Digressions&Impressions

Hayek (Streeck, Hazony) and World Federation and Colonialism

In the national state current ideologies make it comparatively easy to persuade the rest of the community that it is in their interest to protect “their” iron industry or “their” wheat production or whatever it be. An element of nation...

14 March 1979: Foucault on the Neo-Liberal Criticism of Ricardo and Marx (XXIX)

[T]he American neo-liberals say this: It is strange that classical political economy has always solemnly declared that the production of goods depends on three factors—land, capital, and labor—while leaving the third unexplored. It has...

28 March 1979: Foucault's Rational Choice Analysis of Science (XXXVI)

In the end, is not economics the analysis of forms of rational conduct and does not all rational conduct, whatever it may be, fall under something like economic analysis? Is not a rational conduct, like that which consists in formal re...

On Total Humanity, The Origins of Human Rights, and Unreasonable Pluralism

[T]he totalitarian rebellion of our time is not only directed against nineteenth-century liberalism and democracy. It attacks the sum total of the tradition of the Western world, its religion, its science, its law, its State, its prope...

Foucault on the Idea of Europe (and Adam Smith, Hume & Kant), Part 1

So we find this idea, which will be at the center of the economic game as defined by the liberals, that actually the enrichment of one country, like the enrichment of one individual, can only really be established and maintained in the...

On Chicago Economics (Becker vs Kirzner), Foucault, and Darwinism (via Daniel Dennett & David Haig)

Becker, for example—the most radical of the American neoliberals, if you like—says...that the object of economic analysis can be extended...and that economic laws and economic analysis can perfectly well be applied to non-rational cond...

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on Rawls and Liberalism

As a serious and committed liberal, Rawls did not position his theory as a response to the many radical tendencies of his day, because he was convinced that his position, like liberalism itself, already represented an adequate response...

On Foucault and the Anxiety of the Left; pt.1: 'Economic Liberalism'

What both Foucault's critics and his defenders have failed to consider is a deep affinity between Foucault's thought and neoliberalism: a shared suspicion of the state. Foucault's antistatism was, in the first instance, theoretical. He...