michel foucault and liberal intelligence - donzelot, j

7/29/2019 Michel Foucault and Liberal Intelligence - Donzelot, J

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Michel Foucault and liberal

intelligence

Jacques Donzelot

The twentieth anniversary of Foucaults death was celebrated throughout the

world last year (2004) with a number of events which sought to demonstrate

the enduring relevance of one of the greatest French intellectuals of the lastcentury. But by just one year they missed the chance of coinciding with the

issue that is currently haunting French minds and which came to a kind of

climax with the recent referendum on the European Constitution, namely, the

relationship between economic liberalism and politics. And yet this is the

subject on which Foucaults thought might have seemed most directly

pertinent.

Michel Foucault invented a remarkable method for challenging the ways in

which we think about supposedly universal objects like madness, delinquency,

sexuality and government. He did not set out to show the historical relativityof these objects, or even to deny their validity, as has often been said, but

postulated a priori their non-existence, thus dismantling all our certainties

concerning them, including that of their pure historicity. This enabled him to

reveal how something which did not exist could come about, how a set of

practices were able to come together to produce a regime of truth with regard

to these objects, a combination of power and knowledge which makes it

possible to say, at least insofar as this regime of truth succeeded in being

effective, what was true and false in matters concerning madness, delinquency,

sexuality and government. On each of these subjects Michel Foucaultproduced a canonical work, apart from that of government or, which comes

to the same in view of his analysis of government, of the relationship between

economic and political liberalism. Why this omission? Was he prevented from

doing so by an early death? It is hard to say since, after having treated the

subject with remarkable passion, he suddenly put it aside in order to devote the

rest of his life to the delights of a history of subjectivation, which, however

Translated from Esprit, November 2007, Michel Foucault et lintelligence du libe ralisme by

Graham Burchell, Il Mulino di Chimafucci, Apecchio, 61042 PU, Italy. E-mail:

[email protected]

Copyright# 2008 Taylor & Francis

ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online

DOI: 10.1080/03085140701760908

Economy and Society Volume 37 Number 1 February 2008: 115134


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great its interest, might now be thought not to have the same importance as the

subject he abandoned on the way.1

In a way, posterity has rejected this premature abandonment of the question

of the government of men in favour of that of the conduct of self. Studies ongovernmentality are everywhere the most living part of his oeuvre.2 It is only in

France that the Foucauldian analysis of liberalism has been accorded scant

consideration.3

We would like to help make up for this while freely taking

inspiration from his analysis in order to comment on the current political

conjuncture in France which is marked, on the one hand, by the negative

response to the referendum on the proposed European Constitution, which

revealed, if it needed revealing, the extent of the rejection of liberalism, and, on

the other, by the Lefts inability to get to grips with globalization rather than

resorting to evasion or denial.Liberalism is seen in France as a suspect doctrine, perforce tolerated, but

alien to our way of thinking. We think against it rather with it or on the basis of

it. Measured against the values of the Republic, it seems to many to be their

opposite, the sign of their decline, the mendacious promise of a harmony

which in reality can be brought about only by the exacting imposition of the

general interest by a State freed from the grip of particular interests. In

the main, our political thought is established at a calculated distance from this

Anglo-Saxon doctrine: far enough away to avoid succumbing to its evil charms,

but not too far, however, to not be able to preserve its principle of resistance toan extremism which might otherwise stifle the universal claims of our

republican virtues within the narrow confines of the national framework.

In our determination to think against liberalism, without thinking it through

and considering what it can teach us, we fail to grasp the reasons for its strength

and unlimited expansion, and we adopt an increasingly rigid and sterile position

in the development of the world. Foucault applied himself precisely to grasping

the import of liberalism as a way of thinking about government and not as a foil

to the republican art of government. His reflections occupy two courses of

lectures at the College de France, in 1978 and 1979. The first was entitledSecurity, territory, population (2004a, 2007) and the second The birth of biopolitics

(2004b, forthcoming 2008). Not having followed these series of Foucaults

lectures nor indeed any of the others, and now occupying a position far removed

from the group of devotees who maintain the cult of Foucaults memory, I must

say that I undertook the reading of the transcripts of two years of my old

teachers lectures without any particular expectation, with that strange curiosity

that one may feel for a voice which was once familiar and stimulating before

becoming irritating and somewhat foreign.

However, rather than a musty odour of the past, what quickly struck me wasthe astonishing topicality of this analysis of liberalism more than a quarter of a

century after it was formulated. Here was a way of showing wonderfully well

how the power of the economy rests on an economy of power, both at the time

of the emergence of liberalism at the end of the eighteenth century as well as

at that of neo-liberalism between 1930 and 1950. The respect in which the

116 Economy and Society


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analysis is topical and new is that it makes it possible to understand the

bifurcation of French and Anglo-Saxon political thought, the insistence of the

former on law as the expression of a will and its vision of the constitution as

the fruit of the individuals voluntary renunciation of his sovereignty, in short,everything we have just lived through with the referendum on Europe. It is

equally topical and new in enabling us to see how neo-liberalism calls for a

completely different compromise with the idea of social justice than the one

represented by the Welfare State in relation to classical liberalism. Or rather, it

enables us to see how in order to retain its resources and effectiveness this

compromise calls for revision and adaptation rather than for a tooth and nail

defence of it as it is. First of all I would like to present these two moments of

Foucaults analysis of the birth of liberalism and its renewal in the middle of

the twentieth century, and then draw from this some comments on our presentcontext more than twenty-five years later.

The modern art of government

The real object of the first, 1978 series of lectures, Security, territory, population

(2007), is the birth of political economy. What is the relation between the title

of these lectures and their object? At first sight there appears to be no relation,

and the reason for this is the progressive drift of the lectures from an analysisof power towards that of governmentality, the concept which Foucault coined

that year in order to explain the introduction of political economy into the art

of government.

