Digressions&Impressions

On Foucault's Discipline and Punishment & Chicago/Public Choice Economics (II)

But perhaps one should reverse the problem and ask oneself what is served by the failure of the prison; what is the use of these different phenomena that are continually being criticized; the maintenance of delinquency, the encouragement of recidivism, the transformation of the occasional offender into a habitual delinquent, the organization of a closed milieu of delinquency. Perhaps one should look for what is hidden beneath the apparent cynicism of the penal institution, which, after purging the convicts by means of their sentence, continues to follow them by a whole series of 'brandings' (a surveillance that was once de jure and which is today de facto; the police record that has taken the place of the convic's passport) and which thus pursues as a 'delinquent' someone who has acquitted himself of his punishment as an offender. Can we not see here a consequence rather than a contradiction? If so, one would be forced to suppose that the prison, and no doubt punishment in general, is not intended to eliminate offences, but rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use th!m; that it is not so much that they render docile those who are liable to transgress the law, but that they tend to assimilate the transgression of the laws in a general tactics of subiection.--Michel Foucault (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison] translated by Alan Sheridan, pp. 272.

The passage quoted above occurs in the section where Foucault steps back from his account of the 'birth' of a prison and reminds his reader that he is researching and writing his book during "prisoners' revolts of recent weeks." (p. 268) And some readers, then and now, will be familiar with Foucault's activism on behalf of those prisoners. Foucault goes on to note that such revolts elicit a predictable response from (what one might call) enlightened, bien pensant public opinion: "the prisoners' revolts...have been attributed to the fact that the reforms proposed in 1945 never really took effect; that one must therefore return to the fundamental principles of the prison." (p. 268) And Foucault goes on to note that the (seven) principles that entered into the 1945 reform and the predictable response to their failure are a return of the same with a history of "150 years," (p. 269): "Word for word, from one century to the other, the same fundamental propositions are repeated. They reappear in each new, hard-won, finally accepted formulation of a reform that has hitherto always been lacking." (p. 270).*

A certain kind of economist -- often associated with public choice theory and/or Stigler's account of rent-seeking [hereafter the fusion of Chicago and Virginia] --, when confronted by a persistent and enduring failure of a social institution, will ask Cui bono? And what will follow is a story about persistent rents, and rent-seeking. That is, while it is often presented in terms of methodological individualism of utility maximizing agents, the Chicago-Virginia fusion offers a functionalist account of the persistence of social institutions in virtue of the functions they serve to some socially powerful agents or classes of agents. (I put it like that to pay due hommage to the Smithian and Marxist (recall) roots of the emphasis on rent-seeking in the Chicago-Virginia fusion (recall this post on Stigler and recall here on Buchanan and Tullock.) If you don't like the word 'class' use 'representative agent' instead.

Now, before I say anything else, it is worth noting that in the subsequent pages of the material I quote, Foucault offers the rent-seeking answer familiar from Chicago and Virginia fusion. In particular, he identifies three kinds of rents: first, and this is central to the argument of the whole book, members of the human sciences -- medicine, psychology, crimonology, pedagogy, social work, statistics, sociology etc. -- directly gain employment and status from the fact that modern prisons are not just places to lock people away, but also to reform and discipline them. They also gain an easily acessible study object and data (e.g. p. 277 & p. 281).  Second, the criminalization of, say, brothels and the simultaneous regulation of the health of the prostitutes create "enormous profits" that are partially captured by members of the political classes, partially captured by police forces, and again  medicine (see, especially, pp. 279-280). Third, prisons are themselves producers of delinquincy, and so that generates one might call 'second order rents' because it reinforces all the primary rents discussed just mentioned.

There is a further, more important, convergence with Chicago-Virginia fusion lurking here. Foucault treats prisons and the penal system as producers of delinquincy. (This is, in fact, one of the central insights of most prison reform programs that reappear.) And, in fact, it is quite natural to read Becker and Stigler as providing a framework to think about what (in the 1970s already) was called "the crime production function" (as even critics acknowledged). As Becker (1968) put it one can articulate a "function relating the number of offenses by any person to his probability of conviction, to his punishment if convicted, and to other variables, such as the income available to him in legal and other illegal activities, the frequency of nuisance arrests, and his willingness to commit an illegal act." (Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, p. 177) From his annotations, we know Foucault read this essay (even though we don't know when exactly).  That is to say, what Foucault recognizes is that the production of delinquincy is itself a source of possible rents or what Foucault calls "usable...illegality." (p. 277) And in (1979) Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault explicitly links his discussion of the "cost of delinquency" to Becker, Stigler, and Ehrlich.  (21 March 1979, Lecture 10, p. 248) And in many ways the tenth lecture can be read as a restatement of Foucault's Discipline & Punish in the vernacular of Chicago.

So, again, as I noted last week, this kind of convergence between Foucault and the Chicago-Virginia fusion suggests either that Foucault was familiar with Stigler's and Becker's work before he published Discipline and Punish and before he encountered Lepage's (1978) Tomorrow, Capitalism: The Economics of Economic Freedom or that there was a kind of convergence between Foucault and Chicago already during his prison activism phase (when Foucault was associated with Maoist and far left groups).

I could stop here, but I don't mean to suggest that for Foucault the enduring functionality of prison as a producer of delinquincy is exclusively or primarily in financial (and scientific) rents. He also thinks that it has other enduring political benefits to ruling elites in direct and indirect ways. Whether one agrees with this or not, Foucault's answer here is no different in kind than the one articulated just now in terms of rents. (Even if the utility involved would be more difficult to measure directly.) And somewhat remarkably, in his classic study (Sour Grapes) Jon Elster singled out Foucault's question and answer as an especially bad consequence explanations--ones that lack a mechanism, a feedback mechanism, and even an intentional agent.  I responded to that charge in press here before I developed my interest in the Birth of Biopolitics and Foucault's thought. And while I would be the last person to suggest that Foucault's work could pass peer review at JPE, good chunks of the enduring substance of Discipline & Punish is not fundamentally different from work that did at the time.

 

On Foucault's Discipline and Punishment & Chicago Economics

It is understandable that the criticism of the public execution should have assumed such importance in penal reform: for it was the form in which, in the most visible way, the unlimited power of the sovereign and the ever-active illegality of the people came together. Humanity in the sentences was the rule given to a system of punishment that must fix their limits on both. The ‘man’ that must be respected in the sentence was the juridical and moral form given to this double delimitation.
But, although it is true that reform, as a penal theory and as a strategy of the power to punish, took shape at the point of coincidence of these two objectives, its stability in the future was due to the fact that, for a long time, priority was given to the second. It was because the pressure on popular illegalities had become, at the period of the Revolution, then under the Empire, and finally throughout the nineteenth century, an essential imperative, that reform was able to pass from the project stage to that of an institution and set of practices. That is to say, although the new criminal legislation appears to be characterized by less severe penalties, a clearer codification, a marked diminution of the arbitrary, a more generally accepted consensus concerning the power to punish (in the absence of a more real division in its exercise), it is sustained in reality by an upheaval in the traditional economy of illegalities and a rigorous application of force to maintain their new adjustment. A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all.--Michel Foucault (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison] translated by Alan Sheridan, pp. 88-9 [in the Vintage & Penguin classcis edition]

The passage quoted from Discipline and Punish (hereafter D&P) caught my attention because the final sentence expresses an idea that later in the (1979) lecture series, Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault associates with the 'Chicago' (that is, Becker and Stigler) approach to crime. Let me explain.

At the end of the second lecture of 17 January 1979, with an explicit nod to Beccaria, Foucault had summarized  the"new regime" of "the well-known principle of mildness of punishment appears:" "...government is basically no longer to be exercised over subjects and other things subjected through these subjects. Government is now to be exercised over what we could call the phenomenal republic of interests." (p. 49) In fact, in 1979, Foucault here explicitly denies that this change has anything to do with a new humane sensibility.

He then returns to the theme of crime as a major subject (recall this post) in his tenth lecture of 21 March 1979, which is the second one devoted to American (Chicago) neoliberalism (in context he explicitly mentions Ehrlich, Becker, and Stigler).* There he starts his discussion by claiming that "Their analysis of criminality at first appears to be the simplest possible return to the eighteenth century reformers like Beccaria and especially Bentham." (248)+ He then goes on to summarize a kind of synthesis of the reformers as follows (and uses Coase-ian language):

A good law is necessary and almost sufficient, was nothing other than the desire for what could be called, in economic terms, a reduction in the transaction cost. The law is the most economical solution for punishing people adequately and for this punishment to be effective. First, the crime must be defined as an infraction of a formulated law, so that in the absence of a law there is no crime and an action cannot be incriminated. Second, penalties must be fixed once and for all by the law. Third, penalties must be fixed in law according to the degree of seriousness of the crime. Fourth, henceforth the criminal court will only have one thing to do, which is to apply to an established and proven crime a law which determines in advance what penalty the criminal must suffer according to the seriousness of his crime. An absolutely simple, apparently completely obvious mechanics constitutes the most economic form, that is to say, the least costly and most effective form for obtaining punishment and the elimination of conducts deemed harmful to society. (p. 249)

So, in 1979, Foucault implies that the late eighteenth century penal reformers (Beccaria & Bentham) invent the economic analysis of the law in terms of transaction costs and cost benefit analysis. It is worth noting that this reflects a modest change from Discipline and Punishment, where Beccaria is not treated as a progenitor of law and economics, and where (with nods to Capital) Bentham is treated as someone who helps create or constitute the homo economicus through a 'disciplinary mechanism' (D&P, pp. 205-209), but does not take homo economicus as given (in the way, say, Chicago economics does). This change, reflects a rethinking on Foucault's part of the role of interest (and of a decrease of Marx's significance and an increase of Hume's significance to his overall argument), but about that some other time more.

