Foucault’s neoliberalism

26 May, 2023 at 10:46 | Posted in Economics, Politics & Society | 4 Comments

Although somewhat critical of its reductive elements, Foucault found certain attractive features in the ideal or programmatic form imagined by American neoliberalism, namely, that it envisages a kind of regulation outside sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical forms, that it regulates without the fabrication of subjectivities and in a manner that optimizes difference and tolerates minority groups and practices. Second, from a policy perspective, Foucault showed a certain acceptance of a neoliberal diagnosis of current problems of the welfare state as creating dependency, as unresponsive and costly, without offering an explicit endorsement of its reconstructions of health and social services as a series of markets. Finally, from the perspective of concrete political alignments, he displays an affinity with the “Second Left,” those elements within French social democracy that opposed the statism of the “First Left” and displayed a willingness to adopt neoliberal ideas and solutions …

Intellectually, Foucault expresses most affinity with American neoliberalism of the Chicago School. From a public policy perspective, he offers critiques of the welfare state found in the work of the principals of that School and explores technologies, such as the negative tax, that are sourced from such critiques. And from a concrete political perspective, he most clearly aligns himself with specific factions of the French Left open to ideas and solutions borrowed from American neoliberalism. To note this threefold, affirmative relationship is not to denounce Foucault as a neoliberal. It is simply to indicate his much more serious and fundamental engagement with a contemporary form of economic liberalism than is usually allowed in Foucauldian commentary.

Mitchell Dean