At the start of the lectures Foucault sets out to describe the transition, which

takes place in the eighteenth century, from a form of power targeted on a

territory to a form of power bearing on a population. The approach and

periodization is similar to that adopted for the history of punishment in

Discipline and punish from the spectacle of the supplice to the gentle way in

punishment (Foucault, 1977)

or in the conclusion of Volume 1 of the Historyof sexuality from the right of death to the power over life (Foucault, 1979)

which announced a general reflection on bio-power which was due to be

undertaken in these lectures. So we are on familiar ground ready to listen to an

author who is a master of his art and his subject and who is about to restate in a

new register the theses of his main work, Discipline and punish. He announces

three themes for his demonstration of the shift of the point of application of

power from the territory to the population: the town, scarcity and disease.

Within the framework of a power which aims for the safety (su rete ) of the

territory, each of these three objects is treated by a precise logic ofdemarcation, separation and fortification. The territory is like an edifice

which must be protected against internal and external threats. Towns must be

fortified so they are suitable for commerce and manufacture by being protected

from the outside and so that they bring their wealth only to the capital, the

sovereigns seat. The countryside must also be controlled, by the law of the

Jacques Donzelot: Michel Foucault and liberal intelligence 117


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feudal lord, of course, but also and especially by the sovereigns restrictions

with regard to everything concerning the grain trade, where high prices will

affect those living in the towns, causing shortages and provoking riots. The

sovereign also bans peasants from hoarding grain to force up prices and fromselling abroad. They must make the smallest possible profit so that those in the

towns are fed at the lowest cost. Finally, faced with epidemic diseases like

smallpox, leprosy or cholera, one must proceed by separating and isolating

those affected. In short, the safety of the sovereigns territory requires him to

resort principally to measures of separation and interdiction.

Population and the birth of governmentality

The mechanisms of power will change completely, Foucault explains, when the

sovereign no longer has to concern himself with the safety of his territory but

with the security of the population. With regard to the towns, the problem will

no longer be one of enclosing them within fortified limits but of opening them

up to allow for their growth in order to avoid urban congestion. The concern

shifts, therefore, from one of what limit to impose to that of facilitating the

proper circulation of people, of commodities and even of air. The same

principle will prevail for the prevention of famine: instead of imposing a

battery of restrictions on the grain trade, the preferred policy is to allow thefree flow of commodities and achieve the self-regulation of prices, allowing

profits to be made which will then be invested in new cultivation, increasing

the amount of grain for sale the following year, and hence lowering prices, just

as allowing the possibility of imports will discourage hoarding more

successfully than prohibitions. Of course, this will not eliminate revolts

entirely, but it will deprive them of their justification because in acting in this

way the sovereign will be acting in conformity with the nature of things and

not by means of prohibitions for whose ineffectiveness he will be held

responsible. The same nature of things is found at work again withinoculation and vaccination, which consist in quelling the disease by

permitting it to enter the body so that the latter learns to protect itself

from it, just as allowing a high price of grain finally leads to the price rise

subsiding.

In place of the necessity to compel obedience in order to ensure the safety of

his territory, the sovereign opts for the proper use of freedom in order to

maximize the security of the population. But in what sense, then, is he still a

sovereign? What is there in this notion of power applied to the population

which involves the exercise of sovereignty? As Michel Foucault proceeds withhis analysis, he finds an awkwardness in combining the terms sovereign and

population: saying that the sovereign no longer rules over subjects but over a

population makes the two terms jar on each other. As a result, in relation to the

notion of population, he starts to use the term government in preference to

that of sovereign. While I have been speaking about population a word has



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constantly recurred you will say that this was deliberate, but it may not be

entirely so and this is the word government. The more I have spoken

about population, the more I have stopped saying sovereign (Foucault,

2007, p. 76). But what precisely is involved in the need to couple the wordpopulation with government rather than sovereignty? Basically, it is the

observation that with the emergence of population there is not only a change in

the technologies of power but also in the model of government. At that point,

government appears as something other than a technology of power. Or at least

it now serves as a frame of reference for the exercise of power. In the universe

of sovereignty, precisely, the key reference is to the family, and the central

question is: how can the spirit of the family patriarch be introduced into the

management of the State, that is to say, the economy, the concern for the good

of all?

the essential component, the central element . . . in the Princes education . . . is

the government of the family, which is called precisely economy . . . how to

introduce economy that is to say, the proper way of managing individuals,

goods, and wealth, like the management of a family by a father who knows how

to direct his wife, his children, and his servants, who knows how to make his

familys fortune prosper?

(Foucault, 2007, pp. 945)

In fact this model of the family as the standard for the sovereigns governmentis called into question with the appearance of population as the target of

government, because, when it is taken as the object of government, population

includes several phenomena which go beyond the family model. How are

major epidemics to be managed as though by a good father? And how can a

familial logic accommodate the upward spiral of work and wealth made

possible by the regulation of flows which replaces the old prohibitions? The

family is no longer the model for the population but a simple segment of the

latter and, as such, an instrument, a relay which may help in its government

(in the domain of sexuality, demography, consumption. . .

).

the family now appears as an element within the population and as a

fundamental relay in its government. . . . It is therefore no longer a model; it

is a segment whose privilege is simply that when one wants to obtain something

from the population concerning sexual behavior, demography, the birth rate, or

consumption, then one has to utilize the family.

(Foucault, 2007, pp. 1045)

This analysis of the transition from the family as the model of government

to the family as a relay of government is not new.4

But Michel Foucault gives ita theoretical extension of great breadth by developing the concept of

governmentality which, in contrast with the family model associated with

sovereignty, he defines as that complex form of power that has the population

as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses

of security as its essential technical instrument (Foucault, 2007, p. 108).



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From this point his lectures pursue a completely different direction than the

one announced. Instead of elaborating on the mutation of techniques of power

due to the shift of target from territory to population, they focus entirely on

this new concept of governmentality and undertake to show, first, how the ideaof government is born; second, how, subsequently, this idea is introduced into

the State under the cover of the model of raison dEtat, which appeared in the

sixteenth century; and, last, how in the eighteenth century it conquered the

entire State thanks to political economy, which constitutes an accomplished

form of governmentalization of the State.

