I said that this fundamental transformation in the relations between law and governmental practice, this emergence of an internal limitation of governmental reason could be located roughly around the middle of the eighteenth century. What permitted its emergence? How did it come about? Obviously, we should take into account an entire, comprehensive transformation (I will come back to this, at least partially, afterwards), but today I would just like to indicate the intellectual instrument, the form of calculation and rationality that made possible the self-limitation of governmental reason as a de facto, general self-regulation which is intrinsic to the operations of government and can be the object of indefinite transactions. Well, once again, the intellectual instrument, the type of calculation or form of rationality that made possible the self-limitation of governmental reason was not the law. What is it, starting from the middle of the eighteenth century? Obviously, it is political economy.
The very ambiguities of the term “political economy,” and of its meaning at this time, indicate what was basically at issue in all this, since you know that between 1750 and 1810–1820 the expression “political economy” oscillates between two semantic poles. Sometimes this expression aims at a particular strict and limited analysis of the production and circulation of wealth. But, in a broader and more practical sense, “political economy” also refers to any method of government that can procure the nation’s prosperity. And finally, political economy—the term employed by Rousseau in his famous article in the Encyclopedia—is a sort of general reflection on the organization, distribution, and limitation of powers in a society. I think that fundamentally it was political economy that made it possible to ensure the self-limitation of governmental reason....it was formed within the very framework of the objectives set for the art of government by raison d’État, for what objectives did political economy set itself? Well, it set itself the objective of the state’s enrichment. Its objective was the simultaneous, correlative, and suitably adjusted growth of population on the one hand, and means of subsistence on the other. Political economy offered to ensure suitable, adjusted, and always favorable competition between states. It proposed precisely the maintenance of an equilibrium between states such that competition can take place. That is to say, it took up exactly the objectives of raison d’État and the police state that mercantilism and the European balance had tried to realize. So, to start with, political economy lodges itself within the governmental reason of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and to that extent is not in the kind of external position occupied by juridical thought. Michel Foucault, 10 January 1979, lecture 1 The Birth of Biopolitics. translated by Graham Burchell, 13-14.
As I noted earlier in the week, Foucault starts his lecture series in his first lecture with Walpole whom he assumes is unfamiliar to his Parisian audience; and I suggested that the manner in doing so implies that he is shadowing Locke and Hume. In the quoted passage above, half-way through the lecture, he reverses and he explicitly ("you know") assumes that the audience is familiar with the vicissitudes of the term 'political economy.' I assume he is taking for granted awareness of Marx's discussion of what Marx called "classical political economy" (in Capital 1, chapter 1; or in A Contribution to the Critique of political Economy).
Political economy can refer to three perhaps four distinct even heterogenous projects/practices: (i) a theoretical "analysis of the production and circulation of wealth;" (ii) a practical art or "method of government that can procure the nation’s prosperity;" (iii) a "sort of general reflection on the organization, distribution, and limitation of powers in a society." What they have in common is their effect, that is, the taming or domestication of reason d'état, the self-limitation of governmental reason. And Foucault's claim is polemical because it goes against the self-understanding of liberals their marxist critics (recall here and here), who claim that the rule of law is the ground of the development of liberal state and governmentality.
Crucially, Foucault's approach doesn't make the material conditions on the ground explanatory (of large social change), but rather an intellectual conceptualization and practice that appeals to the self-interest of rulers and their desire to control the social levers.** That is to say, Foucault's explanatory schema is unproblematic from a liberal perspective, and can be seen as a friendly corrective to it (while it should be anathema to a dialectical materialist).
But what about the fourth? In his own words, Foucault suggests (iv) that political economy aims at the "state’s enrichment." And its two main causal variables (or levers of control) are population and means of subsistence.** Put like that classical political economy can be traced back (recall here; and here) to the city of pigs. But with this difference that the city of pigs is treated as isolated from its surroundings (because deliberately left too poor to be worthy of conquest) whereas the more modern classical political economy assumes (with Hobbes and in the spirit of Westphalia) a competitive state system with a balance of power in equilibrium.