Now, in the passage quoted from p. 249 it seems as if Foucault allows that the 18th century reformers allowed for the complete elimination of conduct deemed harmful to society. But recall (again here) that this will come at a cost. And so, de facto, the way Foucault introduces the eighteenth century reformers is that in their law & economics of crime, one can calculate a kind of optimum crime rate at the lowest cost to society. And, after explaining that the reformers did not have a pure law & economics, this is, in fact, the view he ends up attributing to Stigler as "the objective of a penal policy: “The goal of law enforcement,” he says, “is to achieve a degree of compliance with the rule of prescribed behavior that society believes it can procure while taking account of the fact that enforcement is costly.” This is in the Journal of Political Economy in 1970." (256; as the editors note, this is a reference to “The optimum enforcement of laws,”) And then Foucault glosses Stigler's point as follows: "Consequently, good penal policy does not aim at the extinction of crime, but at a balance between the curves of the supply of crime and negative demand. Or again: society does not have a limitless need for compliance. Society does not need to conform to an exhaustive disciplinary system." (256)**

That a "penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all" is, thus, a key insight of Stigler (1970), and Foucault makes a point of emphasizing this in his 1979 lecture where he treats it as a return to the reformist sensibility of the late 18th century (before it was, as it were, corrupted by criminology's search for the anthropology of the criminal). Foucault thinks this is highly significant because, looking forward, "On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals." (259-260, emphasis added on the Hayekian, 'rules of the game'). While I would not go so far as claiming that Foucault endorses this horizon in normative fashion, I do think he is intrigued by the opportunities this affords.

Before I conclude. You might think I have made way too much of Foucault's claim that the "penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all" as an anticipation of his analysis of Chicago law & economics. After all, the quoted paragraph leading up to it does not seem very law & economics at all. Fair enough. However, in his own gloss, he goes on to write the following:

Shift the object and change the scale. Define new tactics in order to reach a target that is now more subtle but also more widely spread in the social body. Find new techniques for adjusting punishment to it and for adapting its effects. Lay down new principles for regularizing, refining, universalizing the art of punishing. Homogenize its application. Reduce its economic and political cost by increasing its effectiveness and by multiplying its circuits. In short, constitute a new economy and a new technology of the power to punish: these are no doubt the essential raisons d'etre of penal reform in the eighteenth century. (D&P, 89)++

So, it's clear that in 1975, Foucault understands the significance of the late 18th century penal reformers in terms of a political economy. And he presents them as anticipating the very point that in 1979 he attributes to Stigler (who he treats as returning to the best insights of the reformers). And this theme is really introduced as early as D&P p. 82, so it's not a mere  throw away remark.

Let me conclude with two speculations. First, it is not impossible that Foucault was familiar with Stigler's work before he published Discipline and Punish. There is an annotation on Stigler 1970 in his hand (see here). After all, Foucault was enmeshed in prison reform activism, so not just doing historical research on prisons in the early 1970s. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that Stigler 1970 is absent in Lepage (1978), which is often treated as Foucault's source to Chicago neoliberalism.** So, if that's right, Foucault was already interpreting his source material in light of some familiarity with the Chicago approach to crime.

Second, it's also possible, of course, that Foucault's familiarity with Stigler and the Chicago approach to crime came after he wrote Discipline and Punish. And then that opens up the possibility of not just an epynomous disovery (a term coined by George's son, Stephen Stigler), but also a kind of convergence between Foucault and Chicago economics on a non-trivial issue. This suggests that Foucault's purported late affinity with American neoliberalism (a much debated issue among Foucault scholars) may have roots in his own intellectual development in reflecting on the role of crime and punishment in society.

 

Foucault on Hume on Interest and (Adaptive) Preference

What English empiricism introduces...and doubtless for the first time in Western philosophy, is a subject...who appears in the form of a subject of individual choices which are both irreducible and non-transferable....

Second, this type of choice is non-transferable. I do not mean that it is non-transferable in the sense that one choice could not be replaced by another. You could perfectly well say that if you prefer health to illness, you may also prefer illness to health, and then choose illness. It is also clear that you may perfectly well say: I prefer to be ill and that someone else is not. But, in any case, on what basis will this substitution of one choice for another be made? It will be made on the basis of my own preference and on the basis of the fact that I would find someone else being ill more painful, for example, than being ill myself. In the end the principle of my choice really will be my own feeling of painful or not painful, of pain and pleasure. There is Hume’s famous aphorism which says: If I am given the choice between cutting my little finger and the death of someone else, even if I am forced to cut my little finger, nothing can force me to think that cutting my little finger is preferable to the death of someone else.
So, these are irreducible choices which are non-transferable in relation to the subject. This principle of an irreducible, non-transferable, atomistic individual choice which is unconditionally referred to the subject himself is what is called interest.--Michel Foucault, 28 March 1979, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 271-272. 

This is the third of my recent posts on Foucault's reading of Hume in The Birth of Biopolitics (recall here; and here). In the first paragraph of the quoted passage I have removed Foucault's reference to Locke as the world-historical origin of English empiricism as the fount of Utilitarianism. Foucault is almost certainly inspired by Élie Halévy's classic (1901-1904) The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, which I now know Foucault studied. (We have some of Foucault's note-taking on volume 2 [see here].) I have also removed Foucault's taxonomy of different kinds of approaches to identify a subject in 'Western philosophy.' Here I am also skipping Foucault's treatment of Appendix 1, “Concerning Moral Sentiment” to Hume's (1751) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, which illustrates  what it is for a choice to be irreducible in empiricism, according to Foucault. I do so not because these topics are uninteresting (on the contrary, they are too interesting), but because I want to focus on Foucault's analysis of Hume's account of the non-transferability of choices. (I am unfamiliar with other work on this topic so feel free to share your suggestions.)

In the paragraph I skipped Foucault had shown that for an empiricist (like Locke and Hume) "The painful or non-painful nature of the thing is in itself a reason for the choice beyond which you cannot go." (p. 272. This is irreducibility of choice, or what Foucault calls "the regressive end point in the analysis.") While a lot can be said about this, let's stipulate it's true for the sake of argument. But for what follows, you need to keep in mind that at bottom the agency of an empiricist subject consists in choices that are ground in (the desire for) pleasure or the aversion to pain. And according to Foucault this is what creates a subject with an interest (as a kind of characterization of agency.) That's a big claim, but I am interested here in the details. 

The non-transferability principle is cashed out by Foucault in terms of the fact that preferences are one’s own and that another has no fundamentally no access to them. Foucault really uses the modern (somewhat technical) language of ‘preference’ on p. 272. (It's also there in the French: "À partir de ma préférence à moi et à partir du fait que je trouverai plus pénible, par exemple, de savoir qu'un autre est malade que de l'être moi-même." Naissance de la biopolitique, p. 276.) While Hume certainly has ‘preference’ in his vocabulary, in Hume it generally means something like ‘favoring’ a particular outcome or state of affairs (which is also the use one can find in Ricardo). In Hume 'preference' is not used a technical term to track what is motivationally foundational. In my view it is only in Bentham that the use of 'preference' starts to obtain it's technical, familiar sense. (Something one might pick up from Halévy, who emphasizes Bentham's self-preference principle in various contexts but not in Hume i think.)

I mention this not to castigate Foucault's anachronism. But to remind ourselves that the treatment of Hume in the eleventh lecture follows on Foucault's better known analysis of Becker and Stigler (1977) for who (famously/infamously) hold "the hypothesis of stable and uniform preferences." While I have  no evidence that Foucault read Becker & Stigler (1977, although we know he read papers/works by both), it figures prominently in a fascinating book by Henri Lepage Tomorrow, Capitalism: The Economics of Economic Freedom [first published in French as Demain le Capitalisme in 1978.) As the editors of Birth of Biopolitics note several times (but not in context), Foucault almost certainly read Lepage ahead of his lectures (sadly I have been unable to find any annotations by Foucault on Lepage). I mention this because the stability of preferences in Becker & Stigler (1977) is highlighted by Lepage in his account of human capital more generally (see p. 165 of the English translation). And human capital had been central to the previous lecture of Birth of Biopolitics.

In fact, and as a kind of aside, the 11th lecture is used to tie two major narrative threads in Birth of Biopolitics together: first, Foucault provides a historical eighteenth century framework for his own account of the development of utilitarianism from Bentham to Stigler/Becker. This framework has the shape of a donut in whose hole one can discern the shadow of Halévy's classic The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. (Basically Foucault skips the heart of Halévy's narrative, and only changes the origin and terminus ad quem of philosophical radicalism/Utilitarianism.) Second, Foucault had claimed that this radical tradition is one of two traditions within liberalism that has an account of liberty. Strikingly, in the material I ommitted, Foucault alludes to this. (I return to that another time, too.)  Now, Foucault does not claim that for Hume preferences are stable. But Foucault's anachronism here alerts us to Hume's role in these two threads. This is exactly made explicit by a passage shortly after the one quoted above:

What I think is fundamental in English empiricist philosophy— which I am treating completely superficially—is that it reveals something
which absolutely did not exist before. This is the idea of a subject of interest, by which I mean a subject as the source of interest, the starting point of an interest, or the site of a mechanism of interests. For sure, there is a series of discussions on the mechanism of interest itself and what may activate it: is it self-preservation, is it the body or the soul, or is it sympathy? But this is not what is important. What is important is the appearance of interest for the first time as a form of both immediately and absolutely subjective will.
I think the problem and that which gets the problematic of homo oeconomicus underway is whether this subject of interest or form of will called interest can be considered as the same type of will as the juridical will or as capable of being connected to the juridical will. (273)

Be that as it may, in the present context 'non-transferable,' thus, refers to the brute fact that we cannot fundamentally feel another's pain or let them feel ours. Even sympathy's role is, as Foucault stipulates, a mechanism "to activate" or shape what we feel and thereby our interests not a means to share or trade one's feelings. Pleasures and pains are not portable from one subject to another. Even Adam Smith, who has a much more capacious understanding of the power of sympathy will grant this point. (For him mutual sympathy requires mutial modulation of our original feelings.) Now, as I mentioned above the point of the analysis is to connect Hume to the development of the formal features of homo oeconomicus as found in the radical tradition. Somewhat peculiarly, in Birth of Biopolitics Foucault shows no interest in Hume's economic writings (including a highly salient essay called "Of Interest.")