Where did the idea of government come from? Not from the Greeks, where

the king pilots the city-state exactly like a ship, concerned solely with its

direction but without particular concern for its inhabitants, but rather in the

Jewish people who are not concerned with the territory so much as with thepopulation understood as a flock on the move over which the shepherd must

keep watch while taking care for every sheep.

What is the shepherd (berger)? Is he someone whose strength strikes mens eyes,

like the sovereigns or gods, like the Greek gods, who essentially manifest

themselves through their splendor? Not at all. The shepherd is someone who

keeps watch. He keeps watch in the sense, of course, of keeping an eye out for

possible evils . . . in the sense of vigilance with regard to any possible

misfortune. . . . He will see to it that things are best for each of the animals

of his flock.. . .

The shepherd (pasteur) directs all his care towards others and

never towards himself.

(Foucault, 2007, pp. 1278)

From this Jewish origin, the idea of government enters Christian culture and

organizes life to such an extent that the Wars of Religion can be read as directly

linked to this question of the mode of government of men which is implied by

questions of theology and religious practice. The same goes for the history of

the Church which can be read as being organized entirely around responses to

the counter-conducts (or resistances, if one prefers) of asceticism, religiouscommunities, mysticism, the return to usury, eschatological beliefs. . . .

Throughout this medieval period, the sovereigns government is that of a

shepherd leading his people to eternal bliss, just like the father of a family or

the abbot of a monastery.

A first discontinuity appears after the Wars of Religion, with the idea that

the sovereign needs an additional power in order to impose himself on his

subjects, and this supplementary power will come from the idea of the Res

publica understood as the stabilization of the State, and thus the source of the

model ofraison dEtat. With raison dEtatthe end of government is not celestialbliss, but . . . the State itself. What exactly is meant by the word State?

Sometimes it designates a domain, sometimes a jurisdiction, sometimes a

condition of life (a status) and sometimes the quality of a thing whereby it

remains in a state of good order (that is to say, without movement). Well,

Foucault says, the sovereign Republic is nothing other than this: a territory,



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a set of rules, a set of individuals with their respective status, and all living in

the greatest stability. The sovereign is no longer defined in reference to the

salvation of his flock and the final happiness of each of his sheep after its

passage through this world. He is defined in relation to the State: The end ofraison dEtat is the state itself, and if there is something like perfection,

happiness, or felicity, it will only ever be the perfection, happiness, or felicity

of the state itself. There is no last day . . . nothing like a unified and final

temporal organization (Foucault, 2007, p. 258). At this point the sovereign

does not follow divine laws so much as exercise command over the laws, and he

commands the laws in order to preserve the State, to increase its strength and

its wealth and, in order to do this, to increase its population, within the

framework of its territory whose physical extension he defends against the

encroachments of other sovereigns.Liberalism asserts its superiority as a new governmental rationality against

this model ofraison dEtat. And here again Foucault encounters the question of

population which had got in the way of his plan and which he can now

integrate with more confidence thanks to this detour through the history of

government. For the point of considering this first form of governmentaliza-

tion of the State, with raison dEtat, is that it makes it possible to account for

the way in which the relation to population changes from one regime of

government to the other. What matters in the framework ofraison dEtatis the

quantity of population. It is an absolute commodity, a quantifiable wealth onwhich a careful eye must be kept because the sovereigns wealth depends on its

number, its work and its docility. This is the objective of police, which takes

care of the population in this respect through the regulation of its health,

production and circulation. Likewise, mercantilism, understood as the

economic theory corresponding to raison dEtat, required

first, that every country strive to have the largest possible population, second,

that the entire population be put to work, third, that the wages paid to the

population be as low as possible so that . . . one can thus sell the maximum

amount abroad, which will bring about the import of gold.

(Foucault, 2007, p. 337)

Within the framework of political economy, on the other hand, population is

no longer a matter of numbers, a pure quantity or the greatest number

possible, but a substance whose optimum size varies according to the evolution

of wages, employment and prices. This substance is not controlled but

regulates itself according to resources which involve the development of

commerce not only between private individuals, but also between countries.

Instead of commanding mens actions, one should act on the interactionsbetween them, conduct their conduct, in short, manage rather than control

through rules and regulations:

number is not in itself a value for the e conomistes. Certainly, the population must

be of a sufficient size to produce a lot. . . . But it must not be too large . . .



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precisely so that wages are not too low, that is to say, so that people have an

interest in working and also so that they can bolster prices through their

consumption.

(Foucault, 2007, p. 345)

The progress of governmentality in the transition from raison dEtat to

liberalism consists in the contribution of a reflection on governmental

practices. Governing is no longer ruling, asserting a power, but recognizing

that truth is told elsewhere than at the centre of the State, or at least one truth,

that of the market, which suggests that action is no longer to be conceived as

the imposition of a will but as a balance between too much and too little. The

intelligence of liberalism as a mode of government resides entirely in this

pragmatism, this endeavour to determine what it is advisable to do (the agenda)

and not do (the non-agenda).5 The intervention of governmentality will have to

be limited, but this limit will not just be negative: An entire domain of

possible and necessary interventions appears within the field thus delimi-

ted [by the principle of respect for natural processes]. . . . It will be necessary

to . . . manage and no longer to regiment through rules and regulations

(Foucault, 2007, pp. 3523).

The State and the social irrationality of capitalism

With political economy, the end of governmental reason is no longer the State

and its wealth as with the model of raison dEtat but society and its

economic progress. Its role is no longer to curb a freedom which is the

expression of mans inevitably evil nature, but to regulate it, by means

including prohibition if necessary. For there is no freedom that is not

produced, that is not to be constructed, and this construction takes place

through interventions by the State, not by its mere disengagement. But how

far can and must this interventionism go without turning into its opposite, into

an insidious or avowed anti-liberalism? This is the question which is the

starting point of neo-liberal reflection and whose origins and reasoning

Foucault analyses and reconstructs in the lectures of the following year, 1979,

The birth of biopolitics (Foucault, 2004b, 2008 forthcoming).