The joke, of course, is that the form of the assumed political background condition that is constitutive within the practice (of classical political economy) will then become a normative model within the practice (where stable and unstable competitive equilibria are treated formally). Simultaneously, and no less serious, Foucault thereby announces that his study -- of the birth of biopolitics -- is coextensive with (recall this treatment of the lecture of 24 january, 1979) the discovery of Europe and the evolution of the European state system (jnto imperialism).+ The history of imperialism suggests against the assumption in the city of pigs is false; poverty need not prevent unwelcome conquest.
I already noted earlier in the week that according to Foucault the natural tendency of political economy is to promote despotism. Foucault reminds his readers of the well meaning physiocrats to make the point "political power must be a power without external limitation, without external counterbalance, and without any bounds other than those arising from itself, and this is what they called despotism." Marx makes the same point less subtly when he remarks in a note that Petty's "wonderful keenness shows itself e.g. in the proposal to transport "all the moveables and people of Ireland, and of the Highlands of Scotland...into the rest of Great Britain."" (A Contribution to the Critique of political Economy, translated by N.I. Stone, p. 57)
Perhaps, Foucault's audience expects an unmasking of political economy. But this is not what happens. Foucault closes the lecture by noting that political economy "revealed the existence of phenomena, processes, and regularities that necessarily occur as a result of intelligible mechanisms" (emphasis added). Of course, political economy is aware and diagnoses the many ways the mechanisms effects are hindered by policy. I don't mean to deny (and I will discuss in the next digression) that Foucault intends to interrogate the 'naturalness' with which these phenomena are (ahh) fetishized and the character, or "regime of truth" (18-9; recall here) they constitute; nor does he need to disagree with Marx (and Smith) that this plain of necessity is historically conditioned. But rather, he will resist the impulse -- so common among critics-- to insist that political economy is "wicked illusions or" mere "ideological products,"(if it is ideology at all) or self-justifying falsehoods of the rich (19).
To be sure, prior (conceptually and historically) to political economy and its art of government these phenomena would not have existed. Foucault puts it like this:
That is to say, what I would like to show is not how an error—when I say that which does not exist becomes something, this does not mean showing how it was possible for an error to be constructed— or how an illusion could be born, but how a particular regime of truth, and therefore not an error, makes something that does not exist able to become something. It is not an illusion since it is precisely a set of practices, real practices, which established it and thus imperiously marks it out in reality.(19)
That is to say, political economy is a reflexive activity that helps bring about and stabilizes that which it studies. (This is why the art of governance and governance are so tightly linked for Foucault.) In my view, and I have argued this, this that political economy helps legislate and constitute that which it studies, is, I have argued, exactly how Adam Smith conceives of his own enterprise. And so one way to understand Foucault's lecture series is that by going native -- echt liberal -- he hopes to "grasp" "biopolitics." (22)
Now, we must retrace Foucault's retracing of liberalism, not because we are unaware of the fissures in the liberal edifice, but because we will need to perform the necessary plumbing while the boat is taking on water, even at the edge of capsizing. And, as Foucault promises on the first page of his lecture, he may be the therapist who can turn vicegerent that can guide us.
*That is not entirely certain because what Marx has in mind starts ca 1650 (with Petty). I even checked the French to see if '1750' wasn't a misprint in the translation (and not '1650'),* but it's not. And, yes, I wonder whether it is a transcription error! Marx can be read to imply that classical economics (as distinct from classical political economy) is an eighteenth century phenomenon, but I doubt Foucault would be conflate them. I learned from Stefan Hessbruggen, that Constantin Pecqeur, 1850 uses 'classical political economy' (see the whole thread).
**That political economy is a causal in a mechanistic sense (and uninterest in form or end) is key to Foucault's claims later in the lecture (15ff). See also below.
+In commenting on my post on the first lecture, John Protevi called attention to the fact that Foucault's manuscript reveals he always intended to discuss imperialism's development out of liberal political economy:
"this self-limitation of governmental reason characteristic of ‘liberalism’ has a strange relationship with the regime of raison d’État.—The latter opens up an unlimited domain of intervention to governmental practice, but on the other hand, through the principle of a competitive balance between states, it gives itself limited international objectives.—The self-limitation of governmental practice by liberal reason is accompanied by the break-up of these international objectives and the appearance of unlimited objectives with imperialism." (p. 21)
Comments