I have dwelt so long on this problem of German neo-liberalism first of all for methodological reasons, because, continuing what I began to say last year, I wanted to see what concrete content could be given to the analysis of relations of power—it being understood, of course, and I repeat it once again, that power can in no way be considered either as a principle in itself, or as having explanatory value which functions from the outset. The term itself, power, does no more than designate a term of relations which are entirely still to be analyzed, and what I have proposed to call governmentality, that is to say, the way in which one conducts the conduct of men, is no more than a proposed analytical grid for these relations of power.
So, we have been trying out this notion of governmentality and, second, seeing how this grid of governmentality, which we may assume is valid for the analysis of ways of conducting the conduct of mad people, patients, delinquents, and children, may equally be valid when we are dealing with phenomena of a completely different scale, such as an economic policy, for example, or the management of a whole social body, and so on. What I wanted to do—and this was what was at stake in the analysis—was to see the extent to which we could accept that the analysis of micro-powers, or of procedures of governmentality, is not confined by definition to a precise domain determined by a sector of the scale, but should be considered simply as a point of view, a method of decipherment which may be valid for the whole scale, whatever its size. In other words, the analysis of micro-powers is not a question of scale, and it is not a question of a sector, it is a question of a point of view. Good. This, if you like, was the methodological reason.
A second reason for dwelling on these problems of neo-liberalism is what I would call a reason of critical morality. Actually, going by the recurrence of certain themes, we could say that what is currently challenged, and from a great many perspectives, is almost always the state...--Michel Foucault, 7 March, 1979, translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 8, The Birth of Biopolitics, 186
After my last post, I wanted to move on quickly to lecture 9 with its spectacular fireworks on Gary Becker. But an unease -- I almost wrote 'daimon' -- held me back. When last week, I re-read lecture 8, again, I realized I had underestimated the significance of Foucault's treatment of the evolution of the French welfare state, which Foucault treats not just as one of the diffussions of ORDO liberal though (in elite opinion not among wider public) -- the other, among a wider kind of counter-elite, is the American diffusion --, but also as an instance of its "radicalization." (207)
And, yet, rather than discussing the significance of such radicalization, here i am back again at the start of lecture 8, which is the middle of the lecture-series. And suddenly, with clarity, I notice that Foucault is offering, again, a kind of Apologia Pro Lectiones Sua. As the passage above shows, he offers two reasons for dwelling on the ORDOs.
First, the lecture series is supposed to exhibit a methodological innovation. It is supposed to exhibit what happens when one discards 'power' as a ground, or explanation, and replaces it with 'governmentality,' which is the way one conducts the conduct of men, not just on the micro scale, but also on the macro-scale, in particular, "as an economic policy...or the management of a whole social body." We might say governmentality is a tool in the study of a kind of meta-orchestration. This should be distinguished, I think, from the art of government. Governmentality is a concept or method within the study of the art of government.
However, the distinction between the art of government and its study by way of governmentality is not un-permeable; in so far as the normative art of government reflects on its own ground, that is, it becomes philosophical, it can appropriate governmentality in its own self-understanding. The problematic of this lecture-series can be, then, stated that Foucault has taken upon itself (recall first lecture) the obligation to present his analysis of German neo-liberalism as yet another exemplar of governmentality, and, simultaneously, contribute to the art of government at its best.
It is important to discern that like the German counterparts -- (recall here his fifth lecture; and here) the fraternal strife between Frankfurt and Freiburg -- Foucault is grappling with the legacy of Weber. And we see him here, as it were, with stiletto in hand, deciding to strike at the fact-value distinction while, simultaneously, he is developing an ideal-typical analysis of Ordoliberalism capable of entering into a kind of, if not social science, then social theory.
Second, he explains he does so because of what he calls "a critical morality." Unfortunately, in the lecture series he does not explain what he means by this term. In my last post I explored what, in the name of a critical morality, he attacked: namely the widespread and intellectually lazy uptake of a state-phobia which manifested itself in a certain form of the road-to-serfdom thesis outside its original formulation, by thinking types across the political spectrum that becomes an instrument for manichean thinking and de facto a new form of populism. It sees the rise of fascism everywhere and, if I am not mistaken, is itself in its own way a contribution toward fascism because it refuses to make distinctions and address political reality in its concrete manifestations.
And, so, critical morality has its task to diagnose, police, and correct a kind of thinking man's (and other humans') shared conceptual deformation that prevents better thinking in the intellectual life of (ahh) public opinion. And, in my last post, I got so fascinated by Foucault's first-order analysis of the uptake of inflated state-phobia, that I failed to address the nature of serving or promoting critical morality.*
To the best of my knowledge Foucault does not use 'critical morality' [moralité critique] again. But we see here a willingness to embrace not just the demands of responsible speech, but a desire to challenge and even try to reform leading ideas in circulation.
I have deliberately not used 'ideology' because it is clear that the main business of "critical morality" is not the policing of ideology, but rather the engagement with the kind of background, low-level conceptual framework by which intellectuals, (people like you and me), journalists, students and policy-makers describe and analyze, even try to mobilize, social reality. That is to say, critical morality is addressed at the shared commitments of what Julien Benda called 'clerks' and their wider circle/habitat.
Somewhat surprising, Foucault here takes on something very close to the very project Isaiah Berlin had articulated for himself in his famous inaugural lecture. Recall that Berlin thought that the role of the political theorist was to guide society's ideas (if we don't such ideas "remain blind and undirected.") In particular, Berlin believed it is the duty of philosophers to "disarm" dangerous ideas before they become too dangerous.
Foucault clearly, and one might say, more liberally, does not think it is his role to guide society's ideas. But from the perspective of critical morality, he does think, more Socratically, it his role to criticize and disarm society's critical doxa. And, so part of the point of the Birth of Biopolitics is to supply the educated with a better conceptual framework, and narrative, to describe and analyze contemporary political life.
*Foucault's conceptual correction is two-fold: (i) "the welfare state has neither the same form, of course, nor, it seems to me, the same root or origin as the totalitarian state, as the Nazi, fascist, or Stalinist state;" (190) (ii) fascism and the totalitarian state are not about making the state all-powerful, but about the weakening of the state in the service of the party or leader. (191) Granted, he goes on to admit that (iii) there has been "growth of party governmentality," (191) but in liberal democracies that has not expressed itself as a monopoly (yet); rather (iv) there has been a growth of "liberal governmentality" (191) which, for all its faults/problems, he claims is in clear opposition to totalitarianism. In particular, as I have noted before Foucault agrees with the ORDOs that the independence and strength of the state (vis a vis parties, civil society, etc.) is a bulwark against fascism not its site ("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." (192))
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