The steady growth of the States role in all the democracies, however diverse

its manifestations, provokes the emergence of a neo-liberal reflection which

reaches its peak between the 1930s and 1960s. The idea that this tendency of

the role of the State to increase should be contained, indeed reversed, occupies

liberal economists to the point of becoming an obsession. Although Keynes is a

liberal, in his way, or anyway a thinker hostile to socialism, the success of his

theories disturbs the pure liberals because potentially it puts the State in the

position of directing the market rather than just producing it. But the neo-

liberals fear is based on the uncertain drift of the democracies and the rise of

Nazism and Stalinism. What commonality does an ultimately liberal doctrine



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like Keynesianism have with these monstrous figures of power? Just one, but

an important one: the growth of State power. According to the neo-liberals,

the destruction of the State from within by Nazism only goes to prove that the

State cannot meet the demand for its own indefinite extension withoutdisintegrating and that it is not the bulwark one thought it was against the

irrationality associated with capitalism.

The neo-liberals want to answer the challenge of what Max Weber called,

the irrational rationality of capitalism. But, as Michel Foucault shows, they

mean to do so in a way that is strictly opposed to that of the Marxists. In the

thirties the latter were grouped around Horkheimer and Adorno in the

celebrated Frankfurt School, looking for a social rationality whose application

could counter the effects of economic irrationality. At the same time, the neo-

liberals were grouped together in another German city, Freiburg and wouldregroup after the War around a journal called Ordo. Among them there were

many economists, some of whom would make important contributions to the

guiding ideas of the post-war German Federal Republic and others to the neo-

liberal Chicago School organized around Milton Friedman. They were not

seeking a social rationality to correct economic irrationality, but rather an

economic rationality capable of nullifying the social irrationality of capitalism:

and history had it [Foucault adds] that in 1968 the last disciples of the Frankfurt

School clashed with the police of a government inspired by the Freiburg School,

thus finding themselves on opposite sides of the barricades, for such was the

double, parallel, crossed, and antagonistic fate of Weberianism in Germany.

(Foucault, 2004b, p. 110)

The ordo-liberals ask: what is the deficiency of classical liberal thought

which exposes the economy to increasing pressure for State intervention? And

they find this flaw to be its naive confidence in the virtue of laissez-faire, in

the illusion that the market is a natural phenomenon that only has to be

respected. This naturalistic naivety then obliges the State to intervene to deal

with problems and needs that the market cannot resolve or satisfy on its own.Treating the market as a natural entity really amounts to making it bear the

blame for everything that does not work, playing off the nature of needs

against the nature of the market, in short, gradually discrediting the latter in

the name of the former. The State must thus intervene because of the market,

in order to compensate for its deficiencies and to limit dysfunctions in the

mechanism of exchange. But in doing this one is setting the State to work

against the market. The neo-liberals then say this is a double misunderstand-

ing, first of the primacy of the market in regulating exchange and, second, of

what makes the market work, which is inequality rather than equality or,rather, an equality of inequality. Because what is important in the market is

not the principle of more or less satisfactory exchange but that of more or less

effective competition. The principle of exchange assumes a principle of

equality: that kind of original and fictional situation imagined by eighteenth

century liberal economists. The essential thing of the market is elsewhere; it is



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competition . . . that is to say, not equivalence but on the contrary inequality

(Foucault, 2004b, p. 122). Competition is not a natural phenomenon but a

formal mechanism, a way of getting inequalities to function effectively, of

leaving no inequality sure of itself and master of its position. The role of theState is to intervene in favour of the market rather than because of the market,

in such a way that the market is always maintained and that the principle of

equal inequality produces its effect.6

Competition is not a natural given: the

effects of competition are due only to the essence that characterizes and

constitutes it. . . . Competition is an eidos . . . a principle of formalization. . . .

It is, as it were, a formal game between inequalities (Foucault, 2004b, p. 124).

What does this theorization of competition imply in terms of governmental

rationality? What change does it call for in the role of the State? If what counts

is no longer, in the first place, the man of exchange, the man of need andconsumption, but the man of competition, the man of enterprise and

production, then we should encourage everything in him that partakes of

this spirit of enterprise and place our reliance in man as entrepreneur: as the

entrepreneur of an economic activity, of course, but also as an entrepreneur of

himself the wage-earner is only ever someone who exploits his own human

capital and as a member of a local collectivity taking care for the maintenance

and increase in value of their goods. And what does this mean for the social, for

the compensation for the economic and the injustices generated by its

irrationality? Its meaning is no longer exactly that of a remedy for competitionand so of the reduction of inequalities, but solely that of maintaining each

individual within the system of inequalities, a means of keeping the individual

in the framework of equal inequality which ensures competition precisely

because there is no exclusion. In short, social policy is no longer a means for

countering the economic, but a means for sustaining the logic of competition.

The way of sovereignty versus the way of utility: the example of the

referendum on the proposed European Constitution

Here, then, is an analysis of the birth of liberalism, and of its aggiornamento in

the middle of the twentieth century, which gives us a new understanding by

integrating it within the question of the art of government, or of govern-

mentality in the neologism invented by Foucault. Produced at the end of

1970s, this reading may still surprise today by the singularity of a position

which undertakes to link liberalism and politics together methodically, instead

of distinguishing or opposing them as we usually do in France. It is precisely

for this reason that we can find material here for commenting on a recentdebate between the partisans of the political meaning, for us in France,

advocates of the role of the State and national sovereignty, and of the European

social model, for which we provide the model par excellence and, on the other

hand, the supporters of liberalism, who, within the framework of globalization,

are prepared to do without both this national sovereignty and the famous social



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model for the sake of a projected European Constitution which pays scant

deference to either principle, while promising their better protection, and/or

of an advance of modernity. Not that Michel Foucaults analysis enabled this

debate to be decided in advance.7

But it does allow us to clarify thepresuppositions of the opposing forces thinking.

