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LIBERALISM WITHOUT HUMANISM: MICHEL FOUCAULT AND THE FREE-MARKET CREED, 1976–1979*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2009

MICHAEL C. BEHRENT
MICHAEL C. BEHRENT*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Appalachian State University E-mail: behrentmc@appstate.edu
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Abstract

This article challenges conventional readings of Michel Foucault by examining his fascination with neoliberalism in the late 1970s. Foucault did not critique neoliberalism during this period; rather, he strategically endorsed it. The necessary cause for this approval lies in the broader rehabilitation of economic liberalism in France during the 1970s. The sufficient cause lies in Foucault's own intellectual development: drawing on his long-standing critique of the state as a model for conceptualizing power, Foucault concluded, during the 1970s, that economic liberalism, rather than “discipline,” was modernity's paradigmatic power form. Moreover, this article seeks to clarify the relationship between Foucault's philosophical antihumanism and his assessment of liberalism. Rather than arguing (as others have) that Foucault's antihumanism precluded a positive appraisal of liberalism, or that the apparent reorientation of his politics in a more liberal direction in the late 1970s entailed a partial retreat from antihumanism, this article contends that Foucault's brief, strategic, and contingent endorsement of liberalism was possible precisely because he saw no incompatibility between antihumanism and liberalism—but only liberalism of the economic variety. Economic liberalism alone, and not its political iteration, was compatible with the philosophical antihumanism that is the hallmark of Foucault's thought.

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Articles
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , November 2009 , pp. 539 - 568
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

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23 Foucault, La Volonté de savoir (Paris, 1977), 117.

24 Those who would see Foucault's interest in liberalism and his turn, in the early 1980s, to subjectivity as qualifications or even rejections of his earlier antihumanism overlook the fact that Foucault considered both projects to be examinations of “governmentality,” a concept by which he endeavored to replace the juridical model of power and its humanist underpinnings with a conception of power as a practice and as a relationship through which subjects are constituted. Thus in 1981 Foucault claimed that his “history of subjectivity” was part and parcel of the “question of ‘governmentality,’” insofar as the “government of the self by oneself” raises the issue of its “articulation in relation to others.” Foucault, “Subjectivité et vérité”, in idem, Dits et écrits, vol. 4, 1980–1988, ed. D. Defert, F. Ewald, and J. Lagrange (Paris, 1994), 214.

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26 Foucault, “Entretien avec Michel Foucault” (interview with D. Trombadori conducted in 1978), in idem, Dits et écrits, vol. 4, 1980–1988, 80, 81.

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50 Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique. Cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979 (Paris, 2004), 221.

51 On this issue see W. Gallois, “Against Capitalism? French Theory and the Economy after 1945,” in J. Bourg, ed., After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France (Lanham, MD, 2004), 49–72. The present essay seeks to qualify Gallois's claim that Foucault partook in French theory's neglect of economic thought.

52 Lepage, H., Demain le capitalisme (Paris, 1978), 11Google Scholar.

53 Ibid., 13; original emphasis. A similar argument was made by F.-P. Bénoît in Démocratie libérale (Paris, 1978).

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59 Rosanvallon, L'Age de l'autogestion, 41–5.

60 H. Lepage, Autogestion et capitalisme: Réponses à l'anti-économie (Paris, 1978).

61 Unpublished letter from Foucault to Rosanvallon, dated 17 Dec. 1977. This letter was kindly made available to me by S. Moyn. See also Rosanvallon, “Un Intellectuel en politique” (interview with S. Bourmeau), available at http://www.college-de-france.fr/media/his_pol/UPL57428_Un_Intellectuel_en_politique.pdf. This interview originally appeared in Les Inrockuptibles 566 (3 Oct. 2006).

