The third consequence (the second being the conjunction between the disciplines and liberalism), is the appearance in this new art of government of mechanisms with the function of producing, breathing life into, and increasing freedom, of introducing additional freedom through additional control and intervention. That is to say, control is no longer just the necessary counterweight to freedom, as in the case of panopticism: it becomes its mainspring. And here again we have examples of this, such as what took place in England and the United States in the twentieth century, in the 1930s say, when not only the economic but also the political consequences of the developing economic crisis were immediately detected and seen to represent a danger to a number of what were thought to be basic freedoms. Roosevelt’s welfare policy, for example, starting from 1932, was a way of guaranteeing and producing more freedom in a dangerous situation of unemployment: freedom to work, freedom of consumption, political freedom, and so on. What was the price of this? The price was precisely a series of artificial, voluntarist interventions, of direct economic interventions in the market represented by the basic Welfare measures, and which from 1946, and even from the start moreover, were described as being in themselves threats of a new despotism. In this case democratic freedoms are only guaranteed by an economic interventionism which is denounced as a threat to freedom. So we arrive, if you like—and this is also an important point to keep hold of—at the idea that in the end this liberal art of government introduces by itself or is the victim from within [of]* what could be called crises of governmentality. These are crises which may be due, for example, to the increase in the economic cost of the exercise of these freedoms. Consider, for example, how, in the texts of the [Trilateral] in recent years, there has been an attempt to project the effects of political freedom on the economic level of cost. So there is a problem, or crisis, if you like, or a consciousness of crisis, based on the definition of the economic cost of the exercise of freedom.
Another form of crisis would be due to the inflation of the compensatory mechanisms of freedom. That is to say, for the exercise of some freedoms, like that of the freedom of the market and anti-monopoly legislation, for example, you could have the formation of a legislative straitjacket which the market partners experience as excessive interventionism and excessive constraint and coercion. At a much more local level, you have everything which takes on the appearance of revolt and rejection of the world of the disciplines. Finally, and above all, there are processes of clogging such that the mechanisms for producing freedom, precisely those that are called upon to manufacture this freedom, actually produce destructive effects which prevail over the very freedom they are supposed to produce. This is, if you like, the ambiguity of all the devices which could be called “liberogenic,” that is to say, devices intended to produce freedom which potentially risk producing exactly the opposite.
This is precisely the present crisis of liberalism. All of those mechanisms which since the years from 1925 to 1930 have tried to offer economic and political formulae to secure states against communism, socialism, National Socialism, and fascism, all these mechanisms and guarantees of freedom which have been implemented in order to produce this additional freedom or, at any rate, to react to threats to this freedom, have taken the form of economic interventions, that is to say, shackling economic practice, or anyway, of coercive interventions in the domain of economic practice. Whether German liberals of the Freiburg School from 1927 to 1930,30 or present day, so-called libertarian American liberals, in both cases the starting point of their analysis and the cornerstone of their problem is this: mechanisms of economic intervention have been deployed to avoid the reduction of freedom that would be entailed by transition to socialism, fascism, or National Socialism. But is it not the case that these mechanisms of economic intervention surreptitiously introduce types of intervention and modes of action which are as harmful to freedom as the visible and manifest political forms one wants to avoid? In other words, Keynesian kinds of intervention will be absolutely central to these different discussions. We can say that around Keynes, around the economic interventionist policy perfected between 1930 and 1960, immediately before and after the war, all these interventions have brought about what we can call a crisis of liberalism, and this crisis manifests itself in a number of re-evaluations, re-appraisals, and new projects in the art of government which were formulated immediately before and after the war in Germany, and which are presently being formulated in America.
