What both Foucault's critics and his defenders have failed to consider is a deep affinity between Foucault's thought and neoliberalism: a shared suspicion of the state. Foucault's antistatism was, in the first instance, theoretical. He famously complained that “in political thought and analysis, the king's head has still not been cut off.” What he meant was that political theorists too often understand power on the model of the state, viewing it as flowing top-down from a transcendent authority, rather than as a force disseminated across the social space through complex and open-ended relations, involving a wide range of actors and institutions. This position was a logical consequence of Foucault's antihumanism: the main fallacy of state-based models of politics is that they anthropomorphize power by viewing it as the conscious expression of a will. The theoretical antistatism implicit in Foucault's thought required, however, a specific configuration of circumstances to be actualized. In the 1970s, however, Foucault's theoretical antistatism became increasingly normative: his claim that we should abandon the state as our model for understanding power evolved, in other words, into an argument that the state should cease to be the primary focus of engaging in politics. The context in which this shift occurred is both significant and underappreciated. The economic crisis that struck France in 1973, accompanied by the implosion of the statist assumptions that had driven the country's remarkable postwar growth, suddenly made economic liberalism far more relevant to public discourse than it had been for decades. Spurred by these events, Foucault seems to have recognized the affinity between his theoretical objection to state-based conceptions of power and the economic liberalism that was the subject of contemporary debates. The onset of prolonged economic malaise in the early 1970s, I argue, proves to be as critical a factor in the intellectual transformations of the 1970s as antitotalitarianism or the so-called “death of Marx.”
Thus Foucault did indeed have a liberal moment – but it was inspired not by the political liberalism of Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, or François Guizot, whom other intellectuals were busily dusting off at the time, but by economic liberals like Adam Smith, Wilhelm Röpke, and the Chicago School. In his 1978 and 1979 lectures, the antistatism latent in Foucault's theory of power was nurtured by the resurgence of neoliberal ideas that the 1973 economic crisis precipitated. In this climate, Foucault found economic liberalism to be intellectually appealing for two crucial reasons. First, at a juncture when he, like a number of his contemporaries, was attempting to free French intellectual life from the headlock of revolutionary leftism (or gauchisme), economic liberalism proved to be a potent theoretical weapon for bludgeoning the Left's authoritarian proclivities. Second, Foucault could endorse economic liberalism because, unlike its political counterpart, it did not require him to embrace philosophical humanism – the outlook that Foucault had, from the outset of his career, contested with all the energy that his intellectual skills could muster. The theoretical condition of possibility of Foucault's neoliberal moment was his insight that economic liberalism is, essentially, a liberalism without humanism. The limitation of state power that defines the practice of economic liberalism does not occur, Foucault maintained, when “subjects” are recognized as having “rights.” Of such hypotheses it has no need. Rather, economic liberalism justifies itself on the basis of its greater efficiency: it is a practice that arises when power realizes that it has an interest as power in limiting power. Far from being grounds for denouncing it, this is precisely why Foucault found economic liberalism so appealing: it offered a compelling terrain upon which his practical aspiration for freedom might merge with his theoretical conviction that power is constitutive of all human relationships.--Michael C. Behrent (2016 [2014]) "Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Freemarket Creed, 1976-1979." in Foucault and Neoliberalism, edited b Daniel Zamora & Michael C. Behrent, pp. 29-31. [The paper was first published in 2009.]
It is fair to say that Zamora and Behrent's volume set off an anxious debate on 'the Left' on how to evaluate late Foucault's work. My interest here is not to save Foucault for 'the Left;' but I want to engage some of the more important contributions of that debate because some of its terms prevent, I think, an adequate appreciation of Foucault's position. The problems I want to call attention to are present in Behrent's essay.
But before I get to that, I want to avoid some misunderstanding. I like, even admire Behrent's attempt to situate Foucault's thought in political and activist developments of the 1970s in France and its political economy (including stagflation, and debates over the electoral alliance between communists and socialists). So, if you are not familiar with his paper, do read it!
