Foucault And Political Reason

Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism And The Rationalities Of Government

Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, Nikolas Rose, Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, Nikolas Rose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134222414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Foucault is often thought to have a great deal to say about the history of madness and sexuality, but little in terms of a general analysis of government and the state.; This volume draws on Foucault's own research to challenge this view, demonstrating the central importance of his work for the study of contemporary politics.; It focuses on liberalism and neo- liberalism, questioning the conceptual opposition of freedom/constraint, state/market and public/private that inform liberal thought.

Chapter 1

Liberal government and techniques of the self

Graham Burchell

Defining it in general as “the conduct of conduct”, Foucault presents government as a more or less methodical and rationally reflected “way of doing things”, or “art”, for acting on the actions of individuals, taken either singly or collectively, so as to shape, guide, correct and modify the ways in which they conduct themselves (Foucault 1988a).¹ Thus understood, the notion of government has a fairly wide sense and it may be helpful for what follows to pick out certain elements.²

First, government understood in this wide sense may refer to many different forms of “the conduct of conduct”, the particular objects, methods and scale of which will vary. For example, it may, as in the sixteenth century, refer to the government of oneself, to the government of souls and lives, to the government of a household, to the government of children, and to the government of the State by a prince (Foucault 1991). There may also be interconnections and continuities between these different forms of government and, in particular, between local and diverse forms of government existing at the level of interpersonal relations or institutions dispersed throughout society on the one hand, and political government as the exercise of a central, unified form of State sovereignty on the other, or between forms of government existing within microsettings like the family or the school and the macropolitical activities of government directed towards individuals as members of a population, society or nation.

Secondly, the general idea of government is used by Foucault in a sense that is clearly in continuity with his analysis of power in Discipline and punish (Foucault 1977). On occasions Foucault refers to government as a way in which power is exercised over individuals. Government seems to be used as a synonym or preferred alternative for the use of power to identify a general field of analysis. Part of the word's attractiveness to Foucault could well have been that it makes it more difficult to sustain a lurid “iron cage” type of interpretation of the analysis of disciplinary techniques. We may recall that government in general is understood as a way of acting to affect the way in which individuals conduct themselves (Foucault 1988a). All the same, Foucault's analysis prior to the introduction of the idea of government does not sanction the illusion of what might be called “the all-powerfulness of power”. Part of the point of describing the disciplines as a technology of power is to distinguish them from the land of technologies that involve a simple and direct physical determination of their objects: as techniques of power, the disciplines presuppose the activity, agency or the freedom of those on whom they are exercised (Foucault 1982).

Government, though, is not merely a synonym that signals the extension of the analysis of power from the microphysical to the macropolitical or that corrects possible misunderstandings of an earlier use of the word power. For example, Foucault makes it clear that “technologies of domination”, like the disciplines, only ever constitute one side of the practical systems through which individuals are governed. Government, Foucault suggests, is a “contact point” where techniques of domination – or power – and techniques of the self “interact”, where “technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon himself and, conversely,… where techniques of the self are integrated into structures of coercion” (Foucault 1980).³ We might say that whereas in Discipline and punish Foucault emphasized the subjectification of individuals through their subjection to techniques of power/domination, the perspective of government establishes an essential relationship between these and other techniques of the self in the subjectification of individuals.

I think that if one wants to analyze the genealogy of the subject in Western societies, one has to take into account not only techniques of domination, but also techniques of the self. Let's say one has to take into account the interaction of these two types of techniques. (Foucault 1980)

Thus, within the perspective of government, the introduction of the idea of techniques of the self, of arts or aesthetics of existence, etc. seems to imply a loosening of the connection between subjectification and subjection. A loosening but not a severing of all connections, as should be clear from Foucault's analysis of the relationships between particular practices of the self and relations of domination in ancient Greek and Roman societies (Foucault 1985, 1986).

Foucault speaks of the interactions of these two types of technique. There is no simple determination of techniques of the self (either of governed individuals or of those governing) by techniques of domination. Rather, in particular cases it may be that the latter are presupposed by, or are conditions for the possible existence of, the former. Moreover, the irreducibility of one to the other implies that their relationships and interactions are not necessarily always harmonious or mutually reinforcing. Hence, part at least of the interest in this field: if techniques of the self are more than the insubstantial complement or effect of technologies of domination, if they are not just another way of securing ends sought through technologies of domination, then the study of their interaction with these technologies would seem to be highly relevant to the ethical problems of how freedom can be practised.⁴

It is these interconnections, continuities and interactions between techniques of domination and techniques of the self that I want to begin to explore.

