donzelot - michel foucault and liberal intelligence
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Michel Foucault and liberal intelligenceJacques Donzelot
Online Publication Date: 01 February 2008
To cite this Article Donzelot, Jacques(2008)'Michel Foucault and liberal intelligence',Economy and Society,37:1,115 — 134
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Michel Foucault and liberalintelligence
Jacques Donzelot
The twentieth anniversary of Foucault’s 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 Foucault’s 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 l’intelligence du liberalisme’ by
Graham Burchell, Il Mulino di Chimafucci, Apecchio, 61042 PU, Italy. E-mail:
Copyright # 2008 Taylor & Francis
ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online
DOI: 10.1080/03085140701760908
Economy and Society Volume 37 Number 1 February 2008: 115�134
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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 Left’s 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 College 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 Foucault’s
lectures nor indeed any of the others, and now occupying a position far removed
from the group of devotees who maintain the cult of Foucault’s memory, I must
say that I undertook the reading of the transcripts of two years of my old
teacher’s 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 individual’s 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
Foucault’s 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.
Within the framework of a power which aims for the safety (surete) of the
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
sovereign’s 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 sovereign’s 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 sovereign’s 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 Prince’s 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
family’s fortune prosper?
(Foucault, 2007, pp. 94�5)
In fact this model of the family as the standard for the sovereign’s 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
the State under the cover of the model of raison d’Etat, which appeared in the
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 men’s 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 sovereign’s 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
model of raison d’Etat. With raison d’Etat the end of government is not celestial
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
raison d’Etat is the state itself, and if there is something like perfection,
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
this model of raison d’Etat. And here again Foucault encounters the question of
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 governmentaliza-
tion of the State, with raison d’Etat, is that it makes it possible to account for
the way in which the relation to population changes from one regime of
government to the other. What matters in the framework of raison d’Etat is the
quantity of population. It is an absolute commodity, a quantifiable wealth on
which a careful eye must be kept because the sovereign’s 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
economic theory corresponding to raison d’Etat, required
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 men’s 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)
The ‘progress’ of governmentality in the transition from raison d’Etat to
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 delimi-
ted [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
and its wealth � as with the model of raison d’Etat � but society and its
economic progress. Its role is no longer to curb a freedom which is the
expression of man’s 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 State’s 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 neo-
liberals’ 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 neo-
liberals 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 neo-
liberal 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 misunderstand-
ing, 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 ‘govern-
mentality’ 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 Foucault’s 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 self-
limitation 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
raison d’Etat. At that stage, law applied itself to holding back the excesses of
raison d’Etat by basing itself ‘on the natural and original rights of every
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 Foucault’s 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
inspired by Emile Durkheim constitutes a justification of French acceptance of
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
d’Etat, or to a covert and timidly unavowed liberalism (in the manner of Guy
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 people’s 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
it was a matter of re-enacting the ‘social contract’ against raison d’Etat.
Liberalism goes hand in hand with ‘technical’ progress in matters of
governmentality, in the face of which the way of sovereignty seems ‘retro-
actionary’, and recourse to the State an insidious way of returning to ‘raisond’Etat’. Does this mean that liberalism and, a fortiori, neo-liberalism have so
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 Left’s doctrine for more than a century.
Foucault’s 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 over-
population. 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
people’s 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 œconomicus 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 œconomicus of the classical liberals was the man of exchange. He
was posited as a partner of someone else in an exchange. The homo œconomicus-
entrepreneur, 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 œconomicus, 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 neo-
liberalism, it is this question of the role of the State. It clearly rejects
everything that the French Left continues to maintain is the State’s 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 nation’s 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. Let’s
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 hislectures at the College de France, 1977�8 and 1978�9. He then devoted himself to thehistory 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 field of ‘governmentality studies’ was first launched in Great Britain and theUSA with the publication of Burchell, Gordon and Miller (1991). It was taken up byMitchell Dean (1999). In Germany the development of studies of governmentality wasinstigated by Thomas Lemke (2000).3 There were some colloquia in France on the subject on the twentieth anniversary ofFoucault’s death, one at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and the other at theInstitut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. The latter resulted in a publication (Meyet,Neves, & Ribemont, 2005).4 It recalls the analysis of The Policing of Families (Donzelot, 1979) published theprevious year, in 1977, the fourth chapter of which is entitled, precisely ‘From thegovernment of families to government through the family’ [this does not appear as achapter heading in the English translation, but see p. 92: GB].5 The expression ‘put on the agenda’, so dear to the political class, appeared withEnglish utilitarianism, Foucault explains, when Bentham distinguished between what isto be done (from a liberal point of view), that is to say, the agenda, and what is not to bedone, 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 differentialdoes not condemn the market but makes it work . . . on condition that no-one islastingly excluded from the game. [I have been unable to find any use by Foucault of theexpression ‘equal inequality’ as such, but he attributes to Ropke the statement of‘inequality’ being ‘the same for all’ (2004b, p. 148) (although Senellart notes that he hasnot been able to trace this statement in Ropke either). [The index refers to ‘the equalityof inequality’, but again this expression does not appear in the text: GB.]7 The Foucauldian diaspora includes partisans of the Right and Left, including theextreme 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 forthe 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 thesovereign nation and of the European social model a la francaise.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 Frenchgovernmentality, see Donzelot (1994 [1984]). We note, moreover, that this concernfor a measure of neither too much nor too little in politics, recently promoted by TonyBlair and the ‘third way’ between the old Left and Thatcherite neo-liberalism, also getssupport from a famous sociologist, Anthony Giddens.10 We need only think of Vaincre la pauvrete dans les pays riche (1974) by LionelStoleru, enthusiast of American neo-liberal policy, to acknowledge this precedence inthe debates regarding exclusion that began at the end of the 1980s.
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