Foucault and Neoliberalism as "Left Governmentality"
Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora outline Michel Foucault's growing interest in neoliberalism as a "left governmentality" that could act as an alternative to Marxism.
An excerpt from The Last Man Takes LSD by Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora, one of our May book club picks. Get your copy by joining the book club for 50% off!
Neoliberalism beyond Right and Left
In this context of hostility towards the post-war Left, Foucault and many others set out in search of what could be called a âleft governmentalityâ. As he consistently stated, in his view the French Left did not have a âproblematic of governmentâ but only âa problematic of the Stateâ. This idea was explicit in his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics given at the CollĂšge de France, where he famously argued that there was no âautonomous socialist governmentalityâ and that, therefore, âin actual fact, and history has shown this, socialism may only be implemented, connected up to diverse types of governmentalityâ. A socialist governmentality was thus, for Foucault, still to be âinventedâ.
Neoliberalism with a Franco-German prism
From this perspective, it is interesting to note how much Foucaultâs lectures on biopolitics were marked by what Audier called the French âcrisis of socialismâ. If we are used to reading these lectures as being about neoliberalism in general, they are nonetheless also strongly related to the French politics of the time. Foucaultâs focus is partially on ValĂ©ry Giscard dâEstaing and Raymond Barreâs neoliberal policies and on Germany â especially Helmut Schmidtâs SPD (Social Democratic Party). This choice may seem a strange one for anyone interested in the rise of neoliberal governmentality in the late 1970s. Why, for instance, is there no reference to Pinochetâs coup against Allende in Chile and the neoliberal experiment that followed? Or to Ronald Reaganâs hyper-conservative governorship of California between 1967 and 1975? Why was Foucault only interested in a very abstract reading of neoliberalism, with no regard for its potentially very conservative effects, already manifest in Barry Goldwaterâs extremely conservative 1964 US presidential campaign, conducted under Milton Friedmanâs economic counsel, and in Reaganâs presidential bid in 1976? He does not even mention Friedrich Hayekâs aristocratic conception of democracy, or the often reactionary opinions of Austrian neoliberals.
One of the reasons for this standpoint is elucidated by Audier, who highlights Foucaultâs interest in the very good relations â âuniqueâ as Giscard said himself â between Giscardâs neoliberal government and the Social Democratic government of Schmidt, and what this meant for the future of socialism. As Audier suggests, âif Foucault assumes a very German-centred point of view, itâs because he is questioning the destiny of France and of French socialism in 1979: if the âneoliberalâ policy of Barre and Giscard seems to partially imitate the social democratic policy of Schmidt, what does socialism mean today?â This interrogation would divide at the same time both the Left and the Right. As the French economist Christian StoffaĂ«s wrote at the time, âthe debate on the German model is the moment of original divisions within the political class: Gaullists and Communists communicate in their grumbling; liberal Giscardians, Rocardian socialists and cĂ©dĂ©tistes [members of the CFDT union] communicate in a barely veiled admirationâ. This division would be even stronger in light of the marked lack of enthusiasm among German and UK social democrats for the Common Programme. Giscard would even explain that the day after the 1978 election, the first to rejoice openly at his victory were the social democratic leaders Helmut Schmidt and James Callaghan. From this perspective, Foucaultâs lectures on biopolitics are deeply concerned with the crisis facing the Union of the Left at that moment, and with the rise of the neoliberal Right behind Giscard, which in many ways broke with the old Gaullist power. As Foucault himself explained in his lectures, we âpass from a, broadly speaking, Keynesian type of system, which had more or less lingered on in Gaullist policy, to a new art of government, which would be taken up by Giscardâ. The French context manifests, then, a neoliberalism surging from different sides and with different actors, transcending the old LeftâRight opposition to reshape the whole political framework.
In this context, Foucault â along with some of his contemporaries â saw neoliberalism as an interesting framework within which to rethink the Left as a âgovernmentalityâ rather than a âsimple economic logicâ. As Lagasnerie argues, Foucault did not see it as âsomething that would function as a political alternative to which a well-defined programme or plan could be attachedâ. The important point here is that Foucault did not really study neoliberalism as a problem of the âLeftâ or the âRightâ. Instead, he was interested in it as a form of governmentality, or what we could call its political ontology, the framework within which it conceived politics and society. As he put it in his lectures:
Liberalism in America is a whole way of being and thinking. It is a type of relation between the governors and the governed much more than a technique of governors with regard to the governed . . . I think this is why American liberalism currently appears not just, or not so much as a political alternative, but letâs say as a sort of many-sided, ambiguous, global claim with a foothold in both the right and the left. It is also a sort of utopian focus which is always being revived. It is also a method of thought, a grid of economic and sociological analysis.