Now, the textual support that Foucault offers for all of this is rather fascinating (and that's what I'll end on today). As the editors of Birth of Biopolitics, who recognize in Hume's "famous aphorism" a reference to Treatise 2.3.3.6, and then (as I noted before) quote Hume: “Where a passion is neither founded on false supposition, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it. ’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” This is indeed a famous aphorism (one that clearly exercised Hume's friend Smith at The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 3.3.4, 136–7.)

But while Foucault gets the spirit of Hume's remarks at Treatise 2.3.3.6 right, he is not slavishly following the text of Hume. In Hume the famous aphorism, is introduced to argue that feelings are, in a certain sense, beyond rational scrutiny. However, I use in a 'certain sence' because they are not wholly beyond scrutiny as Hume explicitly notes. For they are often accompanied by judgments and these may well be scrutinized and found wanting. And, more interesting for present purposes, as the quote eveals, when the feeling itself is triggered by "false suppositions" say in cases of adaptive preferences or wishful thinking (or simply bad epistemic luck), or, when it is action guiding and it "chuses means insufficient for the end" and so leads to failures of instrumental rationality. 

Because in the context of 2.3.3.6, Hume is talking about passions more generally and not just about the bedrocks of pain and pleasure, I don't think Foucault really is misunderstanding Hume's general point. But it is a shame that he does not dwell on the specifics because, as I note, 2.3.3.6 is rather important for Hume's ideas on thinking on the contexts in which even a picture that takes preferences as irreducible and non-transferable, one need not treat them as merely given, nor beyond all critical scrutiny. That is to say, Foucault comes incredibly close, but somehow misses, that were the radical tradition and Utilitarianism more Humaen from the start some enduring problems internal to it could at least be diagnosed.

On Foucault and the Anxiety of the Left; pt.1: 'Economic Liberalism'

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.

28 March 1979: Foucault on Locke's World Historical Conceptual Shift (XXXVII)

To simplify things, and somewhat arbitrarily, I will start, as from a given, with English empiricism and the theory of the subject which is in fact put to work in English empiricist philosophy, with the view that—once again, I am making a somewhat arbitrary division—the theory of the subject in English empiricism probably represents one of the most important mutations, one of the most important theoretical transformations in Western thought since the Middle Ages.

What English empiricism introduces—let’s say, roughly, with Locke—and doubtless for the first time in Western philosophy, is a subject who is not so much defined by his freedom, or by the opposition of soul and body, or by the presence of a source or core of concupiscence marked to a greater or lesser degree by the Fall or sin, but who appears in the form of a subject of individual choices which are both irreducible and non-transferable. What do I mean by irreducible? I will take Hume’s very simple and frequently cited passage, which says: What type of question is it, and what irreducible element can you arrive at when you analyze an individual’s choices and ask why he did one thing rather than another? Well, he says: “You ask someone, ‘Why do you exercise?’ He will reply, ‘I exercise because I desire health.’ You go on to ask him, ‘Why do you desire health?’ He will reply, ‘Because I prefer health to illness.’ Then you go on to ask him, ‘Why do you prefer health to illness?’ He will reply, ‘Because illness is painful and so I don’t want to fall ill.’ And if you ask him why is illness painful, then at that point he will have the right not to answer, because the question has no meaning.” The painful or non-painful nature of the thing is in itself a reason for the choice beyond which you cannot go. The choice between painful and non-painful is a sort of irreducible that does not refer to any judgment, reasoning, or calculation. It is a sort of regressive end point in the analysis.
   Second, this type of choice is non-transferable. I do not mean that it is non-transferable in the sense that one choice could not be replaced by another. You could perfectly well say that if you prefer health to illness, you may also prefer illness to health, and then choose illness. It is also clear that you may perfectly well say: I prefer to be ill and that someone else is not. But, in any case, on what basis will this substitution of one choice for another be made? It will be made on the basis of my own preference and on the basis of the fact that I would find someone else being ill more painful, for example, than being ill myself. In the end the principle of my choice really will be my own feeling of painful or not painful, of pain and pleasure. There is Hume’s famous aphorism which says: If I am given the choice between cutting my little finger and the death of someone else, even if I am forced to cut my little finger, nothing can force me to think that cutting my little finger is preferable to the death of someone else.
    So, these are irreducible choices which are non-transferable in relation to the subject. This principle of an irreducible, non-transferable, atomistic individual choice which is unconditionally referred to the subject himself is what is called interest.

    What I think is fundamental in English empiricist philosophy—which I am treating completely superficially—is that it reveals something which absolutely did not exist before. This is the idea of a subject of interest, by which I mean a subject as the source of interest, the starting point of an interest, or the site of a mechanism of interests. For sure, there is a series of discussions on the mechanism of interest itself and what may activate it: is it self-preservation, is it the body or the soul, or is it sympathy? But this is not what is important. What is important is the appearance of interest for the first time as a form of both immediately and absolutely subjective will.--Michel Foucault, 28 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 11, The Birth of Biopolitics, 271-273 

Because most of lecture 11 is a brilliant analysis of the history of criminology and the (sometimes overlapping) significance of Gary Becker's redefinition of homo oeconomicus, it is easy to miss how Foucault embeds his analysis in a narrative in which the least genius of the tradition, Locke, is a world-historical -- "one of the most important mutations, one of the most important theoretical transformations in Western thought since the Middle Ages"* -- figure (in Nietzsche's sense). In my last post (episode 36), I had already observed that lecture 11 is tied by Foucault to the start of the lecture series and Locke's conception of the liberal art of government.   

As an aside, it is striking how conventional Foucault's philosophical categories (e.g., 'Western thought;' 'British Empiricism;' 'Middle Ages' etc.") can be sometimes. But as we know, artistic genius in this convention is characterized by the virtuosity of playing with the given constraints. And as Foucault teaches in this very lecture (recall), that fits the definition of rational agency.

The way I understand Foucault's conceptual analysis of the empiricist agent, the subject of interest, is that he reveals the thin conceptual pre-conditions that ground the nature of homo oeconomicus that figure into the importantly different definitions of economics (say offered by Robbins ("the optimal allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends") and Becker (the "science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables")). Recall that 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); 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 what Foucault notices is that this agent has properties that in so far as there is agency at all, cannot conceptually be reduced to other properties (that's the irreducible element and that cannot be exchanged (or traded)--that's the non-transferable property. Now, I want to pause at this second feature. 

For, to be a subject with interest, one that at the start of liberalism is capable of trading commodities with others (and to be held accountable, etc.), requires that one is constituted by (I use Hume's phrase) elements that themselves are irreducible and that cannot be traded. (This raises interesting questions on the natural limits of economics as a totalizing science.) And so the liberal tradition is founded by a conceptual distinction between entities that can be traded (by subjects of interest) and entities that compose/constitute agents and (at least when they are doing such grounding) cannot be traded as such.* And this conceptual bifurcation between these two kinds of entities survives through the other transformations of the natural history of homo oeconomicus. What does happen is that the manner in which the subject capable of interest is conceptualized shifts. The agents of the contemporary prisoner dilemma or in an agent-based simulation do not need to have Humean impressions and ideas, etc. But they do have these two features that ground their irreducible interest.

As an aside, perhaps far from Foucault's thought, the Lockean/Humean subject of interest with its irreducible elements is a monster from the perspective of (principle of) sufficient explanation. Because in them explanation bottoms out without a proper ground. As Michael Della Rocca has shown, Hume was clearly aware of  this feature of his own theory. What this tells us is that well before the arbitrary initial conditions of natural science were treated as a standing problem for adherence to sufficient reason, the (liberal) subject with an interest was so.

Let me close with a critical observation. It is somewhat unfortunate that Foucault treats the subject of interest as 'atomistic individual.' Even leaving aside the conventional categories he is playing with, and Hume's "famous aphorism," it is kind of natural for him to use this terminology because it seems that the two elements that help constitute a subject of interest are, like Robinson Crusoe, isolatable (in modelling terms) from other subjects of interest. So, there is a sense in which what he says is unobjectionable. And, to be sure, in so far he is thinking, as he is, of Becker (and we would include the effective altruists) for whom the welfare of others (especially in the family) can contribute greatly to our individual utility, he is not unfair. 

But as is made transparent by Adam Smith, building on Hume's philosophy, our (social) feelings, even without "judgment, reasoning, or calculation" incorporate irreducibly and inescapably the (imagined or inherited) judgments or perspectives of others (in my book I call these "social feelings" or "derived passions").** That is, others are an in-eliminable part of, and help constitute, our identity. As we know (recall) J.S. Mill made this, perhaps somewhat too greedily (and without sufficient clarity), a firm foundation of his version of utilitarianism. To be sure this Smith-Mill tradition (revived by the humaneconomics of Vernon Smith and his students) is distinct from the Becker tradition. So, there is another sense in which Foucault reinforces a misleading trope about the possibilities of liberalism. It is unusual for him to do so. And it is worth keeping in mind as we explore Foucault's final arguments.

