A second reason for dwelling on these problems of neo-liberalism is what I would call a reason of critical morality....
These two ideas, which are close to each other and support each other— namely, [first], that the state has an unlimited force of expansion in relation to the object-target, civil society, and second, that forms of state give rise to each other on the basis of a specific dynamism of the state—seem to me to form a kind of critical commonplace frequently found today. Now it seems to me that these themes put in circulation what could be called an inflationary critical value, an inflationary critical currency. Why inflationary?
In the first place, it is inflationary because I think the theme encourages the growth, at a constantly accelerating speed, of the interchangeability of analyses. As soon as we accept the existence of this continuity or genetic kinship between different forms of the state, and as soon as we attribute a constant evolutionary dynamism to the state, it then becomes possible not only to use different analyses to support each other, but also to refer them back to each other and so deprive them of their specificity.
For example, an analysis of social security and the administrative apparatus on which it rests ends up, via some slippages and thanks to some plays on words, referring us to the analysis of concentration camps. And, in the move from social security to concentration camps the requisite specificity of analysis is diluted. So, there is inflation in the sense of an increasing interchangeability of analyses and a loss of specificity.
This critique seems to me to be equally inflationary for a second reason, which is that it allows one to practice what could be called a general disqualification by the worst. Whatever the object of analysis, however tenuous or meager it is, and whatever its real functioning, to the extent that it can always be referred to something which will be worse by virtue of the state’s intrinsic dynamic and the final forms it may take, the less can always be disqualified by the more, the better by the worst. I am not taking an example of the better, obviously, but think, for example, of some unfortunate who smashes a cinema display case and, in a system like ours, is taken to court and sentenced rather severely; you will always find people to say that this sentence is the sign that the state is becoming fascist, as if, well before any fascist state, there were no sentences of this kind—or much worse.
The third factor, the third inflationary mechanism which seems to me to be characteristic of this type of analysis, is that it enables one to avoid paying the price of reality and actuality inasmuch as, in the name of this dynamism of the state, something like a kinship or danger, something like the great fantasy of the paranoiac and devouring state can always be found. To that extent, ultimately it hardly matters what one’s grasp of reality is or what profile of actuality reality presents. It is enough, through suspicion and, as François Ewald would say, “denunciation,” to find something like the fantastical profile of the state and there is no longer any need to analyze actuality. The elision of actuality seems to me [to be] the third inflationary mechanism we find in this critique.
Finally, I would say that this critique in terms of the mechanism and dynamism of the state is inflationary inasmuch as it does not carry out a criticism or analysis of itself. That is to say, it does not seek to know the real source of this kind of anti-state suspicion, this state phobia that currently circulates in such varied forms of our thought. Now it seems to me—and this is why I have laid such stress on the neo-liberalism of 1930–1950—that this kind of analysis, this critique of the state, of its intrinsic and irrepressible dynamism, and of its interlinking forms that call on each other, mutually support each other, and reciprocally engender each other is effectively, completely, and already very clearly formulated in the years 1930–1945. At this time it was quite precisely localized and did not have the force of circulation it has now. We find it precisely localized within the neo-liberal choices being developed at this time. You find this critique of the polymorphous, omnipresent, and all powerful state in these years when, liberalism or neo-liberalism, or even more precisely, ordoliberalism was engaged in distinguishing itself from the Keynesian critique and at the same time undertaking the critique of New Deal and Popular Front policies of state control and intervention, of National Socialist economics and politics, of the political and economic choices of the Soviet Union, or, in a word, of socialism generally. It is in this context, in this German neo-liberal school, and taking things in their narrowest or almost petty form, that we find both this analysis of the necessary and as it were inevitable kinship between different forms of the state, and also this idea that the state has a specific, intrinsic dynamism which means that it can never halt its expansion and complete takeover of the whole of civil society.--- Michel Foucault, 7 March, 1979, translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 8, The Birth of Biopolitics, 187-189.
Much of lecture 8 is devoted to the French uptake, and re-invention, of neoliberalism, including the development of ideas surrounding negative income tax, in the 1970s. Foucault is rather apologetic about this (cf. "bore" 203). But in passing, he explains one of his main reasons for spending so much time on (German) neo-liberalism, which, it turns out, is distinct from its impact on public policy. Simply put, according Foucault a form of neoliberal thought has had an outsized impact on a certain kind of intellectual discourse that understands itself as moral, even on the right side of history, and yet simultaneously does not recognize and grasp its own sources of social criticism and, in a certain and more important way, its futility as a form of social criticism. That is to say, according to Foucault the road-to-serfdom thesis has become so influential among the educated that it has become a species of fantasy incapable of generating needed distinctions; of describing or learning from reality.
