of inequalities. Shortly after coming to power in 1997 it created a Downing Street unit for the struggle against social exclusion, followed by a relatively low minimum wage (now raised to the same level as in France), but it has done nothing directly to increase wage-earners purchasing power or to provide legal protection for their jobs. It has created hardly any subsidized jobs and has not attempted to boost the economy through consumption, and so through increased purchasing power, according to the Keynesian recipes still firmly in favour with the French Left. This renunciation of the canonical formulas of the social is not the same, however, as an abandonment of the social, as is sometimes said. What is at stake rather is a change in the nature of the relationship between the economic and the social. Within the framework of the classical Welfare State, and in line with Keynesian theory, the relationship between the economic and the social develops according to a schema in the form of a spiral. Creation of wealth by the economy enables the social to be financed. In return, the latter, raising the level of income, enables production to be maintained or to increase due to the consequent increase in demand. The limits of this schema have become apparent at both of its levels: that of social security contributions and that of the use of consumption to boost the economy. The first component may be detrimental to investment capacity if profits are curtailed in the name of the social, and this weakening of investment sooner or later has a negative effect on employment. In the context of a global economy, the second component may suffer the drawback of increasing the consumption of products from other countries. Is what we are seeing then a timorous renunciation of the social? The issue rather is one of the replacement of the Keynesian model of the spiral by one of a reciprocal but direct action between the economic and the social not accompanied by the virtuous dream of a progressive sequence from one to the other: a philosophy of history gives way to a doctrine of globalization much less certain of its long-term effects. On the spatial plane, strategy replaces the dialectic. There will be winners and losers with whom one will be concerned later, as far, that is, as circumstances permit. As it happens, we have a first movement going from the social to the economic and which consists in investing in the competitiveness of the employee in the name of the social, through education, training and the struggle against unemployment. A second movement goes from the economic to the social and leads to the requirement that investment in the latter must be profitable. This may be translated, for example, into a particular emphasis being put on prevention rather than compensation in the areas of health, employment and retirement. As a minimum, this criterion of profitability takes the form of the requirement of

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transparency in the conduct and results of a social policy, which, to say the least, is not made easy by reasoning purely in terms of acquired rights. Lets say, the transition from the Welfare State to the Social Investment State. With regard to the third point concerning governmentality, it is easy to see how intensely neo-liberal precepts may irritate the traditional Left. Does not talking in this way about autonomy and responsibility amount to giving individualism more than its due or, in other words, giving more than their due to individuals on higher incomes, leaving the poor with the responsibility for having to put up with their condition? Certainly the supporters of the third way sing the praises of individual autonomy and responsibility as eloquently as the neo-liberals. They see it as a way of reducing the growth of benefits which can only increase to an absurd extent if we remain with the current logic of automatic compensation for all the adversities, real or otherwise, about which we may choose to complain. But they see it as only one way among others. And one of these ways characterizes this political tendency more directly to the extent that it is as much an alternative to individualism as it is to the old Left: this emphasizes the collective dimension, at local and national levels, of the prevention of individual disabilities and the improvement of individual capacities. At the local level this can be seen in the considerable scope given to the notion of community action in Britain, involving people in a risk prevention approach in the areas of health, security and educational and professional failure. At the national level it can be seen in the concern with revitalizing political society by involving the agents of initiatives in addressing the needs that the policy of society identifies. This where the notion of equity comes into play. To make a nation competitive presupposes, in compensation, an equitable distribution of resources, the reduction of that which excludes, certainly, in the neo-liberal sense, but also and especially of iniquities prejudicial to a vigorous dynamic of competition rather than the scarcely amended injustice of the neo-liberals obsessed with the sole and pure essence of the market. But just as neo-liberals are devoted to conducting a policy of society understood as the set of conditions organizing competition, so the Third Way aims to reconstruct a political society by stressing the role of civil society in producing social cohesion resting on a national policy of improving the equal opportunities of all regardless of gender, ethnicity or location. In this sense, equality of opportunity takes precedence over the reduction of social inequalities rather than the latter being an aim which takes only income into account and not real participation in the dynamic of society. Notes
1 Michel Foucault considered this question of government over two years of his lectures at the Colle ` ge de France, 1977 8 and 1978 9. He then devoted himself to the history of subjectivation, with The Care of the Self and The Use of Pleasure (1986a, 1986b) which appeared in France in 1984, the year of his death.