What is the situation of public law when political economy includes an

internal principle of self-limitation of governmental action? How can this self-

limitation be given a legal basis? Starting from this question, Foucault

develops a distinction which enables us to understand a substantial difference

in attitudes towards liberalism, including, it seems to us, those deployed on the

occasion of the recent referendum in France. He suggests that two schemas of

thought were forged in response to this question and then perpetuated until

the present, although with unequal fortune.The first consists in returning to the basis of right as it was affirmed against

raison dEtat. At that stage, law applied itself to holding back the excesses of

raison dEtat by basing itself on the natural and original rights of every

individual, thus defining imprescriptible rights and determining on that basis

what falls within the sphere of sovereignty and is therefore, through legitimate

concession, within the competence of government, and what is outside this

sphere, falling within that of nature.8

Foucault calls this the juridico-deductive

approach which he identifies with the French Revolution and with Rousseau:

this approach consists in starting from the rights of man in order to arrive at the

limitation of governmentality by way of the constitution of the sovereign. . . . It

is a way of posing right from the start the problem of legitimacy and the

inalienability of rights through a sort of ideal or real renewal of society, the state,

the sovereign, and government.


This is the way of sovereignty . . . but he is anxious to stress, clearly

mischievously, that it is by nature a retroactive approach, even retroactionary

he says, coming close to insulting the fathers of the French nation.The second approach does not start from the rights of the governed that

must be preserved, but from governmental practice itself, and from the limits

that should or should not be imposed on it according to the objectives of

governmentality themselves. It refers to a conception of the law (la Loi) which

is not conceived as the effect of a will, that of the sovereign or of the sovereign

people, but as the effect of a transaction between the legitimate sphere of

intervention of individuals and that of the public authority. The law is not the

result of a transfer, of a division, but of a compromise, of an interest common

to the two parties. Finally, and above all, it brings into play a conception ofindividual freedom which is not so much juridical in essence as a de facto

recognition and consideration of the independence of the governed. The

limits of governmental competence will be defined by the limits of the utility

of governmental intervention (Foucault, 2004b, p. 42). This is, of course, the

approach ofutility, of the English utilitarianism of Bentham, understood as the



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way of putting the following question to every government at every moment: is

what you are doing useful? Within what limits? Beyond what point does it

become harmful? Evidently this is not the revolutionary approach, the way of

sovereignty, but that of utility.Foucault tells us that these two approaches, the juridico-deductive approach

of sovereignty and the approach of utility, have remained both heterogeneous

and co-present in modern history, although the tendency has been for the

second to prevail:

of the two systems, one has been strong and has held its ground, while the other

has receded. The one that has been strong and has stood firm is, of course, the

radical approach which tried to define the juridical limitation of public power in

terms of governmental utility. . . . Utility . . . will ultimately be the main

criterion for working out the limits of the powers of the public authority. . .

in an age in which the problem of utility increasingly comes to encompass all the

traditional problems of law.


Departing from Foucaults text, we could add that this progressive

supremacy of the line of utility over that of sovereignty throughout the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries is seen in France as well as in Great Britain.

Better still, its dominant position appears more clearly in France because it is

confronted with a very strong expression of the juridico-deductive approach. Itsucceeds in asserting itself only inasmuch as the path of sovereignty clearly

appears to be in an impasse. Its introduction which cannot be formulated in

the English terms of utilitarianism for obvious reasons of national pride will

justify resort to a specific theorization. This impasse of sovereignty appears in

France with the 1848 revolution which, on the question of the right to work,

pits partisans of a minimum State against those of a maximum State. And we

see how, at the end of the nineteenth century, the doctrine of social solidarity

inspired by Emile Durkheim constitutes a justification of French acceptance of

the utility approach, because it questions the State and its intervention interms of its utility for society rather than of its sovereign basis. Thus,

according to this doctrine, the State must act so as to encourage the solidarity

of society, but it must act only for this purpose. The State must compensate for

the weaknesses of the market in the protection of the population, and so it

must produce the social, but it must also refrain from going further and take

care not to pave the way for socialism understood as an alternative to the

market. Paradoxically, the art of neither too much nor too little as the form of

governmentality in the name of utility found a more methodical formulation in

France than in most other European countries, the United Kingdom included,since it called upon a different form of knowledge than political economy, that

of sociology, and employed a different terminology, that of solidarity.9

The utility approach prevails everywhere in Europe, including here in

France, the natural homeland of the sovereignty approach. Even so we should

take care to note that the ideological pre-eminence of the latter was never



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renounced. No more was socialism democratic socialism at least which was

seen by many as the major form in which sovereignty is accomplished. That

there is no consistent idea of a specific socialist governmentality, that it can

lead only either to an administrative government, a re-actualizing of raisondEtat, or to a covert and timidly unavowed liberalism (in the manner of Guy

Mollet), matters little as long as one ensures the survival of the sovereignty

approach which is still experienced as offering a minimal defence against the

excesses of liberalism. On the very eve of the moment when we were passing

with Mitterrand from darkness into light, Michel Foucault lays stress in his

lectures on the absence of a specific, socialist governmental rationality.

During the last referendum the line of sovereignty does seem to have served

this function of appeal against the dangers of liberalism. The strength of the

rejection of liberalism, within the French Left at least, obviously indicates aresurgence of the sovereignty approach. To give a crystal-clear reading of the

referendum we need only take up the three points on which the two

approaches are distinguished and apply these to the partisans of a yes or

no vote. The utility approach, 1) starts from the exercise of government and

the question of its desirable extent; 2) puts to work mechanisms of compromise

between that which falls within the jurisdiction of the public sphere and that

which falls within the sphere of individuals; and 3) understands by freedom

the real independence of people. These three characteristics are in fact found

in the reasoning of those in favour of a yes vote. The project of a Constitutionwas born within the government of Europe from the difficulties arising from

its size and from the consequent utility of adopting a constitutional regime

which improves its governability. So much for the first criterion, that is to say

of legislative concern as the starting point. It is born within governmentality

and not from the sovereign will of the citizens of Europe. Second, the project

of a constitution also belongs to the utility approach since it rests on an art of

compromise. Compromise is an essential term in the development of the

project. It takes into account the common rules and traditions specific to each

country, not forcing any country beyond what is possible as regards its regimeof social protection, for example. And if there was a problem in this regard, it

arises more from the fear of an abuse of the rules than from a concern for

compromise with the so-called affair of the Polish plumber. Finally, freedom

is not so much juridical, a commodity that one does or does not give up, as a

reality in the form of the independence of people who do what they wish

according to their civil traditions in the matter of abortion, for example.