 

28 March 1979: Foucault's Rational Choice Analysis of Science (XXXVI)

In the end, is not economics the analysis of forms of rational conduct and does not all rational conduct, whatever it may be, fall under something like economic analysis? Is not a rational conduct, like that which consists in formal reasoning, an economic conduct in the sense we have just defined, that is to say, the optimal allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends, since formal reasoning consists in deploying certain scarce resources—a symbolic system, a set of axioms, rules of construction, and not just any symbolic system or any rules of construction, but just some—to be used to optimal effect for a determinate and alternative end, in this case a true rather than a false conclusion which we try to reach by the best possible allocation of scarce resources? So, if it comes to it, we do not see why we would not define any rational conduct or behavior whatsoever as the possible object of economic analysis.
   In truth, this already extremely extensive definition is not even the only one, and Becker, for example—the most radical of the American neoliberals, if you like—says that it is still not sufficient, that the object of economic analysis can be extended even beyond rational conduct as defined and understood in the way I have just described, and that economic laws and economic analysis can perfectly well be applied to non-rational conduct, that is to say, to conduct which does not seek at all, or, at any rate, not only to optimize the allocation of scarce resources to a determinate end. Becker says: Basically, economic analysis can perfectly well find its points of anchorage and effectiveness if an individual’s conduct answers to the single clause that the conduct in question reacts to reality in a nonrandom way. That is to say, any conduct which responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment, in other words, any conduct, as Becker says, which “accepts reality,” must be susceptible to economic analysis. Homo oeconomicus is someone who accepts reality. Rational conduct is any conduct which is sensitive to modifications in the variables of the environment and which responds to this in a non-random way, in a systematic way, and economics can therefore be defined as the science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables.
   This is a colossal definition, which obviously economists are far from endorsing, but it has a certain interest. It has a practical interest, if you like, inasmuch as if you define the object of economic analysis as the set of systematic responses to the variables of the environment, then you can see the possibility of integrating within economics a set of techniques, those called behavioral techniques, which are currently in fashion in the United States. You find these methods in their purest, most rigorous, strictest or aberrant forms, as you wish, in Skinner, and precisely they do not consist in analyzing the meaning of different kinds of conduct, but simply in seeing how, through mechanisms of reinforcement, a given play of stimuli entail responses whose systematic nature can be observed and on the basis of which other variables of behavior can be introduced. In fact, all these behavioral techniques show how psychology understood in these terms can enter the definition of economics given by Becker. There is little literature on these behavioral techniques in France. In Castel’s last book, The Psychiatric Society, there is a chapter on behavioral techniques and you will see how this is precisely the implementation, within a given situation—in this case, a hospital, a psychiatric clinic—of methods which are both experimental and involve a specifically economic analysis of behavior.
    Today though, I would like to emphasize a different aspect. This is that Becker’s definition, which, again, although it is not recognized by the average economist, or even by the majority of them, nonetheless, despite its isolated character, enables us to highlight a paradox, because homo oeconomicus as he appears in the eighteenth century—I will come back to this shortly—basically functions as what could be called an intangible element with regard to the exercise of power. Homo oeconomicus is someone who pursues his own interest, and whose interest is such that it converges spontaneously with the interest of others. From the point of view of a theory of government, homo oeconomicus is the person who must be let alone. With regard to homo oeconomicus, one must laisser-faire; he is the subject or object of laissez-faire. And now, in Becker’s definition which I have just given, homo oeconomicus, that is to say, the person who accepts reality or who responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment, appears precisely as someone manageable, someone who responds systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment. Homo oeconomicus is someone who is eminently governable.--Michel Foucault, 28 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 11, The Birth of Biopolitics,  269-270 (emphasis added)

At the start of the eleventh lecture, Foucault says he wants to go back to the starting point of the year, which (via Freud and Walpole) was (recall) on the liberal art of governing. This is a bit disappointing because he ended the tenth lecture with hints of a new kind of governmental practice. But before we have time to reflect on this, he turns, quickly, to the nature of (what I have been calling following Talcott Parsons) 'economic imperialism. This is odd because it is the topic (recall) he had introduced at the start of the previous lecture. Foucault quickly name-checks Mises Human Action (268) as the fount of neoliberalism, and then goes on to reveal that he has been reading back-issues of the Journal of Political Economy (hereafter: JPE) the house-organ of the The University of Chicago's economics department, from the years 1960–1970, and recommends a "series of articles" from 1962 by "Becker, Kirzner, and others." (268)*

It is by no means obvious what the liberal art of government and the shifting definitions of homo oeconomicus have in common. But, amazingly, by the end of the lecture it is completely clear. To give away the punchline (and to look ahead to some future posts), in Foucault's hands (and this is already clear in what I quote above), Becker's very redefinition of homo oeconimicus effectively betrays the original achievement of liberalism, which consists in not just "limiting the sovereign’s power," but "stripping the sovereign of power" by revealing an "essential, fundamental, and major incapacity of the sovereign, that is to say, an inability to master the totality of the economic field," (292); and the betrayal is, in a certain sense, as Foucault argues during the eleventh lecture, a return to physiocracy. In Foucault's telling Becker throws away the very achievement of Adam Smith, and creates a subject capable of being (to use the phrase Foucault had introduced in lecture 9) programmed, nudged, and shaped by a knowing sovereign.

But just before Foucault explains the significance of the shift from the Robbins definition of economics ("the optimal allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends") to the Becker definition (the "science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables"),** he (that is Foucault) inserts a new analysis of the nature of science. Foucault does this in the first paragraph in the passage quoted above this post.

Now critics of the Robbins definition (itself indebted to Max Weber) tend to notice that it turns economics into a kind of engineering; for the ends are given, and act as constraints on an optimization problem. And since the Robbins definition is topic neutral (neither the resources, nor the ends, nor the implied agent/allocators(s) have to be trading or using money, etc.) it is no surprise that economic analysis so constituted can be applied across many different domains (and economic imperialism is out of the gates). Of course, the critics will see in the Robbins definition a paradigmatic case of instrumental rationality.   

But if one looks at the Robbins definition, as it were, 'formally,' even the pinnacle of substantive rationality -- the inferring of true conclusions from, say, a set of axioms, can be treated, or, better yet, modelled as an instance of it. One is reminded here of Leibniz thinking of the "divine perfection" in terms of God as a perfect geometer in the Discourse of Metaphysics: "He who acts perfectly is like an excellent Geometer who knows how to find the best construction for a problem." (par. 5; Clarke is also tempted by this language.)+ 

So, economic analysis can be applied legitimately to God's choices and to scientific reasoning. Of course, and to be sure, while in God the context of construction/choice and context of justification coincide, one need not claim this about ordinary scientists. So, Foucault, is not here proposing to apply economic analysis to most scientific activity -- what I call 'public choice philosophy of science' of the sort Gordon Tullock and, at Chicago, George Stigler pioneered (and made mature by Sandra Peart and David Levy, now familiar within philosophy in the burgeoning Zollman school of philosophy of science [e.g., O'Connor Weatherall; Kofi Bright, etc.]). To be sure Foucault is not ruling it out. (I follows trivially from what he says.) 

But rather, he is making the more audacious point that economic analysis is a way of conceptualizing disciplined scientific speech speaking the truth (when its claims are justified). And this is a kind of existence proof for the claim that "any rational conduct or behavior whatsoever" is "the possible object of economic analysis" with economic analysis understood in the sense of Robbins' definition. So, economic analysis might be philosophical speech, that is, capable of analyzing itself if and only if it generates "true conclusions." 

I could close with the fate of that lovely sentence hanging in the balance. But I want to note two things here: first, there is a sense in which Foucault agrees with the Frankfurt's school's claim that under capitalism even science becomes conceived as a species of instrumental rationality. But he is not critical of it. He explicitly grants that all rational action can be modelled by economic analysis in this sense. And so, second, he rejects the distinction between instrumental and substantive rationality. For, while Foucault need not accept the much stronger claim that no other form of analysis, no other grid of intelligibility, is possible (he is clearly a pluralist about such matters [Robbins' definition "is not even the only one"]), he does not accept here the possibility that something is a species of rational agency and not capable of falling under the Robbins definition.++ 

And with that, I conclude my seventh full year of solo blogging and will take my customary winter break; I wish you happy holidays my dear reader!

21 March 1979: Foucault on Economic Imperialism (XXXIII)

I would like to talk a little about one aspect of American neo-liberalism, that is to say, the way in which they try to use (i) the market economy and (ii) the typical analyses of the market economy to (iii) decipher non-market relationships and phenomena which are not strictly and specifically economic but (iv) what we call social phenomena. In other words, this means that I want to talk about the application of the economic grid to a field which since the nineteenth century, and we can no doubt say already at the end of the eighteenth century, was defined in opposition to (v) the economy, or at any rate, as complementary to the economy, as that which in itself, in its own structure and processes, does not fall within the economy, even though the economy itself is situated within this domain. In other words again, what I think is at stake in this kind of analysis is the problem of the inversion of the relationships of the social to the economic.--Michel Foucault, 21 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 10, The Birth of Biopolitics,  239-240.

The main point of the tenth lecture is introduced in the first paragraph (quoted above). As I have noted before, the phenomenon described by Foucault is usually called 'economic imperialism,' a phrase that goes back to Talcott Parson's analysis of the effect of Robbins' re-definition of economics back in 1934. 