In addition, in the passage quoted above, Behrent notes an important oddity in Foucault's treatment of liberalism in the Birth of Biopolitics; Foucault seems to skip the French, nineteenth century liberal tradition, including its leading lights, Constant, Tocqueville, and Guizot. (We know that Foucault was quite familiar with Tocqueville, especially.) This apparent omission matters because it entails that Foucault's treatment of the 'radical' tradition -- utilitarianism -- is biased toward Bentham and Robbins (and later Becker), and away from J.S. Mill (who was shaped by Tocqueville and Constant, especially) and who is never mentioned in the Birth of Biopolitics (nor is Sidgwick).
Unfortunately, Behrent ends up misunderstanding the significance of this because he treats the omission as instantiating a distinction between political and economic liberalism with political liberalism committed to (philosophical) humanism and economic liberalism not. To be sure, I don't mean to deny that Foucault's engagement with liberalism exhibits anti-humanist tendencies, but Behrent's presentation ends up conflating a number of issues.
First, the distinction between political and economic liberalism is Behrent's not Foucault's. Unfortunately, it is orthogonal to Foucault's own distinction between (recall 17 January 1979, lecture 2 The Birth of Biopolitics. p. 42) (i) an "axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach" which starts from law (and which Foucault associates with Rousseau). That is a republican-contractual approach. and (ii) "The other approach does not start from law but from governmental practice itself...and tries to analyze it in terms of the de facto limits that can be set to this governmentality." This (ii) Foucault associates with English radicalism, that is utilitarianism. And according to Foucault (i) and (ii) are two traditions of conceptualizing freedom in liberalism. That is to say, while Constant is not mentioned Foucault is actually engaged in a polemic with him.
I have quoted Foucault to make clear that in Foucault's hands (ii) is also a political form of liberalism (it's focused on governmental practice, after all). Moreover, as Behrent belatedly recognizes, it is kind of odd to slot Röpke, and Ordoliberalism generally, into a non-political or economic liberalism. And so Behrent introduces a further ad hoc claim (about the status of law in liberal thought) that ends up undermining his own distinction between political and economic liberalism:
the Ordoliberals were not, however, crude free-marketeers. Their beliefs boil down to a single crucial insight: everything that neoclassical economics says about the free market's virtues is true; the problem, however, is that competition is a quasi-mathematical ideal, not an empirical reality. For competition to work its magic, it must first be jump-started by the state. Specifically, the state needs a robust legal framework, one that allows marketplace competition to approximate its ideal form (though like the utilitarians, it should be noted, the Ordoliberals conceived of law as a political tool, not as the state's metaphysical foundation). What seems to have intrigued Foucault about Ordoliberalism is that it confirmed his intuition that economic liberalism should be thought of as a political and not merely an economic system. Behrent "Liberalism without Humanism," p. 49
To save his distinction between economic and political liberalism, Behrent introduces a further distinction between those that treat the law "as the state's metaphysical foundation" (that is, "political liberals") and those that treat it merely as a political tool (that is, "economic liberals").
Unfortunately, we're now slipping furth away Foucault's own understanding. For, first, Foucault doesn't treat "axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach" as treating the law as a metaphysical foundation for the state--he actually thinks that in so far as law is derived from anything, it's revolutionary violence (or war). But let's stipulate for the sake of argument that Behrent is correct about this.
More important for present purposes, second, it it is quite clear that Foucault treats the "axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach" as leading into Kantianism and he understands Ordoliberalism (plausibly) as itself explicitly a species of Kantianism, but one shaped by the influence of phenomenology (recall especially lecture 5). For, in fact, when Foucault treats of ordoliberalism, they are represented as recognizing explicitly (recall my treatment of lecture 4, 31 January 1979, The Birth of Biopolitics) that "a state which violates the basic freedoms, the essential rights of citizens, is no longer representative of its citizens." That is to say, the ordoliberals constitute the state in terms of its capacity and willingness to respect citizens' rights. (It is no surprise that James Buchanan, who is a contractualist, admired the Ordoliberals.) So, while Behrent is right to claim that the law is also a tool for Ordoliberals (in particular a means to help battle the effects of concentrated power), Behrent's distinction between economic and political liberalism mischaracterizes them (as an interpretation of Foucault and of their self-understanding).