As for those who campaigned for a no vote, on this occasion they

methodically reproduced all the characteristics of the sovereignty approach.

For them, it was not a question of starting from government and its problems,but from peoples constitutive rights. In their eyes, was not the first defect of

this constitution that it did not come from a constituent assembly elected by

the inhabitants of each country and mandated to decide on the form of

collective sovereignty with which they would decide to endow themselves?

Nor, for them, was there any question of accepting a law that was the product



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of compromise rather than the expression of their will. The latter must be

collective and total or not exist. There was no question for them of giving up

their will unless it was to engage in a project conforming to their requirements.

The discussion of every article of the law and, a fortiori, of the earlier treatisesthey were asked to ratify, reached the heights of passion, as if it was a matter of

rebuilding the world, rather than of the best way of adapting oneself to it. As

for the juridical conception of freedom, they engaged in a universalism of

rights and duties incompatible with the relative singularity of peoples in the

domain of customs and morals. Thus, the Portuguese were accused of

threatening the right of women from other European countries to abortion

because they had not yet proclaimed this right. In short, the supporters of

a no vote behaved with regard to the project of a European Constitution as if

it was a matter of re-enacting the social contract against raison dEtat.Liberalism goes hand in hand with technical progress in matters of

governmentality, in the face of which the way of sovereignty seems retro-

actionary, and recourse to the State an insidious way of returning to raison

dEtat. Does this mean that liberalism and, a fortiori, neo-liberalism have so

defeated their adversaries that all that they now confront are reactive attitudes

which allow their advocates to win only by making the societies to which they

belong lose? The question arises especially with regard to neo-liberalism and its

role in globalization. Is the political dilemma summed up as having to choose

between adherence to ultra-liberalism, the name for neo-liberal doctrinepreferred by those taking the sovereignty path and by the extreme Left, and a

retroactive, outdated attitude which is incapable of offering any effective

purchase on the exercise of government? There is in fact a middle way between

neo-liberalism and the retroactive approach dear to the traditional Left, and this

is precisely the third way represented by Bill Clinton and adapted to Europe

by Tony Blair. But in France we are usually told that this famous third way is

no more than a scarcely improved copy of neo-liberalism, which in turn is

nothing more than a revival of the old liberal theories, with their original

harshness prior to intervention by the State to compensate for their damagingeffects. It is on this point that the Foucauldian analysis can usefully help us to

get out of the current impasse in which political reasoning finds itself in France.

In this analysis we find the demonstration that neo-liberalism is anything but

the revival of old liberal theories, because it carries out a decisive shift with

regard to both the role of the State and the conception of exchange. To start

with, this shift enables a completely different approach to the question of the

content of the political option represented by the third way and enables us to

compare the latter favourably with the solidariste philosophy of progress which

has served as the French Lefts doctrine for more than a century.Foucaults analysis aims to counter the false ideas which have spread about

neo-liberalism and, increasingly, about the relationship between the economic

and the social. At the forefront of these erroneous claims about neo-liberalism

should be placed, Foucault says, that which would see it as no more than a

reactivation of old liberal theories in their original harshness. This is a major



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misinterpretation since the problem the neo-liberals confront is no longer that

of introducing an unregulated space in order to make way for laisser-faire, but

is to work at producing the conditions for competition, without which the

market is only an empty word. Now in order to produce competition the Statemust not confine itself to laisser-faire; it must produce an adequate framework.

To illustrate what the neo-liberals mean by the notion of framework Foucault

provides an example which is not without a certain piquancy for us in 2005: the

emergence of the Common Agricultural Policy. In 1952, Eucken, one of the

most prominent neo-liberals of the Freiburg School, put forward all the reasons

why German agriculture, as well the agriculture of other European countries,

has never been fully integrated into a market economy due to customs barriers

and all kinds of protection made necessary by the unequal degree of technical

development of agriculture in each country and by an evident rural over-population. Action is therefore necessary on each of these points: it is necessary

to intervene in such a way as to facilitate migration from the countryside to the

town, to make available improved equipment along with the training needed for

people to use it, and to transform the legal regime of farms and encourage their

expansion. In other words, to make competition possible the State must act on a

level which is not directly economic, but social in the broad sense. The fact that

the Common Agricultural Policy has since become perceptibly less a means of

social transformation to encourage competition than a system of subsidies in

order to avoid this competition in no way detracts from the spirit of the initialapproach. What this amounts to saying is that the government is not to

intervene on the effects of the market through a policy of welfare but on

society itself so that it can be regulated by the market.

No doubt it is possible to create a competitive capability in this way. But for

how long can it be sustained? As the Common Agricultural Policy shows,

competition has no assured duration. Competition is even certain to disappear

according to Schumpeter, who prophesied the eventual and regrettable advent

of socialism, given that competition ineluctably calls forth a monopolistic

situation which will justify State intervention when one wants to satisfypeoples needs by avoiding the harshness resulting from all those situations in

which the absolute hegemony of a supplier deprives them of necessary goods.

We find here all the interest of the second stage of neo-liberal reasoning

according to Foucault. If, they say, we want to avoid this tendency for economic

processes to be absorbed by the State, we should act on the initial error from

which it gets its strength. This is the error which consists in giving the man or

woman of exchange, the consumer, precedence over the entrepreneur. The

homo conomicus of neo-liberalism is an entrepreneur, even an entrepreneur of

himself. The wage is the profit of someone who is the entrepreneur of a capitalwhich is him or herself, of the human capital that he or she must maintain.