Now before I get to the main point of Foucault's analysis -- the 'inversion' mentioned in the last quoted sentence --, I want to note explicitly that Foucault does not explain what an 'economic grid' is. It is immediately tempting to assume that the economic grid is the kind of thing studied by (ii) or, if we remember the language of 'programming' in lecture 9, partially constituted by (ii), perhaps in interaction with (i). And my reason for noticing this is that Foucault does not pause to reflect on the relationship between (i) and (ii).

For, as any informed observer can tell you, the relationship between (ii) the typical analyses (note the plural) of the market economy, presumably as typified now by Chicago economics (in particular Becker, Mincer, Stigler, Schultz, etc.), and (i) the market economy is by no means simple. For example, I often joke that the Black-Scholes-Merton formula for (rational) option pricing makes no reference to supply and demand. (While the formula is a product of Chicago economics this formula is far from what Foucault has in mind here.) There is a similar, more sophisticated joke to be made about the absence of money in the GE Arrow-Debreu model (manifestly not Chicago).

Another strange slippage occurs, when Foucault moves from (i) the 'market economy' to the (v) economy. Even nineteenth century laissez-faire economists noticed that not all activity which could be sensibly called 'economic' were within or facilitated by 'the market' (not the least because slavery existed for a good chunk of the nineteenth century). 

When a few pages down, Foucault returns to the theme he speaks, more precisely:

In comparison with the ambiguity, if you like, of German ordoliberalism, American neo-liberalism evidently appears much more radical or much more complete and exhaustive. American neo-liberalism still involves, in fact, the generalization of the economic form of the market. It involves generalizing it throughout the social body and including the whole of the social system not usually conducted through or sanctioned by monetary exchanges. This, as it were, absolute generalization, this unlimited generalization of the form of the market entails a number of consequences or includes a number of aspects and I would like to focus on two of these.
First, the generalization of the economic form of the market beyond monetary exchanges functions in American neo-liberalism as a principle of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment of social relationships and individual behavior. This means that analysis in terms of the market economy or, in other words, of supply and demand, can function as a schema which is applicable to non-economic domains. And, thanks to this analytical schema or grid of intelligibility, it will be possible to reveal in non-economic processes, relations, and behavior a number of intelligible relations which otherwise would not have appeared as such—a sort of economic analysis of the non-economic. (243)

Here it is pretty clear that what it means to be a market economy (i) involves 'monetary exchanges'. Now Foucault is saying that (ii) just is the canonical way of analyzing (i). And striking one can use (ii) to study activities (iii) that do not involve monetary exchange, but still can be made intelligible (by (ii)) as falling under an 'economic form.' Somewhat annoyingly Foucault does not say what  the content of the economic form is. But it is clear that form of the market economy seems to be constituted by 'supply and demand.'  So, the economic form can be materialized in monetized (market) exchanges and in non-monetized (non-market) exchanges and be studied with the same tool-kit (ii), which involves (inter alia) analysis of supply and demand.

Now, the initial pay-off of this is a new possibility: [A] "to reveal in non-economic processes, relations, and behavior a number of intelligible relations which otherwise would not have appeared as such."

Now the strong version of [A] suggests that without the tools of (ii) some human phenomena would simply remain unintelligible. This strong version presupposes that no other grids are possible or (if we weaken it a bit) available. Because Foucault does not explain the conditions he puts on the nature of intelligibility, it is hard to evaluate this claim (which rules out grids derived from, say, "demography, sociology, psychology, and social psychology," (245) etc.). But it seems to entail that Foucault thinks most of what passes for social science fails to generate intelligibility of what they study (that is the social phenomena). That's no reason to doubt that Foucault did not hold the strong version of [A].

As slightly weaker version of [A] I have hinted at before. And it presupposes the thought that in order to make phenomena involving human  behavior intelligible, we need to see them/us as agents. And, as Foucault notes (recall also lecture 9) it is the Chicago version of tools of (ii) to make it possible to see choice, and thus, agency in the patterns of social life. This weaker version still entails that there is a sense in which passes for social science fails to generate intelligibility of what they study, but they themselves might (legitimately even) think otherwise.

The weakest version of [A] is to make it relative to professional economists; such that non-economic processes, relations, and behavior become intelligible to them qua professional economist. 

When we turn to Foucault' description of  analysis of how (ii) is applied to (iii) and (iv), we see that supply and demand is just one element in a larger analytical tool-kit "of investment, capital costs, and profit—both economic and psychological profit," etc. As Foucault notes, quoting Jean-Luc Migué, "the analytical framework traditionally reserved for the firm and the consumer" is applied to the ''household"...."This involves making the household a unit
of production in the same way as the classical firm." I don't mean to suggest this is exhaustive; I have already noticed (recall) the significance of the redefinition of  homo oeconomicus as utility maximizer in lecture 9.

In addition, among the 'social' are not just phenomena related to education, family, and crime, but also government (recall this post on the relevant passage in lecture 10). This matters because it turns that that if you deploy (ii) you don't just make phenomena intelligible, you can also criticize them, as noted, in light of an "economic tribunal." (247) As Foucault puts it, "these two aspects—the analysis of non-economic behavior through a grid of economic intelligibility, and the criticism and appraisal of the action of public authorities in market terms..." (248)

Now, Foucault does not really make an effort to explain how analysis slides into authoritative criticism. He mentions the use of cost-benefit analysis. But in a way this presupposes what needs to be explained. For, cost-benefit analysis presupposes a further standard. Either comparison with some reference class or the thought that beyond a certain baseline level/ratio some benefits are not worth the(se) cost(s). Now, the moment one writes this it is obvious that there will be contestation over the reference class or the baseline level.

I think a better understanding of the underlying idea of the move to analysis to normativity is also noticed by Foucault, but earlier in lecture 9. That is an effect of Robbins' definition (the one that prompted Parson's musing on economic imperialism), “Economics is the science of human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have mutually exclusive uses.” For the analysis of this relationship allows one to judge some courses of action objectively as ineffective, or with a lot of opportunity costs, or instrumentally irrational. 

And as Foucault notes, in his majestic treatment of the evolution of criminology from the eighteenth century to Chicago neoliberalism, this style of reasoning did not have to await Robbins' definition. In the eighteenth century Enlightenment reformers criticized "the ineffectiveness of the system of punishment, with reference to the fact, for example, that public torture and executions or banishment had no perceptible effect on lowering the rate of criminality, insofar as it was possible to measure this at the time...there was an economic grid underlying the critical reasoning of the eighteenth century reformer." (248) Foucault does not mention Grouchy, but we see such reasoning in her, too. He goes on to claim, that "this great concern of the law, the principle constantly recalled that for a penal system to function well a good law is necessary and almost sufficient, was nothing other than the desire for what could
be called, in economic terms, a reduction in the transaction cost." (248-249)

Somewhat amusingly, the otherwise diligent and excellent editors of the lectures, do not drop a note to Coase (or Commons) here. And so leave unexplained one of Foucault's jokes (one that Coase himself would appreciate, I think) that one strain of Chicago economics is a recovery of insights from the eighteenth century.*

The more important point left hanging now is the question what is distinctive about Chicago post-Robbins? One answer Foucault offers, in his treatment of the Chicago treatment of crime, can be discerned in his analysis of a point made by Stigler, "The regulatory principle of penal policy is a simple intervention in the market for crime and in relation to the supply of crime. It is an intervention which will limit the supply of crime solely by a negative demand, the cost of which must obviously never exceed the cost of the supply of the criminality in question." (256) Here we do see the spirit of Robbins. Because violations of this principle (which presupposes an idea of instrumental rationality) are now to be criticized. (Here, too, one can wonder about the relationship between the analysis and the phenomena analysed.)

I have noted before, and so won't repeat, that by taking the ends for granted, the analysis is weirdly un-transparent, even to itself, about its substantive normative commitments. But as usual Foucault is more interesting than me. He notes the following kind of implication, as a promissory note, we the idea "of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals." (259-260)

What Foucault is pointing to that if one sees/interprets the regulatory principle as providing one with or reflecting policy mechanisms that help determine different points on demand and supply curves (of crime, etc.), then one has levers by which to manipulate, say, (and I use Stigler's terminology) the "supply of offenses." (In Stigler, this is all articulated in terms of marginal costs/returns.)

For Stigler (who uses a lovely quote from Adam Smith), and Foucault tracks this, "offenses are in a sense demanded by the society." And so once one treats the regulatory principle as governing the (law) enforcement agency, one has a social/planning choice what range of offenses will exist (at what cost).