As an aside, Behrent's distinctions make a total hash of Röpke's political philosophy. For, Röpke himself is a big fan of Tocqueville (their mutual overlap can be characterized as a kind of 'aristocratic liberalism'). And while Foucault doesn't mention it, it would have been odd if he had missed it.
Now, above I noted that I am open to Behrent's idea that Foucault's attraction to neoliberalism, if it is one, might be found in a kind of shared anti-humanism. The problem with Behrent's way of articulating this insight is that Foucault is quite clear that the Ordos are humanists (this is actually evident from the titles of Röpke's books alone: Civitas Humana; Mass und Mitte; Humane Economy.) Crucially, Foucault explicitly treats and recognizes the Vitalpolitik and Gesellschaftspolitik of Ordoliberalism as enmeshed in humanism, I quote (recall) lecture 10 (21 March, 1979) of The Birth of Biopolitics: for the Ordos, "The individual’s life must be lodged, not within a framework of a big enterprise like the firm or, if it comes to it, the state, but within the framework of a multiplicity of diverse enterprises connected up to and entangled with each other, enterprises which are in some way ready to hand for the individual, sufficiently limited in their scale for the individual’s actions, decisions, and choices to have meaningful and perceptible effects, and numerous enough for him not to be dependent on one alone." (p. 241, emphasis added; there is an echo of Heidegger here, but without his anti-humanism!)
As an important aside, while Foucault clearly admires Ordoliberalism, Behrent misses that Foucault treats the French uptake of their ideas as a "radicalization" (lecture 8, p. 207; in context Foucault is discussing Giscard and Barre). And so Behrent misses, I think, how Foucault is criticizing how Giscard and Barre have applied ordoliberal (and Austrian) ideas in France. But about that another time more.
Now, as I have noted before, inscribed in the Birth of Biopolitics, is a natural history of the changing conceptions of homo oeconomicus: (i) in the Smithian period he is the man of exchange (224) or with explicit reference to Hume (as an exemplar of English empiricism) "the subject of interest" (273); in the (ii) classical period starting with Ricardo he is man the consumer in terms of satisfaction/pursuit of needs (p. 225);+ (iii) in the neoliberal period, especially in the (recall) ORDO senses, "he is the man of enterprise and production." (147, lecture 6). And (iv) at Chicago he is also "an entrepreneur," but now, especially, "an entrepreneur of himself," who develops and produces/maintains his own human capital as a source of earnings (226), even a possible earning stream into the future (230), and (crucially for present purposes) "reacts to reality in a nonrandom way." (p. 269, 28 March 1979).*
Now, of these only Becker (iv), perhaps, may be slotted into a kind of philosophical antihumanism in Foucault's hands (recall this post). (I return to that some time.) But in so far as there is a tradition of economic liberalism as constructed by Behrent, it is not constituted by philosophical antihumanism in Foucault's presentation (or, I would add, in 'reality'). And so this means that in so far as we're trying to explain Foucault's attraction, if any, to neoliberalism something has gone off the rails. And this is, I have argued, because Behrent mistakenly treats "economic liberalism" as a kind term that somehow combines Smith, Röpke, and Becker whereas Foucault does not. It doesn't follow from this, of course, that 'the Left's anxiety' about Foucault's seeming attraction to neoliberalism is itself mistaken. To be continued.
*It is worth noting that Daniel Zamora in his very fine, "Foucault, the Excluded, and the Neoliberal Erosion of the State," while drawing on Jose Luis Moreno Pestana, flattens this natural history (see p. 78 Zamora & Behrent), and treats neoliberalism as having one kind of homo oeconomicus. This is analogous to Behrent's mistake about economic liberalism.
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