The homo conomicus of the classical liberals was the man of exchange. He

was posited as a partner of someone else in an exchange. The homo conomicus-

entrepreneur, however, as entrepreneur of himself, has only competitors. Even

consumption becomes an activity of enterprise by which consumers undertake



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to produce their satisfaction. This means that the opposition between an active

production and a passive consumption no longer has any meaning. One is living

in the wrong century when one denounces consumer society or the society of

the spectacle; one is mistaking neo-liberal man for the man of exchange andconsumption, whereas he is first and foremost an entrepreneur. It is the

problem of redistribution and reduction of the gap between incomes which

makes man a consumer. The policy of society, on the other hand, as defined

with respect to the necessity of competition, makes man an entrepreneur,

someone who situates himself in a game and applies himself to increasing his

successful outcomes within a system in which inequalities are necessary and

which are more effective and stimulating the greater their disparities.

However, the neo-liberals say that a limit must be introduced into this game of

inequalities. This limit is that of exclusion. Everything must be done to avoidsome players being definitively excluded from the game; otherwise it loses its

sense and credibility. One should therefore see to it that those who find

themselves on the borders of the game can return to it. Keeping everyone in the

game increases its dynamism and this is therefore a dimension of the policy of

society. Much more than a charitable concern, the struggle against exclusion

was first of all, on the theoretical level, an economic concern highlighted by the

neo-liberals.10

But according to the neo-liberals it is above all important that one

stays in the game so as to remain a homo conomicus, an entrepreneur, that is to

say, someone who is eminently governable, unlike his liberal predecessor, theman of exchange, who had to be left to fit in naturally. He is governable because

he governs himself. He governs himself according to economic laws and one can

act on the environment in such a way as to modify his conduct. In his regard one

can establish a conduct of conduct because he enjoys the autonomy of an

entrepreneur of his life and as such one can make him responsible for it.

It was important to reconstruct this analysis of neo-liberalism in order to see

that the third way is not entirely what it is said to be but really a way of

getting through the Caudine Forks of the old Left and the new liberalism. Its

value can be assessed at the triple level of the relationship to the role of theState, then of the relationship between the economic and the social and, finally,

of the mode of government.

Indeed there is one dimension which closely links the third way to neo-

liberalism, it is this question of the role of the State. It clearly rejects

everything that the French Left continues to maintain is the States domain:

nationalizations, public services established as a State clergy, etc. But this does

not mean that it wants to reduce the State to a role of symbolic representation.

It behaves as a declared enthusiast for the policy of society, to use the

neo-liberal expression for designating the interventionism intended to bringthis or that activity of society into the regime of competition. There is a

recognized reason for this which is the sure advantage of this type of policy in a

world in which globalization determines a nations wealth and employment

according to the competitiveness of different sectors. Laisser-faire is no longer

appropriate in this situation, any more than is nationalization.



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Neo-liberalism wants intervention only if it serves competition. It neglects

the social and even condemns it by only accepting social policy as a struggle

against exclusion on condition, again, that it is not aiming to reduce

inequalities. Could we not accuse the third way of adopting a culpablyimitative attitude towards neo-liberalism in this domain of the social? It seems

clear that the British government, for example, concentrates its action on

poverty more than on the reduction of inequalities. Shortly after coming to

power in 1997 it created a Downing Street unit for the struggle against social

exclusion, followed by a relatively low minimum wage (now raised to the same

level as in France), but it has done nothing directly to increase wage-earners

purchasing power or to provide legal protection for their jobs. It has created

hardly any subsidized jobs and has not attempted to boost the economy

through consumption, and so through increased purchasing power, accordingto the Keynesian recipes still firmly in favour with the French Left.

This renunciation of the canonical formulas of the social is not the same,

however, as an abandonment of the social, as is sometimes said. What is at

stake rather is a change in the nature of the relationship between the economic

and the social. Within the framework of the classical Welfare State, and in line

with Keynesian theory, the relationship between the economic and the social

develops according to a schema in the form of a spiral. Creation of wealth by

the economy enables the social to be financed. In return, the latter, raising the

level of income, enables production to be maintained or to increase due to theconsequent increase in demand. The limits of this schema have become

apparent at both of its levels: that of social security contributions and that of

the use of consumption to boost the economy. The first component may be

detrimental to investment capacity if profits are curtailed in the name of the

social, and this weakening of investment sooner or later has a negative effect on

employment. In the context of a global economy, the second component may

suffer the drawback of increasing the consumption of products from other

countries. Is what we are seeing then a timorous renunciation of the social?

The issue rather is one of the replacement of the Keynesian model of the spiralby one of a reciprocal but direct action between the economic and the social

not accompanied by the virtuous dream of a progressive sequence from one to

the other: a philosophy of history gives way to a doctrine of globalization much

less certain of its long-term effects. On the spatial plane, strategy replaces the

dialectic. There will be winners and losers with whom one will be concerned

later, as far, that is, as circumstances permit. As it happens, we have a first

movement going from the social to the economic and which consists in

investing in the competitiveness of the employee in the name of the social,

through education, training and the struggle against unemployment. A secondmovement goes from the economic to the social and leads to the requirement

that investment in the latter must be profitable. This may be translated, for

example, into a particular emphasis being put on prevention rather than

compensation in the areas of health, employment and retirement. As a

minimum, this criterion of profitability takes the form of the requirement of



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transparency in the conduct and results of a social policy, which, to say the

least, is not made easy by reasoning purely in terms of acquired rights. Lets

say, the transition from the Welfare State to the Social Investment State.

