4 April 1979: Foucault on The Original Neoliberalism (ep XXXVIII)

What is civil society? Well, all in all, I think the notion and analysis of civil society, the set of objects or elements that are brought to light in the framework of this notion of civil society, amount to an attempt to answer the question I have just mentioned: how to govern, according to the rules of right, a space of sovereignty which for good or ill is inhabited by economic subjects? How can a reason, a rational principle be found for limiting, other than by right or by the domination of economic science, a governmental practice which must take responsibility for the heterogeneity of the economic and the juridical? Civil society is not a philosophical idea therefore. Civil society is, I believe, a concept of governmental technology, or rather, it is the correlate of a technology of government the rational measure of which must be juridically pegged to an economy understood as process of production and exchange. The problem of civil society is the juridical structure (économie juridique) of a governmentality pegged to the economic structure (économie économique). And I think that civil society—which is very quickly called society, and which at the end of the eighteenth century is called the nation—makes a self-limitation possible for governmental practice and an art of government, for reflection on this art of government and so for a governmental technology; it makes possible a self-limitation which infringes neither economic laws nor the principles of right, and which infringes neither the requirement of governmental generality nor the need for an omnipresence of government. An omnipresent government, a government which nothing escapes, a government which conforms to the rules of right, and a government which nevertheless respects the specificity of the economy, will be a government that manages civil society, the nation, society, the social.--Michel Foucault, 4 April, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 12, The Birth of Biopolitics, 295-296

In the final lecture, Foucault returns to the eighteenth century, and his main theme, the specificity of a liberal art of government. And he reminds his audience that this does not involve what they might antecedently to his lectures imagine: the liberal art of government neither involves the creation of a zone (the market) free of government interference ("sort of free port or free space in the general space of sovereignty" (293)); nor does it involve, as the Physiocrats propose, "a position of both passivity with regard to the intrinsic necessity of the economic process and, at the same time, of supervision and, as it were, checking, or rather of total and constant [scientific] verification of this process." (293) Rather, the liberal art of government will involve the management of a sphere, even an entity, that in some sense is in between government and rights bearing individuals and corporations (i.e., society); and, in other sense, is the general, but delimited common ground among government,  rights bearing individuals, corporations, and other associations (i.e., the nation).

While it is tempting to rush ahead to the end of the lecture to explore the relationship between civil society and nationalism, in order to understand the relationship between liberalism and naturalism, and to see how Foucault treats the theorists of civil society (Ferguson and Adam Smith), Foucault halts the flow of his argument, to make both a larger metaphysical point first as well as to remind his audience, as I noted, that the lecture-series itself is part of a much larger enterprise. And he, thereby invites his audience then (and later) to explore how his musings on the specifically liberal art of government related to much larger study of governmental technologies:

Civil society is not a primary and immediate reality; it is something which forms part of modern governmental technology. To say that it belongs to governmental technology does not mean that it is purely and simply its product or that it has no reality. Civil society is like madness and sexuality, what I call transactional realities (réalités de transaction). That is to say, those transactional and transitional figures that we call civil society, madness, and so on, which, although they have not always existed are nonetheless real, are born precisely from the interplay of relations of power and everything which constantly eludes them, at the interface, so to speak, of governors and governed. Civil society, therefore, is an element of transactional reality in the history of governmental technologies, a transactional reality which seems to me to be absolutely correlative to the form of governmental technology we call liberalism, that is to say, a technology of government whose objective is its own self-limitation insofar as it is pegged to the specificity of economic processes. (297)

l want to make three main points about Foucault's position here. First, it is in some sense a mistake, albeit an understandable one, to treat Foucault as a straightforward social constructivist about transactional realities. That would be to say that civil society is merely a "product"--and Foucault explicitly denies that. For while civil society is in a certain sense a new effect of certain historically specific conditions, it is not constructed on a plan or by anybody in particular; nor is it merely (a la Searle) a set of self-affirming beliefs (even if it presupposes norms and commitment). Rather, civil society is both the byproduct of particular patterns of behavior (and omission) from the bottom up (as it advocates would claim) as well as co-constituted by (as it advocates may miss noticing) the existence of governmental practice that simultaneously, and historically conditioned, aims to shape, and is shaped by, market exchange(s) and a practice which is also a form of self-limitation.

From the perspective of metaphysical clarity, the previous paragraph is frustratingly vague. To the best of my knowledge Foucault never uses 'transactional realities' again. I think it is best to understand civil society as a kind of emergent property from different levels and orders of social reality. But it is also a robust property because once it emerges it gives rise to all set of other properties that reinforce it. 

