To summarize all this, the decisive point of the Nazi experience for the Freiburg liberals—and this was their choice of adversary, if you like, the way in which they set up the field of adversity necessary for the definition of their strategy—was that, first, they thought they could establish that Nazism was the product of an economic invariant which is indifferent and as it were impervious to the capitalism/socialism opposition and to the constitutional organization of states; second, they thought they could establish National Socialism as an invariant which, as both cause and effect, was absolutely bound up with the unlimited growth of state power; and third, that the first major and visible effect of this invariant linked to the growth of the state was a destruction of the network, the tissue of the social community, a destruction which, through a sort of chain reaction, a loop, calls precisely for protectionism, a centrally planned economy, and an increase in the power of the state.
Broadly speaking, everything which opposes liberalism and proposes state management of the economy thus constitutes an invariant whose history can be seen throughout the development of European societies since the end of the nineteenth century and, more precisely, from the start of the twentieth century, that is to say, when the liberal art of government became, so to speak, intimidated by its own consequences and tried to limit the consequences that it ought to have drawn itself from its own development. How did it try to limit them? Well, by a technique of intervention which consisted in applying to society and the economy a type of rationality considered valid within the natural sciences. In short, what we can broadly call technology. Technicization of state management, of control of the economy, and also in the analysis of economic phenomena, is what the ordoliberals call “eternal Saint-Simonism,” and they identify Saint-Simon with the birth of that vertigo which takes hold of the liberal art of government and leads it to seek a principle of limitation, a principle of organization in the application to society of a schema of rationality specific to nature, a principle which ultimately leads to Nazism. So, from Saint-Simon to Nazism there is a cycle of rationality entailing interventions which entail the growth of the state, which entails setting up an administration that itself functions according to technical types of rationality, and this constitutes precisely the genesis of Nazism over two centuries, or at any rate a century and a half, of the history of capitalism....
The essential thing is the conclusion the ordoliberals drew from this series of analyses, namely: since Nazism shows that the defects and destructive effects traditionally attributed to the market economy should instead be attributed to the state and its intrinsic defects and specific rationality, then the analyses must be completely overturned. Our question should not be: Given a relatively free market economy, how should the state limit it so as to minimize its harmful effects? We should reason completely differently and say: Nothing proves that the market economy is intrinsically defective since everything attributed to it as a defect and as the effect of its defectiveness should really be attributed to the state. So, let’s do the opposite and demand even more from the market economy than was demanded from it in the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century the market was called upon to say to the state: Beyond such and such a limit, regarding such and such a question, and starting at the borders of such and such a domain, you will no longer intervene. This is not enough, the ordoliberals say. Since it turns out that the state is the bearer of intrinsic defects, and there is no proof that the market economy has these defects, let’s ask the market economy itself to be the principle, not of the state’s limitation, but of its internal regulation from start to finish of its existence and action. In other words, instead of accepting a free market defined by the state and kept as it were under state supervision—which was, in a way, the initial formula of liberalism: let us establish a space of economic freedom and let us circumscribe it by a state that will supervise it—the ordoliberals say we should completely turn the formula around and adopt the free market as organizing and regulating principle of the state, from the start of its existence up to the last form of its interventions. In other words: a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state.
I think this kind of reversal, which the ordoliberals were only able to carry out on the basis of their analysis of Nazism, enabled them in 1948 to try to resolve the problem they faced of finding a way of giving legitimacy to a state that did not yet exist and that had to be made acceptable to those who most mistrusted it. Well, let’s adopt the free market and we will have a mechanism that will found the state and at the same time, by controlling it, will provide the guarantees demanded by those who have grounds for mistrusting it. This, I think, was the reversal they carried out. --Michel Foucault, 7 February 1979, translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 5, The Birth of Biopolitics. 114-117
The philosophically inclined reader may wish to go straight to either the drama of the Ordos vs Frankfurt School as competing, fraternal twins; heirs of Max Weber or to Foucault's analysis of the Ordos as applied Husserlian phenomenologists. And I won't leave lecture 5 until I have done so. But much of lecture 5 is devoted to analyzing the function and functionality of what is now known as the Road to Serfdom thesis. And he does so without actually naming the title of the famous book, although Hayek (who did not (recall this post on Lippmann and Mises) originate the thesis) is mentioned in the lecture (104) as a definer of neoliberalism.