Liberal government – old and new

Foucault adopts a distinctive approach towards the analysis of liberalism. This consists in analyzing it from the point of view of governmental reason, that is from the point of view of the rationality of political government as an activity rather than as an institution. On this view, liberalism is not a theory, an ideology, a juridical philosophy of individual freedom, or any particular set of policies adopted by a government. It is, says Foucault, a rationally reflected way of doing things that functions as the principle and method for the rationalization of governmental practices (Foucault 1989). Liberalism is described as a particular way in which the activity of government has been made both thinkable and practicable as an art. Above all, Foucault emphasizes the critical and problematizing character of liberalism. The point may be made clearer by crudely contrasting two different kinds of liberalism widely separated in time.

Foucault describes early, or “classical”, liberalism as emerging in relation to a problem of how a necessary market freedom can be reconciled with the unlimited exercise of a political sovereignty. This problem already implies a kind of criticism of a characteristic form of government in the early modern period – the “police state” associated with raison d'état. The assumption of raison d'état was that the State was able to have an adequate and detailed knowledge of what had to be governed – that is to say, a knowledge of itself – on the basis of which it could act to direct and shape that reality in accordance with its, the State's, own interests; increasing its wealth and strength vis-à-vis other States, for example. According to Foucault, the decisive point of liberalism's critique of this view is its scepticism about the State and its reason, about the possibility of it, or of anyone, being able to know perfectly and in all its details the reality to be governed, and about its capacity to shape that reality at will on the basis on such a knowledge.

The Anglo-Scottish school of early liberalism sets limits to the State's capacity to know and act by situating it in relation to the reality of the market or of commercial exchanges, and more broadly of civil society, as quasi-natural domains with their own intrinsic dynamic and forms of self-regulation. On this view, interventions by the State in these domains are liable to produce effects that, as well as being different from those intended, are also likely to be positively harmful. Commercial exchanges will not produce the benefits demanded from them by the State unless the State secures the conditions necessary for them to be able to function freely and naturally to optimum effect. Laissez-faire is here both a limitation of the exercise of political sovereignty vis-à-vis the government of commercial exchanges, and a positive justification of market freedom on the grounds that the State will benefit more – will become richer and more powerful – by governing less.

Now for modern forms of liberalism – those generally referred to as neo-liberalism or as economic liberalism or economic rationalism – it is still a question of a critical reason concerning the limits of government in relation to the market. For the German school of Ordoliberalen that developed during and after the Second World War, and many of whose members played a significant role in the early years of the Federal German Republic, the problem is not one of how a space can be found within an existing State for a necessary market freedom, but of how to create a State on the basis of an economic freedom that will secure the State's legitimacy and self-limitation. The problem is especially marked by the experience of National Socialism. An essential part of the Ordo-liberal argument was historical and involved the claim that National Socialism was not some monstrous aberration but the quite inevitable outcome of a series of anti-liberal policies – national protectionism, the welfare policies of Bismarckian State socialism, wartime economic planning and management, and Keynesian interventionism. Each of these policies entails the other three in a vicious circle, the inevitable outcome of which is the kind of exorbitant growth in the State witnessed in National Socialist Germany. In a sense, the Ordo-liberals argued somewhat like those who say that socialism has not failed because nowhere has it been truly practised. There has been, they suggest, a constant retreat from liberalism in the face of what were perceived to be its unpalatable consequences.

The Chicago school of economic liberalism, some of whom established strong contacts with members of the Ordo-liberal school just after the Second World War also functions as a criticism of the consequences of too much government. The historical references naturally differ from those of the Ordo-liberals, but in each case the general form of argument is very similar. What they have in common, putting it very crudely, is a question concerning the extent to which competitive, optimizing market relations and behaviour can serve as a principle not only for limiting governmental intervention, but also rationalizing government itself. Both are looking for a principle for rationalizing government by reference to an idea of the market. Where they differ from earlier forms of liberalism is that they do not regard the market as an existing quasi-natural reality situated in a kind of economic nature reserve space marked off, secured and supervised by the State. Rather, the market exists, and can only exist, under certain political, legal and institutional conditions that must be actively constructed by government.

This rough contrast between early and modern forms of liberalism can be continued in a related area that will return us to our main focus. Both forms of liberalism set out a schema of the relationship between government and the governed in which individuals are identified as, on the one hand, the object and target of governmental action and, on the other hand, as in some sense the necessary (voluntary) partner or accomplice of government.