One may still wonder how one gets from Stigler to Foucault here. After noting that by Stigler's lights (of his economic analysis) much law enforcement is clearly irrational, Stigler offers the following thought: "a second and wholly different reason for the use of what appear to be inappropriate sanctions and inappropriate appropriations to enforcement bodies: the desire of the public not to enforce the laws....Variation in enforcement provides desirable flexibility in public policv," (Stigler 1970: 534-535)** 

21 March 1979: Foucault Diagnoses American Analytic Philosophy (XXXI)

The second interesting use of these neo-liberal analyses is that the economic grid will or should make it possible to test governmental action, gauge its validity, and to object to activities of the public authorities on the grounds of their abuses, excesses, futility, and wasteful expenditure. In short, the economic grid is not applied in this case in order to understand social processes and make them intelligible; it involves anchoring and justifying a permanent political criticism of political and governmental action. It involves scrutinizing every action of the public authorities in terms of the game of supply and demand, in terms of efficiency with regard to the particular elements of this game, and in terms of the cost of intervention by the public authorities in the field of the market. In short, it involves criticism of the governmentality actually exercised which is not just a political or juridical criticism; it is a market criticism, the cynicism of a market criticism opposed to the action of public authorities. This is not just an empty project or a theorist’s idea. In the United States a permanent exercise of this type of criticism has developed especially in an institution which was not in fact created for this, since it was created before the development of the neo-liberal school, before the development of the Chicago School. This institution is the American Enterprise Institute whose essential function, now, is to measure all public activities in cost-benefit terms, whether these activities be the famous big social programs concerning, for example, education, health, and racial segregation developed by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the decade 1960–1970. This type of criticism also involves measuring the activity of the numerous federal agencies established since the New Deal and especially since the end of the Second World War, such as the Food and Health Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and so on. So, it is criticism in the form of what could be called an “economic positivism”; a permanent criticism of governmental policy.
Seeing the deployment of this type of criticism one cannot help thinking of an analogy, which I will leave as such: the positivist critique of ordinary language. When you consider the way in which the Americans have employed logic, the logical positivism of the Vienna School, in order to apply it to scientific, philosophical, or everyday discourse, you see there too a kind of filtering of every statement whatsoever in terms of contradiction, lack of consistency, nonsense. To some extent we can say that the economic critique the neo-liberals try to apply to governmental policy is also a filtering of every action by the public authorities in terms of contradiction, lack of consistency, and nonsense. The general form of the market becomes an instrument, a tool of discrimination in the debate with the administration. In other words, in classical liberalism the government was called upon to respect the form of the market and laisser-faire. Here, laissez-faire is turned into a do-not-laisser-faire government, in the name of a law of the market which will enable each of its activities to be measured and assessed. Laissez-faire is thus turned round, and the market is no longer a principle of government’s self-limitation; it is a principle turned against it. It is a sort of permanent economic tribunal confronting government.--Michel Foucault, 21 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 10, The Birth of Biopolitics, 246-247 [emphases added]

It's difficult to leave the riches of lecture 9 behind without exhausting all possible angles of comment, but it it is clear that in lecture 10 Foucault starts harvesting the fruits of the first nine lectures. This lecture contains two great set-pieces: (i) the comparison between the neo-liberalism of ORDOs and Chicago-school in part to explore the contrasting analysis of the relationship between market/state and market/society; (ii) the evolution of what we may call law and criminality since the Enlightenment in light of Becker's approach. So, it may strike you as a bit perverse that today's post zones in on an apparent aside. 

So, the emphasized passage is odd because it is by no means obvious that Foucault's audience ("one") will have thought of this particular analogy. As I have noted throughout my comments, Foucault is constantly assuming a kind of Bien pensant marxism in his audience. I don't want to make too much of the grammatical structure of his thought -- and I am not conformatible in the French [On ne peut pas ne pas penser, en voyant s'exercer ce type-là de critique à une analogie que je laisse encore une fois sous la forme d'analogie], but it is notable that the (analogical) thought is inevitable (and that Foucault represents his own thought in such disassociated way, and being so analogical) while Foucault takes responsibility for conveying it in the (analogical) manner he has the thought. 

Before, I get to the substance of Foucault's claim, a bit of context is useful. First, I would not be surprised if the possibility of visiting Berkeley (which starts the following year) was not already on Foucault's horizon. As we know he was visiting California from the mid 70s onward. Second, Foucault would have tracked Derrida's confrontation with analytic philosophy, first in the brilliant, and oddly neglected, (1973) The Archeology of the Frivolous. This book is ostensibly about Condillac, but it is simultaneously (recall this post) a critique of Foucualt's earlier practice of archeology and a clever exploration of the nature of analysis. I would be amazed if Foucault were unfamiliar with it because I think it can help explain some important shifts in Foucault's method(s)/stance(s). And then in the infamous exchange with Searle (Foucault's future colleague) that unfolded through the 1970s.* I assume that Foucault would have been familiar with this 'event'. So, perhaps, for Foucault, a possible personal confrontation with American analytic philosophy would have made the thought inevitable.

Let's return to the emphasized bit in the quoted passage from lecture 10 above. And to avoid misunderstanding, Foucault here is not discussing ordinary language philosophy. Earlier, in Lecture 4 (see p. 76) Foucault had noticed the significance of the movement from Vienna (and Freiburg) of certain intellectual practices to the States.** And this point gets amplified by Foucault's surprising organicist commitment in lecture 8, that when ideas travel from their origin, they are radicalized/amplified in new environments. (We may call such intensification in a new ecological niche a law of memetics!) So, on Foucault's view, we may say that what starts out as possible source of emancipation in Left Vienna, is turned into a form of speech policing Stateside.+ 

And Foucault is explicit that the policing speech is not just directed at ordinary speech, but also at scientific and philosophical speech. The significance of this is that Foucault interprets the (ahh) tools and practices of this branch of analytic philosophy in terms of technologies of control.

As an aside, it is worth noting, and a kind of historical irony, that Foucault here is kind of tracking the general atmosphere of victory of Quine-ean regimentation and, especially, a wider naturalizing program(s) over the Carnapian explanation, which had explicitly limited itself (recall here; and here) to artificial speech. I use 'general atmosphere' because what Foucault is describing (as theoretical virtues and non-virtues "contradiction, lack of consistency, nonsense",) while undoubted familiar in some sense, is surely not Quine-ean regimentation (with its own specialist clarified language)--this is a diffuser form of score-keeping familiar from polemics and classroom instruction.

So, I use 'general atmosphere' for another reason. Because the analogy itself is I think itself intended to point to what happens when certain practices leave the rarified technical discussion in elite journals and seminar rooms, and become a more general mode of thought. For, as a disciplinary practice of deploying (philosophical) technologies of speech control that American analytic philosophy is used as an elucidatory analogy for the fact of what happens when think tanks deploy techniques developed by the Chicago school to try to score and police government policy.

This is not to say one can avoid mentioning Quine. For Quine's (rather juridical) tribunal of experience is now transformed (by way of the magic of analogy) "into permanent economic tribunal confronting government."  That is to say, as the ideas of the Chicago school leave Hyde Park and are institutionalizes by well financed interests, a democratic-republican government is now made to account itself not to the voters, and their representatives, or the press, or supreme court judges, but to an intellectual edifice that deploys (protected) theoretical speech. And this edifice represents itself a strand of the liberal tradition that, as Foucault argued in lecture 9, is itself one of the animating principles of the constitutional order. 

I return to the previous paragraph in subsequent digressions on Birth of Biopolitics. Foucault leaves hanging what to make of his view of American analytic philosophy. It's important to realize that the analogy is not a moralizing criticism. If I understand Foucault's larger meta-philosophical (political) position, he thinks that the development and application of technologies of control have a kind of inevitability to them. And it is not impossible -- but here i speculate -- that he believes that (the philosophical politics of) philosophical speech itself is (given the significance of the law of non-contradiction to its way of being) also, always, constituted by technologies of control. And what may be novel here, is unusual clarity and zest of the Americans in deploying such technologies of speech control.

 

 

 

 

14 March 1979: Foucault's Science Fiction of Neo-Liberal Eugenics (XXX)

[I]n Gary Becker there is a very interesting theory of consumption, in which he says: We should not think at all that consumption simply consists in being someone in a process of exchange who buys and makes a monetary exchange in order to obtain some products. The man of consumption is not one of the terms of exchange. The man of consumption, insofar as he consumes, is a producer. What does he produce? Well, quite simply, he produces his own satisfaction. And we should think of consumption as an enterprise activity by which the individual, precisely on the basis of the capital he has at his disposal, will produce something that will be his own satisfaction. Consequently, the theory, the classical analysis trotted out a hundred times of the person who is a consumer on the one hand, but who is also a producer, and who, because of this, is, as it were, divided in relation to himself, as well as all the sociological analyses—for they have never been economic analyses—of mass consumption, of consumer society, and so forth, do not hold up and have no value in relation to an analysis of consumption in the neo-liberal terms of the activity of production. So, even if there really is a return to the idea of homo oeconomicus as the analytical grid of economic activity, there is a complete change in the conception of this homo oeconomicus.
So, we arrive at this idea that the wage is nothing other than the remuneration, the income allocated to a certain capital, a capital that we will call human capital inasmuch as the ability-machine of which it is the income cannot be separated from the human individual who is its bearer. How is this capital made up? It is at this point that the reintroduction of labor or work into the field of economic analysis will make it possible, through a sort of acceleration or extension, to move on to the economic analysis of elements which had previously totally escaped it. In other words, the neo-liberals say that labor was in principle part of economic analysis, but the way in which classical economic analysis was conducted was incapable of dealing with this element. Good, we do deal with it. And when they make this analysis, and do so in the terms I have just described, they are led to study the way in which human capital is formed and accumulated, and this enables them to apply economic analyses to completely new fields and domains.
How is human capital made up? Well, they say, it is made up of innate elements and other, acquired elements. Let’s talk about the innate elements. There are those we can call hereditary, and others which are just innate; differences which are, of course, self-evident for anyone with the vaguest acquaintance with biology. I do not think that there are as yet any studies on the problem of the hereditary elements of human capital, but it is quite clear what form they could take and, above all, we can see through anxieties, concerns, problems, and so on, the birth of something which, according to your point of view, could be interesting or disturbing. In actual fact, in the—I was going to say, classical—analyses of these neo-liberals, in the analyses of Schultz or Becker, for example, it is indeed said that the formation of human capital only has interest and only becomes relevant for the economists inasmuch as this capital is formed thanks to the use of scarce means, to the alternative use of scarce means for a given end. Now obviously we do not have to pay to have the body we have, or we do not have to pay for our genetic make-up. It costs nothing. Yes, it costs nothing—and yet, we need to see ... , and we can easily imagine something like this occurring (I am just engaging in a bit of science fiction here, it is a kind of problematic which is currently becoming pervasive).
In fact, modern genetics clearly shows that many more elements than was previously thought are conditioned by the genetic make-up we receive from our ancestors. In particular, genetics makes it possible to establish for any given individual the probabilities of their contracting this or that type of disease at a given age, during a given period of life, or in any way at any moment of life. In other words, one of the current interests in the application of genetics to human populations is to make it possible to recognize individuals at risk and the type of risk individuals incur throughout their life. You will say: Here again, there’s nothing we can do; our parents made us like this. Yes, of course, but when we can identify what individuals are at risk, and what the risks are of a union of individuals at risk producing an individual with a particular characteristic that makes him or her the carrier of a risk, then we can perfectly well imagine the following: good genetic make-ups—that is to say, [those] able to produce individuals with low risk or with a level of risk which will not be harmful for themselves, those around them, or society—will certainly become scarce, and insofar as they are scarce they may perfectly well [enter], and this is entirely normal, into economic circuits or calculations, that is to say, alternative choices. Putting it in clear terms, this will mean that given my own genetic make-up, if I wish to have a child whose genetic make-up will be at least as good as mine, or as far as possible better than mine, then I will have to find someone who also has a good genetic make-up. And if you want a child whose human capital, understood simply in terms of innate and hereditary elements, is high, you can see that you will have to make an investment, that is to say, you will have to have worked enough, to have sufficient income, and to have a social status such that it will enable you to take for a spouse or co-producer of this future human capital, someone who has significant human capital themselves. I am not saying this as a joke; it is simply a form of thought or a form of problematic that is currently being elaborated.
What I mean is that if the problem of genetics currently provokes such anxiety, I do not think it is either useful or interesting to translate this anxiety into the traditional terms of racism. If we want to try to grasp the political pertinence of the present development of genetics, we must do so by trying to grasp its implications at the level of actuality itself, with the real problems that it raises. And as soon as a society poses itself the problem of the improvement of its human capital in general, it is inevitable that the problem of the control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction, will become actual, or at any rate, called for. So, the political problem of the use of genetics arises in terms of the formation, growth, accumulation, and improvement of human capital. What we might call the racist effects of genetics is certainly something to be feared, and they are far from being eradicated, but this does not seem to me to be the major political issue at the moment.--Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226-229 [emphasis added on 'inevitable'].

