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DOI: 10.1111/hith.10765
Forum: Foucault and Neoliberalism
1.
INTRODUCTION
MATTHEW SPECTER
1. 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 respec-
tively.
6. Foucault, Biopolitics, 317.
7. Daniel Zamora, Critiquer Foucault: Les annes 1980 et la tentation neoliberale (Brussels: Edi-
tions Aden, 2014).
8. For an archive of this growing body of debate and commentary, see http://foucaultnews.com/
category/neoliberalism/ (accessed August 26, 2015).
368 matthew specter
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 tho-
rie 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.
introduction to foucault and Neoliberalism 369
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 ordo-
liberalism, American neoliberalism, and French neoliberalism was that all three
conceptualized the economy as a kind of game,21 and that this game was intel-
lectually or epistemologically suggestive. As he puts it in one of the lectures, neo-
liberal 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 Beck-
er: American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucaults 1979 Birth of Biopolitics Lectures. A conversa-
tion 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.
370 matthew specter
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 Gut-
ting, 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.
introduction to foucault and Neoliberalism 371
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