For early liberalism, to govern properly involves pegging the principle for rationalizing governmental activity to the rationality of the free conduct of governed individuals themselves. That is to say, the rational conduct of government must be intrinsically linked to the natural, private-interest-motivated conduct of free, market exchanging individuals because the rationality of these individuals' conduct is, precisely, what enables the market to function optimally in accordance with its nature. Government cannot override the rational free conduct of governed individuals without destroying the basis of the effects it is seeking to produce (Burchell 1991). Of course, this is not the whole story and I will add to it below.

By contrast, for neo-liberalism, the rational principle for regulating and limiting governmental activity must be determined by reference to artificially arranged or contrived forms of the free, entrepreneurial and competitive conduct of economic-rational individuals. Here again the rationality of government must be pegged to a form of the rational self-conduct of the governed themselves, but a form that is not so much a given of human nature as a consciously contrived style of conduct.

In neither case are we dealing with the simple application of a technical know-how of domination to individuals qua bodies with certain capacities, forces and aptitudes. In both cases the principle of government requires of the governed that they freely conduct themselves in a certain rational way, whether in the form of a “natural liberty”, as Adam Smith puts it (Smith 1976), or as a freedom that is an “artefact”, as Hayek puts it (Hayek 1979). In any case, it is a principle that requires the proper use of liberty. Individual freedom, in appropriate forms, is here a technical condition of rational government rather than the organizing value of a Utopian dream.

I must now expand on the very partial stories given in these two examples. For early liberalism, and here I am thinking especially of Anglo-Scottish early liberal thought, the individual to be governed is not only a rational, interest-motivated economic ego. He (and here the male pronoun is, for the most part, appropriate) is also, and equally naturally, a member of society and part of a biological population. Economic exchanges – private, individual, atomistic, egoistic – are seen as arising within a natural and historical milieu comprising a tissue of proximate, passional ties, associations, affiliations, antagonisms, enmities and friendships, communitarian bonds and so on, which characterize civil society (or society, or the nation). Within this milieu a historical dynamic is identified that arises from, on the one hand, the fissiparous tendency of economic egoism that leads exchanging individuals to engage in an abstract form of activity involving relations with others that are indifferent to their membership of any particular society or nation and, on the other hand, the complex interplay of particular localized patterns of sociability, of allegiances and antagonisms. It is on the basis of this natural and historical dynamic society that there evolve spontaneous relationships of power, authority and subordination or, in other words, forms of the “self-government” of civil society.

It is in relation to this dynamic, historico-natural, both economic and non-economic domain that government as the exercise of nationally unified political sovereignty comes to define its tasks. Liberal governmental reason does not so much set out what in any particular case government policy should be, as define the essential problem-space of government, and define it in such a way as to make a definite art of government both thinkable and practicable. Early liberalism determines the questions of how to govern in relation to an object-domain which is a kind of quasinature with its own specific self-regulating principles and dynamic. This natural domain is both what has to be governed and what government must produce or, at least, maintain in the optimum condition of what naturally it is. Civil society becomes at the same time both object and end of government.

Early liberalism, then, describes a problem-space of government. This problem-space is an open-ended space of real politico-technical invention, of a governmental constructivism. Liberalism sets limits to what government can know or do vis-à-vis a. civil society that must none the less be governed even if, as in the most radical proposals, it is sometimes maintained that civil society or the nation is entirely capable of governing itself and does not require a State. Liberalism fixes the terms of the problem of how political sovereignty must be exercised: what relationship must political sovereignty establish with this quasi-natural reality over which it presides but with which it cannot do just what it likes? What is within and what outside of its competence? What techniques, what procedures, what regulations and laws enable this reality to function in accordance with its nature and to optimum effect in the production of wealth and the promotion of wellbeing? This general libe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Liberal government and techniques of the self
• 2 Governing "advanced" liberal democracies
• 3 Liberalism, socialism and democracy: variations on a governmental theme
• 4 The promise of liberalism and the performance of freedom
• 5 Security and vitality: drains, liberalism and power in the nineteenth century
• 6 Lines of communication and spaces of rule
• 7 Assembling the school
• 8 Governing the city: liberalism and early modern modes of governance
• 9 Risk and responsibility
• 10 Foucault, government and the enfolding of authority
• 11 Revolutions within: self-government and self-esteem
• 12 Foucault in Britain
• Index