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2 The eld of governmentality studies was rst launched in Great Britain and the USA with the publication of Burchell, Gordon and Miller (1991). It was taken up by Mitchell Dean (1999). In Germany the development of studies of governmentality was instigated by Thomas Lemke (2000). 3 There were some colloquia in France on the subject on the twentieth anniversary of Foucaults death, one at the Maison des Sciences de lHomme and the other at the tudes Politiques de Paris. The latter resulted in a publication (Meyet, Institut dE Neves, & Ribemont, 2005). 4 It recalls the analysis of The Policing of Families (Donzelot, 1979) published the previous year, in 1977, the fourth chapter of which is entitled, precisely From the government of families to government through the family [this does not appear as a chapter heading in the English translation, but see p. 92: GB]. 5 The expression put on the agenda, so dear to the political class, appeared with English utilitarianism, Foucault explains, when Bentham distinguished between what is to be done (from a liberal point of view), that is to say, the agenda, and what is not to be done, that is to say, the non-agenda. 6 With this odd expression, equal inequality, Foucault designates the neo-liberals idea that we are all exposed to a situation of relative inequality and that this differential does not condemn the market but makes it work . . . on condition that no-one is lastingly excluded from the game. [I have been unable to nd any use by Foucault of the expression equal inequality as such, but he attributes to Ro pke the statement of inequality being the same for all (2004b, p. 148) (although Senellart notes that he has not been able to trace this statement in Ro pke either). [The index refers to the equality of inequality, but again this expression does not appear in the text: GB.] 7 The Foucauldian diaspora includes partisans of the Right and Left, including the extreme Left. Do we need to note that the most notorious of the latter, Antonio Negri, appealed for a vote in favour of the proposed European Constitution out of hatred for the national level, which is seen as a brake on awareness of the reality of the empire, and he has called for the engagement of battles at this supreme level. In this, furthermore, he could give comfort only to the certainties of the partisans of the sovereign nation and of the European social model ` a la franc aise. 8 This analysis is found in the lecture of 17 January 1979 (Foucault, 2004b, pp. 39ff.). 9 For an analysis of the art of neither too much nor too little in French governmentality, see Donzelot (1994 [1984]). We note, moreover, that this concern for a measure of neither too much nor too little in politics, recently promoted by Tony Blair and the third way between the old Left and Thatcherite neo-liberalism, also gets support from a famous sociologist, Anthony Giddens. 10 We need only think of Vaincre la pauvrete dans les pays riche (1974) by Lionel Stole ru, enthusiast of American neo-liberal policy, to acknowledge this precedence in the debates regarding exclusion that began at the end of the 1980s.

References
Burchell, G., Gordon, C., & Miller, P. (1991) The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Dean, M. (1999) Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. London: Sage. Donzelot, J. (1979) The policing of families (R. Hurley, Trans.). London: Hutchinson. Donzelot, J. (1994 [1984]) LInvention du social: Essai sur le declin des passions politiques. Paris: Le Seuil. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and punish: Birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). London: Allen Lane. Foucault, M. (1979) The history of sexuality, Vol. 1, An introduction

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France 1977 1978 (M. Senellart, Ed.; G. Burchell, Trans.). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (forthcoming, 2008) The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 1978 1979 (M. Senellart, Ed.; G. Burchell, Trans.). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lemke, T. (2000) Gouvernementalita t: Neoliberalismus und Selbsttechnologien, in U. Bro ckling, S. Krasmann, & T. Lemke (Eds), Gouvernementalita t der Gegenwart. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Meyet, S., Neves, M.-C., & Ribemont, T. (2005) Travailler avec Foucault. Paris: LHarmattan. Stole ru, L. (1974) Vaincre la pauvrete dans les pays riches. Paris: Flammarion.

(R. Hurley, Trans.) Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1986a) The care of the self (R. Hurley, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Viking. Foucault, M. (1986b) The use of pleasure (R. Hurley, Trans.) Harmondsworth: Viking. Foucault, M. (2004a) Securite, territoire, population: Cours au Colle`ge de France (1977 1978) (M. Senellart, Ed.). Paris: Gallimard/Le Seuil. Foucault, M. (2004b) Naisssance de la biopolitique: Cours au Colle`ge de France (1978 1979) (M. Senellart, Ed.). Paris: Gallimard/Le Seuil. Foucault, M. (2007) Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Colle`ge de