And what Foucault shows is that the Road to Serfdom is not a prediction, but an analytic tool. It is not a prediction because it cannot be, say, falsified; rather it is not a prediction because it has already happened. As an analytic tool, really -- and this, in part, the point of the nod to Weber -- an ideal type, it helps explain and characterize an invariant political economy and processes.
The cold war, with its opposition between capitalism and socialism has occluded the very nature of the Road to Serfdom. For it was received, even launched, in the Anglo world as a sally in a manichean fight with communism (as a kind of capstone to the socialist calculation debate). And while Foucault is not a Skinnerian-contextualist, he restores the Road to Serfdom to its original meaning. That is quite striking because in 1979 there is little reason to think the manichean fight is not eternal.
A further point Foucault is making, and this is in the first quoted paragraph, is that alongside the liberal art of government, there is a genuine theoretical innovation in history of political philosophy. That in addition to the traditional typology of constitutions (monarchy, aristocracy, democracy and the variants), there is also another form of statism that is, in a way, without a constitution altogether, "unlimited growth of state power," that is, totalitarianism (a word he used the week before but only starts exploring a month later).* And again, this is not a prediction but lived reality for the ORDOs.
As Foucault sees clearly, once one adopts this ideal type framework, "(a) everything which opposes liberalism and (b) proposes state management of the economy" (emphasis added) is part of the Road to Serfdom. Of course, one can embrace (a) without (b) and vice versa, although often they entail each other. But as Foucault shows, for the ORDOs, the embrace of (b), associated with Keynesianism (which understands itself as saving liberalism, after all), often produces (a).
The Road to Serfdom thesis in Foucault's rendering also has an arresting analysis of the failure of the earlier "liberal art of government" which can be traced back (recall here; here; and here) to Locke. Such an analysis is needed genealogically because Nazism seems to follow liberalism (as Karl Polanyi argued). Superficially the claim is that it involved a failure of nerve ("intimidated by its own consequences and tried to limit the consequences that it ought to have drawn itself from its own development.") The more fundamental version of this failure is that the liberal art of government became enchanted by an image of science that allowed technological interventions on society as a kind of inert subject.
That is to say, the Road to Serfdom thesis presupposes, and here is one version of the manifestation of Weberianism, a distinction between the human and natural sciences and with it a distinction between the kind of rationality or management apt for it. This distinction, in Hayek's hands, received a withering (1952) review by Ernest Nagel (which I think accounts for the very delayed interest in Hayek in analytic philosophy). The key point can be stated without such a distinction; Saint-Simonism presupposes one understands the machinery of society and so one can calibrate and engineer its working parts for improvement whereas Hayek is aware that one lacks the synoptic vision to grasp all the working parts in real time.
There is also a moral criticism lurking here. The failure of nerve that results in Saint-Simonism, entails that the liberal art of government cannot treat humans as autonomous ends who have the dignity to make their own errors and to refuse participation in experiments with their lives.
So, the echt liberal art of government requires an analysis of the image of science, which contains (a) a list of characteristics that function as short-hand for representing science when (b) these characteristics are used in debates where one side (or more) appeals to the (epistemic) authority of science to settle debate, and (c) such an image is often accompanied by privileged list of scientific virtues, and (d) a kind of cost-benefit analysis of these characteristics and virtues when science wishes to be policy-apt.
And so, the Road to Serfdom thesis entails a constitution of science that can serve the needs of liberal art of government. Unusually for Foucault, he does not stop to pause what this entails for scientific enquiry or the art of government. Or to put the point in terms of the main point of this lecture. A regress looms once one recognizes that the government most constitute the free-market and, in turn, be modeled on the market. But one of the partial players in this regress is science, and it has a position necessarily orthogonal to the market-state dichotomy that defines it.
*Not for the first time I am struck how in Foucault's hands, the ORDOs come very close to Arendt (who goes unmentioned).
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