It is important to be clear that Foucault is not here criticizing the original road to serfdom thesis.1 Nazism and Stalinism are real phenomena which developed out of and, to be explained by earlier historical and political events. But the road-to-serfdom also fed into other habits of thoughts, which gained wide currency beyond ordo-austrian-libertarian circles. The inability to make distinctions and grasp essential features of reality creates circumstances when demagogues and cynical authoritarians are turned into purported fascists and nazis (or where protests -- which are disproportionately petty to the threat of nazism -- are turned into riots or uprisings and other acts of resistance).
What Foucault is diagnosing, I think, that the road-to-serfdom thesis, once unmoored from its historical specificity becomes an instrument for manichean thinking that infects commentariat that presents itself as learned and intellectually savvy. It is not just among intellectuals, because Stateside it influences, "if not a mass movement, at least a widespread movement" (193; he has in mind the shaping of libertarian ideals on the right). And what Foucault recognizes that this form of thinking is not limited to what are now known as classical liberals, but it becomes predominant across the intellectual spectrum (even if the terminology sometimes shifts from uncontrollable growth of the state to uncontrollable growth of elites).
That is to say, the unmoored-road-to-serfdom thesis becomes a species of populist thought in which all states morph into each other and each is, say, an election away from fascism and/or the renewed continued control of unaccountable elites. And the problem Foucault confronts is that if you deny the unmoored road-to-serfdom thesis (because these rightwingers are not leading us to fascism; or this social policy is worth the cost), then you are thought an enabler of fascism or an apologists for stalinism. It would be tempting to repeat the exercise for every work that markets itself as against the rise of fascism or denounces <fill in your favored shibboleth> today.
In reading Foucault here, we should note that he is not ruling out that fascism increases.* But in so far as this growth exists, it is due to the implosion or erosion of the state. And that's because Foucault locates fascism in parties, and perhaps cults of personalities, that are at odds with state independence and fill the gap once state power has collapsed.*
That is to say, Foucault agrees, in his own voice, with a core feature of the ORDOs--that a key bulwark against fascism is the independence of the state against would be particular (party) interests or cults of personality who tame the state's independence. And, again following Weber, he claims that it is the 'governmentality of the party' that undermines state independence and so opens the door to fascism.** But, once one refuses to engage in Manichean thought, it does not follow that any strengthening of parties automatically leads to fascism; party elites and primary voters have something to say about this, too.
Strikingly, and I close with this, Foucault does not ask why or how a kind of fantasy critique stays so attractive and why it persists, despite its anodyne quality, decade after decade. That is to say, it is clear that Foucault thinks it undermines what he calls 'critical morality.' But it is left unclear why, after diagnosing the problem, he thinks a fundamentally -- recall the Freudian themes of lecture 1 -- neurotic, infantile intellectual culture can persist and metastasize on itself in democratic life. That is to say, Foucault diagnoses the effects of mechanisms that prevent the reality principle from being practiced and exercised.+ But Foucault does not explicitly spell out the underlying causes because, I surmise, to do so would overstep the bounds of prudence, that is, break necessary taboos of democratic life. And so he leaves that effort to an audience he simultaneously indicts.
1. By original, I mean pre-1943. For Foucault, once Röpke & Hayek develop it to analyze the Beveridge plan it gets transformed into something else (p. 189).
* Foucault writes, "we should not do is imagine we are describing a real, actual process concerning ourselves when we denounce the growth of state control, or the state becoming fascist, or the establishment of a state violence, and so on. All those who share in the great state phobia should know that they are following the direction of the wind and that in fact, for years and years, an effective reduction of the state has been on the way, a reduction of both the growth of state control and of a “statifying” and “statified” (étatisante et étatisée) governmentality. I am not saying at all that we delude ourselves on the faults or merits of the state when we say “this is very bad” or “this is very good”; that is not my problem. I am saying that we should not delude ourselves by attributing to the state itself a process of becoming fascist which is actually exogenous and due much more to the state’s reduction and dislocation. I also mean that we should not delude ourselves about the nature of the historical process which currently renders the state both so intolerable and so problematic. (191-192; emphasis added).
**: it is "at the historical origin of something like totalitarian regimes, of something like Nazism, fascism, or Stalinism." (191)
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