To summarize, or conclude, I would like to say that if it is true that a feature of the contemporary world, or of the modern world since the eighteenth century, really has been the constant presence of phenomena of what may be called crises of capitalism, couldn’t we also say that there have been crises of liberalism, which are not, of course, independent of these crises of capitalism? The problem of the thirties I have just been referring to is indeed the proof of this. But crises of liberalism are not just the pure and simple or direct projection of these crises of capitalism in the political sphere. You can find crises of liberalism linked to crises of the capitalist economy. But you can also find them with a chronological gap with regard to these crises, and in any case the way in which these crises manifest themselves, are handled, call forth reactions, and prompt re-organizations is not directly deducible from the crises of capitalism. It is the crisis of the general apparatus (dispositif ) of governmentality, and it seems to me that you could study the history of these crises of the general apparatus of governmentality which was installed in the eighteenth century. That is what I will try to do this year, but approaching things retrospectively, as it were. Michel Foucault, 24 January 1979, translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 3, The Birth of Biopolitics. 68-70
Near the end of the third lecture, in the first paragraph I quoted above, Foucault uses the word 'crisis' for the first time in the lecture series. In the subsequent (ca) 1000 words, which close his third lecture, Foucault uses 'crisis'/'crises' in a repetitive, Stockhausen-like, refrain. to announce, finally, the great theme of the series: the coexistence, perhaps, -- and this turns out to be an important rebuke to Marx -- the co-constitution, of crisis and liberalism.
For, the origin of the co-constitution of crisis and liberalism is, in Foucault's hands, not reducible to political economy. Rather, and this strikes me as vital, it is ground in liberalism's commitment to ensuring "that individuals or the community have the least exposure to danger." (66) That is to say, Foucault recognizes that liberalism is more than possessive individualism; it is, after all, life (recall) that comes first in "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." And Foucault's great insight is that the very diversity of ends, and the multiplicity of means of securing them, generates both the great vitality of liberalism and the open-ended nature of its crises. Because the means at preventing threats to one of liberalism's ends come to be seen as undermining one of its other ends.
And what we see in liberalism, today as much as during Foucault's extended present ("present crisis"), is boundless energy when one threat is imminent and a kind of paralysis of thought when are confronted with choices and interactions among ends. If the pandemic were merely a threat to life, policy would be painful but straightforward (even if there were considerable uncertainty about success). But because our response to the pandemic seems to require undermining civil liberties and the livelihoods of many, there is no stable dogmatic ground to fall back on to.
So, the third lectures (recall) diagnoses not just the recurring and dynamic to-and-fro pulling toward benevolent despotism within liberalism, but also how in this potentially fruitful dynamic crises, many of which unconnected to the business cycle, are a permanent companion to liberalism.
I do not mean to deny that Foucault, echoing the Ordos and Chicago types, makes a distinction between major, that is, systemic, and minor crises. The major crises are characterized by the genuine threat of a systemic transition away from liberalism to "socialism, fascism, or National Socialism." In the late 1930s such systemic collapse of liberalism seemed plausible, and occurred in greater and small degrees, well beyond Weimar Germany.
And, in fact, Foucault also offers a heuristic for recognizing minor crises from the systemic ones. In the minor crises the reduction of, and the making calculable, of one of the major ends to another will strike one as a plausible exercise (e.g., "the definition of the economic cost of the exercise of freedom.") Such intellectual exercises are only possible when a great deal of stability can be taken for granted. Or to put it differently, Keynesianism became the target in virtue of its partial success in preventing systemic transition.
Let me close with a bang. Foucault closes the third lecture with his statement of purpose: "I will start with the way in which the elements of this crisis of the apparatus of governmentality have been set out and formulated over the last thirty years, and to find in the history of the nineteenth century some of the elements which enable us to clarify the way in which the crisis of the apparatus of governmentality is currently experienced, lived, practiced, and formulated." (70)
What is the purpose of such clarification? Why would Foucault appeal to clarity (which I associate with Carnap and Quine; cf McKeon)? Recall from the first lecture that Foucault distinguishes (in a specific sense) between a normative conception of the art of governing and an empirical practice of governing. And he explicitly focused on the normative version by which he means a reasoned reflection on the optimal species of the art of government. This craft requires, one may surmise, skill and judgment.
So, since we are always writing amidst a crisis of liberalism, what's required is judgment about whether one faces a systemic crisis or not, and to acquire skill at navigating it. Foucault's lectures are an opportunity, in the manner of Machiavelli's instruction to the Duke of Urbino, to acquire such judgment. Of course, when such a systemic crisis will arrive cannot be known. We may say, then, that by looking back and offering us a phenomenology of governmentality, Foucault wishes to offer a gift, a kind of time capsule, to the future which necessarily will be a time of crisis.
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