Second, it is surprising that the ontological category Foucault uses 'transactional reality' itself linguistically echoes the particular social phenomenon (market exchange) to which civil society is pegged. Perhaps this awkwardness explains the reason why Foucault does not seem to use the term again, which, after all, is also used to describe social features (madness, sexuality, etc.) that are not themselves intrinsically connected to markets or exchange.

But it is also pretty clear why Foucault uses the term. For Foucault is trying to describe what Hayek called 'spontaneous order' while denying its 'naturalness'. In addition, Foucault is clear transactional realities exist, in part, to be subjects of (governmental) technique and this is something Hayek would generally deny (although ORDOs would accept). 

The previous two points are meant as elucidation (even if you, my dear reader, might feel  have clarified nothing). The final, third point is to note how narrow liberalism is for Foucault. It is constituted by a certain governmental technology that respects rights (or governs by 'rules of right,'), that is the rule of law, and is oriented toward market processes or the economy.* What's lacking entirely are the features associated with political liberalism (representative government, consent of the governed, free press/speech, freedom of religion, separation of powers, open borders, etc. This is especially surprising because as, I have noted (see also my post on the first lecture of birth of biopolitics) the liberal art of government (even the term) is rooted in the seventeenth century philosophy of John Locke, especially chapter 5 of Locke's Second Treatise. Of course, I don't deny this also involves a commitment to economic and population growth, cheap goods, trade etc. (as discerned by Toland).

The point is not just historical (what about Locke), but also philosophical. Is liberalism constituted narrowly -- as its Marxist critics often suggest, and certain libertarian advocates imply -- to a narrow defense of property and the gospel of growth -- or does it constitute a whole range of practices that are political, social, and even cultural? In fact, Foucault recognizes that a reader may well be wondering what happened to Locke  because he continues with the following, striking claim:

In Locke, for example, civil society is precisely a society characterized by a juridical-political structure. It is society, the set of individuals who are linked to each other through a juridical and political bond. In this sense, the notion of civil society is absolutely indistinguishable from political society. In Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, chapter 7 is entitled: “Of Political or Civil Society.” So, until then, civil society is always a society characterized by the existence of a juridical and political bond. It is from the second half of the eighteenth century, precisely at the time when the questions of political economy and of the governmentality of economic processes and subjects are being addressed, that the notion of civil society will change, if not totally, then at least in a significant way, and it will be thoroughly reorganized. (297-298)

To put this as a joke: in Foucault's historiography, the original neo-liberalism is the eighteenth century's move to depoliticize its conception of civil society. Foucault's reading of Locke is a bit curious, because the leitmotif of chapter 7 of the Second Treatise, which gives a stylized natural history from marriage/family, procreation, economic contracts, to the institution of the rule of laws and punishment as well as collective self-government is that all these institutions revolve around mutual consent and shared utility, that is, "mutual peace and security" and to be "guarded from harm, or injury." (etc.)** Rather than seeing mutual, voluntary consent as the ground of a shared liberal conception of civil society, and seeing the eighteenth century conceptions as a natural development of Locke's rather terse and stylized account, Foucault implies that from the vantage point of the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century conception of civil society represents, despite some continuity, a break. And this is all the more surprising because throughout his treatment of homo economicus in the Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault had insisted (recall lecture 11) that the eighteenth century conception was the man of (voluntary) exchange. So, with that in mind we're ready for the discussion of Ferguson and Smith, which Foucault implies, re-founded liberalism by making it self-aware about how (a re-conceptualized) civil society could be governed. 

 

 

*Obviously, one can conceive of a non-market economy, but in context it is clear Foucault is here treating market exchange primarily.

*Yes, I am skipping Locke's comments on family slaves, and dependents like children.

Comments

[Jeff Bell]

Great post Eric! The 18th century text that came to mind as I was reading this, and seems to have been a crucial text that marks the discontinuity you point to in your last paragraph, is this passage from James Steuart's Statistical Account of Scotland: '...a modern economy is the most effective bridle ever invented against the folly of despotism...the sovereign finds himself so bound up by the laws of his political economy that every transgression of them runs him into new difficulties' (1767, 322).

[Eric Schliesser]

Hi Jeff, that lovely Steuart passage figures prominently in one of pieces at Newapps: https://www.newappsblog.com/2013/01/weekly-philo-of-economics-the-gentle-hand-of-james-steuart-and-neo-liberalism.html. (And in the piece, I was pleasantly surprised, I link it to Foucault, Ordo-liberalism, and Jeff Bell!)
There is interesting fact that Foucault completely ignores Steuart (and the elements of Hume's political economy on which it is based). In my next post I want to explain what Foucault finds so useful in Ferguson's (and Smith's) account of civil society (and so can ignore Steuart).