It is difficult to write this blog post because I am so in awe of Foucault's analysis. For, in these pages, and the ones that follow and precede it, Foucault basically articulates the whole paradigm in which economic analysis becomes incapable of self-limiting and, thus, totalitarian. The question becomes not just how the genetic endowment, but the "child’s family life will produce human capital?" (229) And as Foucault notes this means that everything that can be measured in this environment must be measured to uncover its effect on human capital formation. Deep learning was made, we might say, for human capital theory.

And this human capital will not just be the principle that generates (possible) income into the future, but also the skill to consume it. Foucault's analysis of Becker's treatment that consumption isn't merely a passive doing, a mere hedonic receptacle, but an effect of human capital is masterly. We must not merely acquire taste but must gain the skill to enjoy our acquired commodities. We might say, as a serious joke, that Becker and Mincer (and Schultz, etc.) re-discover Rousseau and Kames in the vernacular. Foucault alerts us to his own interest in this merging of the philosophy of culture and education with the logical of capital/computing by calling it 'very interesting' (226) which is a stark contrast to the 'banalities' when he discusses political history (216/218). 

As an aside, I noted last week the brilliant almost counterfactual history of economics inscribed in this ninth lecture. But it is also worth noting a bizarre lacuna. For in Foucault's hands it is immediately obvious that this strain of Chicago economics -- the human capital, economic imperialism one -- rediscovers and revives the eugenic features of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century economics most associated with names like Galton and Pearson, but visible and significant in wide variety of American and British progressives, such that it infected the foundation of the welfare state nearly everywhere.* 

That is to say, what Foucault misses, and with him many other well-meaning intellectual commentators, is that part of the neo-liberal reaction against "Keynesian policy, social pacts of war, and the growth of the federal administration through economic and social programs" which "formed the adversary and target of neoliberal thought, that which it was constructed against or which it opposed in order to form itself and develop" (217) had a further moral underpinning (other than the anti-war, anti-collectivism already explicit in Foucault's analysis) one that had high salience after the Nazi-era is that of human moral equality. And this fits even Becker and his Chicago allies/teachers because in their version of human capital theory, after the Robbins redefinition of the nature of economics, the individual agency of each (recall last week) of us matters.  

My language of 'misses' in the previous paragraph is misleading. Given Foucault's knowledge of the study of deviance, it is unlikely he is not aware of this. And, in fact, he clearly signals he is aware of it: "call the racist effects of genetics is certainly something to be feared, and they are far from being eradicated," but he tells us why he does not alert us to this in his treatment: it "does not seem to me to be the major political issue at the moment." This comment raises tough questions about the hermeneutics of Foucault. 

The whole lecture series is (recall) oriented around the liberal art of government. And foucault makes clear that in one sense his is descriptive treatment of praxis and theory, and in other sense he is constructing what we may call the optimal art of liberal government. Now, it comes as no surprise that Foucault is aware of his situatedness in a particular political context; I have tried to be alert in where he hints at this. But here he alerts us to the fact that his decisions about what to highlight are themselves a function of his judgment of what he takes to be a major political issue at that moment. But he does not tell us what -- to be reflexive for a moment -- what enters into the formation of, and what secures the ''output'' of this judgment, and what counts as political for him.

Okay, let's close with a final observation. Above I noted that Foucault rightly discerns a kind of totalitarian element in the neo-liberal turn of Becker, Mincer, Schultz because as a domain of enquiry it is incapable of self-limitation. What he discerns is that (nearly) everything that can become data or a data-set connected to human activity is, in principle, possible evidence (about genes, environment, learning, production, risk, etc.) in this theory. (The remainder of the lecture Foucault spells this out nicely and ambitiously--very much worth re-reading for its significance to theories of capitalism, imperialism, and development.) In so far as there are constraints these are determined more by search costs than by the nature of the paradigm. This is really a contrast to how many other forms of enquiry function, where the paradigm limits severely what may count as possible evidence. 

But, of course, one may object that the totalitarian tendency in enquiry is not sufficient to count something as totalitarian in political praxis. The objection misses the point here. For Foucault is clearly committed to the idea once certain questions become intellectually pertinent -- not to an individual but (notice the bourgeois or at least Weberian terminology of Gesellschaft) "society"* -- then they become also necessarily ("inevitable") pertinent to, and actionable for, political practice ("control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals.") He does not explain why he believes in this kind of weirdly friction-free market in ideas such that the social problem must generate its own social praxis. It is notable that he does not offer a mechanism for why this is inevitably so, and a critique of the present must originate here. But that's for another time.  

To put the more arresting point of the previous paragraph as a serious joke, if one raises the question of what Plato [Republic 546d] calls the marriage number (viz. "the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction"), then even in a liberal society (focused on "individuals") there is, contra the hopes of Bacon no self-restraint on its pursuit.* That is to say, Foucault accepts the kind of Heideggerian/Thomistic critique of modernity without their moralism or, despite his latent political "fears," existential angst. 

 

 

14 March 1979: Foucault on Programming Human Capital (XXVIII)

I would like to bring out some aspects of American neo-liberalism, it being understood that I have no desire and it is not possible to study it in all its dimensions. In particular, I would like to consider two elements which are at once methods of analysis and types of programming, and which seem to me to be interesting in this American neo-liberal conception: first, the theory of human capital, and second, for reasons you will be able to guess, of course, the problem of the analysis of criminality and delinquency.
First, the theory of human capital. I think the interest of this theory of human capital is that it represents two processes, one that we could call the extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain, and second, on the basis of this, the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic.
First, an extension of economic analysis within, as it were, its own domain, but precisely on a point where it had remained blocked or at any rate suspended....Starting from this criticism of classical economics and its analysis of labor, the problem for the neo-liberals is basically that of trying to introduce labor into the field of economic analysis. A number of them attempted this, the first being Theodore Schultz, who published a number of articles in the years 1950–1960 the result of which was a book published in 1971 with the title Investment in Human Capital. More or less at the same time, Gary Becker published a book with the same title, and then there is a third text by Mincer, which is quite fundamental and more concrete and precise than the others, on the school and wages, which appeared in 1975.--Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 219-220.

Perhaps, some other time I return to neoliberal history of classical economics that Foucault summarizes in the part I skipped in this quote. And in what follows I also ignore Foucault's acuity in grasping the inner meaning, as it were, of intellectual trends in a different rather technical discipline in real time. 

In the first quoted paragraph, Foucault introduces the central theme of the lecture and, perhaps, of the whole book without alerting his audience (or himself) that he has done so. There are features of American neo-liberalism (in his discussion he mostly confines himself to Chicago economics) that are "methods of analysis and types of programming." That papers and books in economics contain methods of analysis is no surprise. But Foucault insists, without initially making a big deal about it, that they are simultaneously types of programming. And so the question is what (or who) is being programmed and what counts as a program in this context?

While Foucault uses programming (and its cognates) throughout the lecture, Foucault only offers his answer in the final two sentences of lecture nine: "programming of policies of economic development, which could be orientated, and which are in actual fact orientated," toward the development of human capital. (233) So, it is humans and, perhaps, whole societies that are to be programmed. The purpose of this programming can be varied. For, example the focus on developing human capital is to stimulate economic development (locally and internationally) from which many things may follow. (The analysis of delinquency may serve other ends.) 