With regard to the third point concerning governmentality, it is easy to seehow intensely neo-liberal precepts may irritate the traditional Left. Does not

talking in this way about autonomy and responsibility amount to giving

individualism more than its due or, in other words, giving more than their due

to individuals on higher incomes, leaving the poor with the responsibility for

having to put up with their condition? Certainly the supporters of the third

way sing the praises of individual autonomy and responsibility as eloquently

as the neo-liberals. They see it as a way of reducing the growth of benefits

which can only increase to an absurd extent if we remain with the current logic

of automatic compensation for all the adversities, real or otherwise, aboutwhich we may choose to complain. But they see it as only one way among

others. And one of these ways characterizes this political tendency more

directly to the extent that it is as much an alternative to individualism as it is to

the old Left: this emphasizes the collective dimension, at local and national

levels, of the prevention of individual disabilities and the improvement of

individual capacities. At the local level this can be seen in the considerable

scope given to the notion of community action in Britain, involving people in a

risk prevention approach in the areas of health, security and educational and

professional failure. At the national level it can be seen in the concern withrevitalizing political society by involving the agents of initiatives in addressing

the needs that the policy of society identifies. This where the notion of equity

comes into play. To make a nation competitive presupposes, in compensation,

an equitable distribution of resources, the reduction of that which excludes,

certainly, in the neo-liberal sense, but also and especially of iniquities

prejudicial to a vigorous dynamic of competition rather than the scarcely

amended injustice of the neo-liberals obsessed with the sole and pure essence

of the market. But just as neo-liberals are devoted to conducting a policy of

society understood as the set of conditions organizing competition, so theThird Way aims to reconstruct a political society by stressing the role of civil

society in producing social cohesion resting on a national policy of improving

the equal opportunities of all regardless of gender, ethnicity or location. In this

sense, equality of opportunity takes precedence over the reduction of social

inequalities rather than the latter being an aim which takes only income into

account and not real participation in the dynamic of society.

Notes

1 Michel Foucault considered this question of government over two years of hislectures at the College de France, 19778 and 19789. He then devoted himself to thehistory of subjectivation, with The Care of the Self and The Use of Pleasure (1986a,1986b) which appeared in France in 1984, the year of his death.



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2 The field of governmentality studies was first launched in Great Britain and theUSA with the publication of Burchell, Gordon and Miller (1991). It was taken up byMitchell Dean (1999). In Germany the development of studies of governmentality wasinstigated by Thomas Lemke (2000).

3 There were some colloquia in France on the subject on the twentieth anniversary ofFoucaults death, one at the Maison des Sciences de lHomme and the other at theInstitut dEtudes Politiques de Paris. The latter resulted in a publication (Meyet,Neves, & Ribemont, 2005).4 It recalls the analysis of The Policing of Families (Donzelot, 1979) published theprevious year, in 1977, the fourth chapter of which is entitled, precisely From thegovernment of families to government through the family [this does not appear as achapter heading in the English translation, but see p. 92: GB].5 The expression put on the agenda, so dear to the political class, appeared withEnglish utilitarianism, Foucault explains, when Bentham distinguished between what isto be done (from a liberal point of view), that is to say, the agenda, and what is not to bedone, that is to say, the non-agenda.6 With this odd expression, equal inequality, Foucault designates the neo-liberalsidea that we are all exposed to a situation of relative inequality and that this differentialdoes not condemn the market but makes it work . . . on condition that no-one islastingly excluded from the game. [I have been unable to find any use by Foucault of theexpression equal inequality as such, but he attributes to Ropke the statement ofinequality being the same for all (2004b, p. 148) (although Senellart notes that he hasnot been able to trace this statement in Ropke either). [The index refers to the equalityof inequality, but again this expression does not appear in the text: GB.]7 The Foucauldian diaspora includes partisans of the Right and Left, including the

extreme Left. Do we need to note that the most notorious of the latter, Antonio Negri,appealed for a vote in favour of the proposed European Constitution out of hatred forthe national level, which is seen as a brake on awareness of the reality of the empire,and he has called for the engagement of battles at this supreme level. In this,furthermore, he could give comfort only to the certainties of the partisans of thesovereign nation and of the European social model a la francaise.8 This analysis is found in the lecture of 17 January 1979 (Foucault, 2004b, pp. 39ff.).9 For an analysis of the art of neither too much nor too little in Frenchgovernmentality, see Donzelot (1994 [1984]). We note, moreover, that this concernfor a measure of neither too much nor too little in politics, recently promoted by TonyBlair and the third way between the old Left and Thatcherite neo-liberalism, also gets

support from a famous sociologist, Anthony Giddens.10 We need only think of Vaincre la pauvrete dans les pays riche (1974) by LionelStoleru, enthusiast of American neo-liberal policy, to acknowledge this precedence inthe debates regarding exclusion that began at the end of the 1980s.

References

Burchell, G., Gordon, C., & Miller, P.

(1991) The Foucault effect: Studies in

governmentality. London: HarvesterWheatsheaf.Dean, M. (1999) Governmentality: Power

and rule in modern society. London: Sage.Donzelot, J. (1979) The policing of

families (R. Hurley, Trans.). London:

Hutchinson.

Donzelot, J. (1994 [1984]) LInvention du

social: Essai sur le de clin des passions

politiques. Paris: Le Seuil.Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and

punish: Birth of the prison (A. Sheridan,

Trans.). London: Allen Lane.Foucault, M. (1979) The history of

sexuality, Vol. 1, An introduction



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(R. Hurley, Trans.) Harmondsworth:Penguin.Foucault, M. (1986a) The care of the self (R. Hurley, Trans.). Harmondsworth:

Viking.Foucault, M. (1986b) The use of pleasure(R. Hurley, Trans.) Harmondsworth:Viking.Foucault, M. (2004a) Se curite , territoire,population: Cours au Colle ge de France(19771978) (M. Senellart, Ed.). Paris:Gallimard/Le Seuil.Foucault, M. (2004b) Naisssance de labiopolitique: Cours au Colle ge de France(19781979) (M. Senellart, Ed.). Paris:Gallimard/Le Seuil.Foucault, M. (2007) Security, territory,population: Lectures at the Colle ge de

France 19771978 (M. Senellart, Ed.;G. Burchell, Trans.). London: PalgraveMacmillan.Foucault, M. (forthcoming, 2008) The

birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Colle gede France 19781979 (M. Senellart, Ed.;G. Burchell, Trans.). London: PalgraveMacmillan.Lemke, T. (2000) Gouvernementalitat:Neoliberalismus und Selbsttechnologien,in U. Brockling, S. Krasmann, &T. Lemke (Eds), Gouvernementalitat derGegenwart. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.Meyet, S., Neves, M.-C., &Ribemont, T. (2005) Travailler avecFoucault. Paris: LHarmattan.Stoleru, L. (1974) Vaincre la pauvretedans les pays riches. Paris: Flammarion.


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