The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979

"These are lectures that Michel Foucault gave at the College de France in 1978 and 1979. They were only published in English in 2008. They still constitute some of the most interesting writing on neoliberalism. Foucault’s concerns are very different from those of Harvey and Slobodian. Harvey and Slobodian were mostly concerned with macro issues: capital accumulation, markets, institutions to govern markets and masses, and so on. Foucault was most interested in the ‘micro’—how the ideology of neoliberalism acted on the mind and bodies of individuals. Foucault had long been interested in how broad ideological structures encased individuals in modes of thought over which they had little control. Knowledge was power, especially when that knowledge was organized into systems of thought that rendered human individuals—and human populations as a whole—legible, controllable, and governable. Foucault saw in neoliberalism an ideology that vastly increased the terrain of human activities that could be understood by reference to market principles. In classical liberalism, homo economicus , or ‘economic man’, was defined as a man of exchange, who swapped his labor for a wage. The resulting income he then exchanged for goods in the marketplace that he either needed or desired. Much economic analysis revolved around how the two economic spheres of ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ were to be structured. Other realms of human activity—the family, religion, and politics, for example—were thought to stand apart from these two major arenas of economic exchange, and outside the realm of activity encompassed by homo economicus. “Foucault saw in neoliberalism an ideology that vastly increased the terrain of human activities that could be understood by reference to market principles” Foucault argued that economic man could not be comprehended in such narrow terms. Rather, economic man had to been as a repository of capital him- or herself. He was the producer of his own wants and needs; he was what Foucault called ‘an entrepreneur of the self’, ‘being his own capital’. The concept of homo economicus, therefore, had to be expanded to include the various investments that such a man and others had made in his personhood. A capitalist of the self, homo economicus was always being called upon to deploy his capital so as to satisfy his needs and wants. Deploying such ‘human capital’ required knowledge of how much capital, and of what sort, each person possessed. Acquiring such knowledge meant bringing into economic discourse aspects of human existence at one point considered separate from economic calculation: marriage, family, morality, education, even sport. From this perspective, human beings are understood to be making calculations all the time about what kind of capital they have, how to amass inputs and deploy outputs. ‘Human capital’ might refer to one’s education, or one’s muscle mass, or one’s investment in a marriage partner. It might refer to child raising, now understood as a series of capital investments in the next generation’s future. It was time, neoliberals argued, to push aside the notion that parents should be inculcating something as vague as moral virtue in their children. It was time, instead, for parents to start thinking about instilling a set of advantages in their offspring that would position the latter, once grown, to make the best use of their futures. This way of looking at the world was popular among a 1940s group of German neoliberals who called themselves ‘ordoliberals’. Then it moved to the United States and to the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics, in particular, where it informed a major stream of thinking associated with what came to be known as The Chicago School. The Chicago economist Gary Becker was a leading innovator, in this regard, who early on analysed the family in human capital terms. Foucault was ambivalent about this neoliberal theory. The libertarian in him was drawn to the notion of an individual being a repository of capital with the capacity to become an entrepreneur of the self. On the other hand, there was something terribly tyrannical and dehumanizing about reducing all human activity to a series of inputs and outputs. Well, Foucault saw both sides—the freedom and the tyranny. But not Wendy Brown, a political theorist very much influenced by Foucault. In her book, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution , she castigates this form of neoliberal thinking for transmogrifying all human relations into calculations of gain and loss, allowing such reasoning to penetrate, contaminate, and ruin everything."

"A few years ago, I wrote a book called The Last Lesson of Michel Foucault , in which I tried to understand why Foucault gave this lecture, in which he focuses on neoliberalism, and to explain why it is important to read and understand neoliberal thinkers. There is indeed a paradox: everyone says we live in a neoliberal world, and yet no one in the field of critical theory wants to read the theories of neoliberal, ordoliberal, and libertarian authors such as Gary Becker, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, or Robert Nozick. Today neoliberalism is presented as the evil idea, but this ideology is much more subtle than we think. And when I read Foucault’s lectures, I realised he’d had the same fascination. In this series of lectures he begins by saying that he’ll simply dedicate one lecture to the birth of neoliberalism, and he ends up spending the entire year on this history of modern political economy and the different schools of neoliberal thought. To give an example, Friedrich Hayek developed really strong ideas about the possibility of a spontaneous social order based on plurality which could help us avoid the unification of powers into sovereignty. By thinking about a world that would self-regulate and not need to be unified and governed, these intellectuals helped us think about life without a state. There is an anarchistic element to these ideas. Foucault says that the core idea of neoliberalism is that ‘we always govern too much’, and for this reason, the neoliberal tradition could be seen as one of the contemporary incarnations of critical theory. And without agreeing with these ideas, once you truly study them, you realise how much we don’t live in a neoliberal world. Some reforms are neoliberal, of course, but many of them aren’t. Whenever people tell me that neoliberalism is ruling everything, I jokingly reply: ‘I wish!’ If we don’t understand the world we live in, how can we hope to transform it? Neoliberal thought is incompatible with the criminalisation of drugs, the interdiction of sexual labour, the refusal of migrations, the carceral system—all of which are central elements of conservative politics today. Some neoliberal thinkers gave a lot of thought to the issue of prisons and judgments; to them, nothing justifies how by committing a crime against another person, a third-party—the state—could require you to spend time in prison or pay a fine. Foucault also mentions how neoliberal thinkers didn’t try to address the usual question of ‘how to stop crime’, but rather focused on the question of how much crime should be allowed for society to function well. This is a completely fresh way of looking at the issue, breaking away from the disciplinarian ideal of normalisation. “Neoliberalism allows us to identify the blind spots of our theories, the things we have failed to criticise, the power devices we blindly accept.” Many authors and experts on Foucault, as they couldn’t grasp his interest in such ideas, interpreted these lectures as a critic towards neoliberalism. But I think it was rather a thought experiment. Every author is born in a preset ideological universe. The neoliberal economic rationality is so peculiar that Foucault uses it to reveal some crucially-overlooked concepts in social and political theory. Since neoliberal authors aren’t read by the left, and belong to a tradition that is so different from the one we are used to, they allow us to identify the blind spots of our theories, the things we have failed to criticise, the power devices we blindly accept. Reading these authors is a way of confronting ourselves with our subconscious, our reflexes and our weaknesses. Economic rationality makes it possible to break with certain themes that are often naive in contemporary thought, such as the ‘common’ or the ‘social bond’. The real caveat is that neoliberalism lacks a coherent framework to think about justice and social classes. Exploitation, domination, persecution aren’t among its preoccupations. That’s why I wouldn’t define myself as a neoliberal or a libertarian. But thinking seriously about neoliberalism has allowed me to shed light on two things. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter First, the fact that many left-wing academics and politicians have lingering authoritarian impulses. Their ideas and speeches often imply that the issues of our world are disorder, a weak state, and individualism. In this way, anarchists or anti-institutional ideas are much less powerful in the left than they used to be. But more importantly, I have realised how conformist the academic field has become. The contemporary intellectual world is becoming more and more a unified body, rather than a field of disagreements. There are various themes and reflexes that you must follow to be seen as a credible researcher, and this leads to a terrible homogeneity. If you want to be recognised as a critical theorist, you must show you belong to the field by following its instituted modes of thinking. Thus, a field that was meant to rely on critique and experimentation has gradually become plagued with censorship, self-censorship and conformism. It’s almost like a small village, where there are minor disagreements, but people mostly get along and don’t like causing too much trouble."