I do not know if in the 1970s, a French audience, would have heard 'programming' as the thing we do to write software or make computers and robots run. Perhaps, they heard it terms of scheduling. Or perhaps they heard it as an ironic counterpart to the programmatic political projects ordinarily associated with five year social planning. But it is quite clear that Foucault treats these economists not merely as offering (who?) new kinds of descriptions of society, but also offering a new kind of praxis. 

Foucault's claim here sits uneasily with the self-understanding of many Chicago economists of the period; they, following Milton Friedman's lead , generally claim that they make a sharp description between the descriptive ('positive') and prescriptive ('normative') elements in their work; while leaving practice ('art') largely to the side. So, for example, 

THE new economic approach to political behavior seeks to develop a positive theory of legislation, in contrast to the normative approach of welfare economics. The new approach asks why certain industries and not others become regulated or have tariffs imposed on imports or why income transfers take the form and direction they do, in contrast to asking which industries should be regulated or have tariffs imposed, or what transfers should be made.
Both the normative and positive approaches to legislation, however, generally have taken enforcement of laws for granted, and have not included systematic analyses of the cost of enforcing different kinds of laws. In separate studies we recently formulated rules designed to increase the effectiveness of different laws. We proposed that offenders convicted of violating laws be punished by an amount related to the value of the damages caused to others, adjusted upwards for the probability that offenders avoid conviction. Gary S. Becker & George J. Stigler. "Law enforcement, malfeasance, and compensation of enforcers." The Journal of Legal Studies 3.1 (1974): 1.*

Stigler and Becker (both Chicago Nobels eventually) present themselves as doing something on the 'positive'/descriptive side of things. In their work they explore the costs of enforcements. Yet, even if one grants that their work is firmly grounded in empirical analysis, it is not so odd that Foucault thinks they are doing what he calls programming. For, they offer a rule of punishment intended to decrease 'cost' of punishment and increase the 'effectiveness' of these. To an outsider that does seem prescriptive.  Why do Becker and Stigler not call that normative analysis? To an outsider this seems like obscurification. 

The beauty of Foucault's treatment in lecture 9, is that he shows that part of the confusion stems from the way Robbins' definition of what economists do gets (ahh) operationalized in economics. I quote Foucault (initially quoting Robbins):

“Economics is the science of human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have mutually exclusive uses.” You can see that this definition of economics does not identify its task as the analysis of a relational mechanism between things or processes, like capital, investment, and production, into which, given this, labor is in some way inserted only as a cog; it adopts the task of analyzing a form of human behavior and the internal rationality of this human behavior. Analysis must try to bring to light the calculation—which, moreover, may be unreasonable, blind, or inadequate—through which one or more individuals decided to allot given scarce resources to this end rather than another. Economics is not therefore the analysis of processes; it is the analysis of an activity. So it is no longer the analysis of the historical logic of processes; it is the analysis of the internal rationality, the strategic programming of individuals’ activity. (222-223)

Economics stops being the large scale study of historical processes. Rather, economics becomes the study of the scarce means given ends. As Foucault notes in the passage I quoted at the top of this post, this definition is topic neutral. And facilitates what (already (recall) back in 1934) Talcott Parsons called 'economic imperialism' (that is, "the extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain, and second, on the basis of this, the possibility of giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic.") The setting of ends is treated as normative or prescriptive activity. And so when one studies means in light of scarcity one is doing descriptive work.

So, in the just quoted passage, the rules offered by Stigler and Becker are rules that govern the means, but not the ends criminal laws are supposed to serve. They are a form of instrumental rationality or conditional/hypothetical rationality. 'Programming' is an excellent term to capture what is going on here because these 'rules' offered by Becker and Stigler are, in fact, supposed to be legally binding on subjects.

Now, a critic may well worry about the immaculate conception of the ends. Who decides what they are? And by what right do Stigler and Becker assume them as given? (Answering these questions has informed my own work on them.) But Foucault, however notices or is interested in something else. (I think this is really spectacular.) I continue with Foucault's analysis of human capital theory:

This means undertaking the economic analysis of labor. What does bringing labor back into economic analysis mean? It does not mean knowing where labor is situated between, let’s say, capital and production. The problem of bringing labor back into the field of economic analysis is not one of asking about the price of labor, or what it produces technically, or what is the value added by labor. The fundamental, essential problem, anyway the first problem which arises when one wants to analyze labor in economic terms, is how the person who works uses the means available to him. That is to say, to bring labor into the field of economic analysis, we must put ourselves in the position of the person who works; we will have to study work as economic conduct practiced, implemented, rationalized, and calculated by the person who works. What does working mean for the person who works? What system of choice and rationality does the activity of work conform to? As a result, on the basis of this grid which projects a principle of strategic rationality on the activity of work, we will be able to see in what respects and how the qualitative differences of work may have an economic type of effect. So we adopt the point of view of the worker and, for the first time, ensure that the worker is not present in the economic analysis as an object—the object of supply and demand in the form of labor power—but as an active economic subject. (223)

To put the point as a paradox: the very theory that seems to objectify humans as capital and that is often accused of treating citizens as optimizing paws in engineering problems, is in fact a theory that treats humans as subjective agents. Now, as my former colleague John Davis has shown in a number of books, as this theory gets developed (in ever more subtle mathematical ways), it becomes difficult to see where, in the effervescent moments of a second derivative, agency ends up being located. But that's for a different time.

Admittedly, the cognitive content of such agency is reductive in character because human motivation is treated in fairly simple fashion. Quoting Foucault again,

People like Schultz and Becker say: Why, in the end, do people work? They work, of course, to earn a wage. What is a wage? A wage is quite simply an income. From the point of view of the worker, the wage is an income, not the price at which he sells his labor power. Here, the American neo-liberals refer to the old definition, which goes right back to the start of the twentieth century, of Irving Fisher, who said: What is an income? How can we define an income? An income is quite simply the product or return on a capital. Conversely, we will call “capital” everything that in one way or another can be a source of future income. Consequently, if we accept on this basis that the wage is an income, then the wage is therefore the income of a capital. Now what is the capital of which the wage is the income? Well, it is the set of all those physical and psychological factors which make someone able to earn this or that wage, so that, seen from the side of the worker, labor is not a commodity reduced by abstraction to labor power and the time [during] which it is used. Broken down in economic terms, from the worker’s point of view labor comprises a capital, that is to say, it as an ability, a skill; as they say: it is a “machine.”And on the other side it is an income, a wage, or rather, a set of wages; as they say: an earnings stream.
This breakdown of labor into capital and income obviously has some fairly important consequences. First, if capital is thus defined as that which makes a future income possible, this income being a wage, then you can see that it is a capital which in practical terms is inseparable from the person who possesses it. To that extent it is not like other capitals. Ability to work, skill, the ability to do something cannot be separated from the person who is skilled and who can do this particular thing. In other words, the worker’s skill really is a machine, but a machine which cannot be separated from the worker himself, which does not exactly mean, as economic, sociological, or psychological criticism said traditionally, that capitalism transforms the worker into a machine and alienates him as a result. We should think of the skill that is united with the worker as, in a way, the side through which the worker is a machine, but a machine understood in the positive sense, since it is a machine that produces an earnings stream. An earnings stream and not an income, precisely because the machine constituted by the worker’s ability is not, as it were, sold from time to time on the labor market against a certain wage. In reality this machine has a lifespan, a length of time in which it can be used, an obsolescence, and an ageing. So that we should think of the machine constituted by the worker’s ability, the machine constituted by, if you like, ability and worker individually bound together, as being remunerated over a period of time by a series of wages which, to take the simplest case, will begin by being relatively low when the machine begins to be used, then will rise, and then will fall with the machine’s obsolescence or the ageing of the worker insofar as he is a machine. We should therefore view the whole as a machine/stream complex, say the neo-economists—all this is in Schultz is it not—it is therefore a machine-stream ensemble, and you can see that we are at the opposite extreme of a conception of labor power sold at the market price to a capital invested in an enterprise. This is not a conception of labor power; it is a conception of capital-ability which, according to diverse variables, receives a certain income that is a wage, an income-wage, so that the worker himself appears as a sort of enterprise for himself. Here, as you can see, the element I pointed out earlier in German neo-liberalism, and to an extent in French neo-liberalism, is pushed to the limit, that is to say, the idea that the basic element to be deciphered by economic analysis is not so much the individual, or processes and mechanisms, but enterprises. An economy made up of enterprise-units, a society made up of enterprise-units, is at once the principle of decipherment linked to liberalism and its programming for the rationalization of a society and an economy. (224-225)

So Foucault understands human capital theory as a theory focused on agents, which are simultaneously programmable machines, that is, as possible generators of income streams. Given the recent focus on risk and uncertainty, and the many social and political challenges (pandemic, climate, financial instability) which lay in the future, it is natural to wonder about how we should think of possible income of these machines with, as the logicians teach, necessarily finite time spans. And this is also natural because Foucault (correctly) treats Chicago economics as a return to the radical utilitarian program of Bentham (248) and given that utilitarianism is as a technique of decision-making resolutely oriented toward the future (and spectacularly useful to forget crimes from the past).

Even so, agents don't fall like manna from heaven ready to produce income streams; they need to be educated and cultivated, and constituted by norms and institutions. Capital-ability is the product of history, and the machine-stream ensemble is built over time in society. So, lurking in this theory is a complex analysis relating past and (possibly discounted) future time. And while from one perspective wages merely reflect supply and demand at a given time, in other perspective they become a way to connect individual decisions over time to larger social ends (e.g., development). And as Foucault recognizes, the irony is that a relatively libertarian, intellectual community with distrust of collective planning, pioneers a set of analytical techniques by which policy-makers may come to shape (if not program) human agents toward collectively imposed ends.