The emergent neoliberal governmentality would thus be essential for the philosopherâs attempt to find an alternative to âsocial-statismâ and to open a space for the proliferation of minority practices.
This political context sheds new light on Foucaultâs reading of neoliberalism. Indeed, since the publication of his lectures in 2004, the majority of authoritative commentators have generally projected onto them their own interpretations of neoliberalism. The enormous contrast between the reception of the published courses and that of the course given at the CollĂšge de France is particularly well illustrated by the first account of it, published in September 1979, in the journal Autrement, the emblematic publication of the Second Left. In this piece, written by the journalist Jules Chancel and the management theorist Pierre-Eric Tixier, Foucaultâs lessons are not at all depicted as a denunciation of neoliberalism. Their article, entitled âThe Desire of Entrepreneurshipâ, argued that with the explosion of alternative economic models in the aftermath of May â68 (such as autonomous and local experimentations within the ecological movement, anti-institutional struggles or self-management alternatives), âthe notion of enterpriseâ was âat the centre of this cocktail of ideologiesâ. In that context, the authors remarked, Giscardâs government and his neoliberal reforms were surprisingly âfavourableâ to the proliferation of small, autonomous âentrepreneurialâ experiments. Using Foucaultâs lectures on neoliberalism, Chancel and Tixier argued that these ânew entrepreneursâ of the Left could, within the neoliberal framework, âuse the convergences, objective but partial, which exist between their experiences and the governmental perspectives, without falling into the trap, so convenient, of âco-optationâ â. In their view, what Foucault helped us to understand was that a subversive use of neoliberalism was possible, that in its âenterprise-orientedâ framework the Left could open spaces for its own anti-âsocial-statistâ politics, to create a âthird sectorâ of âcreative entrepreneursâ in between the state and the more traditional firms. As Audier observed, âthis first and almost immediate mobilization of Foucaultâs lectures on neoliberalism . . . is undoubtedly a valuable document because it reveals elements of context that are no longer those of readers of the twenty-first century or even of the nineties, and are generally ignored by them, as if Foucault had written only for them and in their own contextâ.
The Autrement journal intended then to ârehabilitateâ the concept of âenterpriseâ within the Left by titling its special issue âWhat If Everyone Created His Own Job?â It included articles by Jacques Delors, future president of the European Commission, criticizing the âinvasion of the person by institutionsâ, and by Michel Rocard â Foucaultâs favourite socialist â arguing that the âfreedomâ to be an entrepreneur should be an integral part of the struggle against totalitarianism. Interestingly, this key publication of the French Second Left also included an interview with Bernard Stasi, a former right-wing minister in Giscardâs government. Stasi illustrated perfectly what Foucault had sensed about neoliberalism:
the state, whatever its political connotation, necessarily tends to tighten its control, its tutelage, on society. It is necessary, by building all kinds of safeguards, to ensure that society is not crushed by the State, that there is a certain autonomy, spaces of freedom for individuals and natural communities. It is only through the diversification of funding sources that it will be possible to avoid the increase in state control.
Finally, in the same issue, it is worth noting the paper by the sociologists Bernard Rochette and Elie ThĂ©ofilakis, who argued openly that âthe remedy is simple if a little retro: reinventing the marketâ.66 In their view, in the aftermath of â68 and the energy it released, it was obvious that âthe market is no longer only the static equilibrium between a supply and a demand for goods, but the global dynamic process of integration and articulation of all the effervescent elements of a new social orderâ. Indeed, while the old welfare state affected negatively both economic growth and social justice, the market, if carefully reorganized, could have a âtherapeutic valueâ in regulating social exchanges. Behind this shift, what was now emerging, on both the Right and the Left, was âthe figure, for a time overshadowed by the planning technocrat, of the entrepreneurâ. In this new context, the neoliberal economist, the âmanagerâ and the âleftist entrepreneurâ could all rejoice together within the spaces freed from statist normativity.
In many ways, this Second Left felt that it sometimes shared more with the Giscardian and neoliberal Right than with the âsocial-statismâ of its own party. A new field of experimentation was thus opened by this ânew capitalismâ, creating the conditions for new coalitions between past enemies. If this context is important, it is precisely because it gives us a sense of what kind of neoliberalism Foucault was talking about in his lectures, and of the conversation of which they were a part.