62 Foucault, “Une Mobilisation culturelle,” Le nouvel Observateur 670 (Sept. 1977), 49. Foucault would subsequently collaborate with the CFDT on a number of issues, including opposition to the repression of the Polish trade union Solidarity in 1981 and efforts to rethink the French social security system. For the latter, see R. Bono, B. Brunhes, M. Foucault, R. Lenoir, and P. Rosanvallon, Sécurité sociale: L'Enjeu (Paris, 1983). Foucault's archives testify to further projects. See notably a letter on CFDT stationary from A. Bihous, addressed, in addition to Foucault, to Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Julliard, Claude Lefort, Kryztof Pomian, Pierre Rosanvallon, Paul Thibaud, Alain Touraine, and Patrick Viveret, entitled “Propositions de travail commun intellectuels—Conféderation française démocratique du travail”. Fonds Foucault, Institut mémoires de l'édition contemporaine (IMEC) (Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe, France), FCL 6.11.

63 P. Rosanvallon, “L'Etat en état d'urgence”, Le nouvel Observateur 670 (Sept. 1977), 49, 48.

64 Rosanvallon, La Crise de l'état-providence (Paris, 1992; first published 1981), 97.

65 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York, 1977; first published 1975), 296. The original passage is in the interrogative form.

66 Ibid., 308. In his translation, Sheridan makes this footnote the book's final paragraph.

67 J. Miller points out, on D. Defert's testimony, that Foucault started writing what became the final chapter of the first volume of The History of Sexuality—“The Right of Death and Power over Life”—on the very day that he completed Discipline and Punish. This suggests that Foucault's reservations about the scope of the “disciplinary hypothesis” may date back as far as 1975. See J. Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York, 1993), 240–1.

68 Foucault, “Il faut défendre la Société.” Cours au Collège de France, 1975–1976 (Paris, 1997), 215.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid., 216, 218–19.

71 Ibid., 220.

72 Ibid., 216.

73 Ibid., 223–4.

74 Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978 (Paris, 2004), 47.

75 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 206.

76 Ibid., 202–3.

77 Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 50.

78 See Miller's The Passion of Michel Foucault, as well as Seigel, J., The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (New York, 2005), 603–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 68.

80 Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 23, 24. Foucault uses the term libéralisme, not “economic liberalism,” but clearly means the latter, and not liberalism's political form. In the opening lecture, for instance, he speaks in one breath of “liberalism, of the Physiocrats, of Adam Smith, of Bentham, of the British utilitarians” (ibid., 25). I use the term “economic liberalism” in the interest of clarity.

81 Ibid., 323.

82 Ibid., 325.

83 Ibid., 25.

84 Rosanvallon had close ties to Furet as well as to Foucault.

85 Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 41.

86 Though Furet, too, was critical of many aspects of revolutionary politics, it was ultimately the Revolution's failure to ground political life in a solid legal framework, rather than its rootedness in such a tradition, that he condemned.

87 Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 43.

88 Ibid., 324.

89 Quoted in Fourçans, “La Politique du gouvernement Barre”, 279.

90 For these reasons, M. Bonnafous-Boucher's argument is exactly wrong: Foucault does not embrace what she calls “liberalism without liberty,” but rather liberty without liberalism—at least insofar as the latter is understood in a more conventional (i.e. humanistic) sense. See Bonnafous-Boucher, M., Le Libéralisme dans la pensée de Michel Foucault: Un Libéralisme sans Liberté (Paris, 2001)Google Scholar.

91 Christofferson, French Intellectuals against the Left.

92 See François-Poncet, J., La Politique économique de l'Allemagne occidentale (Paris, 1970)Google Scholar; and Rieter, H. and Schmolz, M., “The Ideas of German Ordoliberalism, 1938–1945: Pointing the Way to a New Economic Order,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 1/1 (1993), 87–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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94 Ibid., 92.

95 Quoted in Moreau, J., “Le Congrès d'Epinay-sur-Seine du Parti socialiste,” Vingtième siècle 65 (2000), 95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 93.

97 Foucault, “Mon Corps, ce papier, ce feu,” in idem, Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 1970–1975, ed. D. Defert, F. Ewald, and J. Lagrange (Paris, 1994), esp. 267–8.

98 Quoted in Moreau, “Le Congrès d'Epinay”, 95.

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102 Ibid., 213.

103 Ibid., 264.

104 Ibid., 265.