Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Six

I have provided a summary of notes on the sixth lecture given by Michel Foucault at the College de France 1978-79, published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics. The lecture was originally given on 14 February, 1979.

• Foucault wants to emphasise the singularity of neo-liberalism, and not to say that it is a return to old economic theories (Adam Smith), it is another term for market society (Marxism) or that it is the generalization of a form of state power. For Foucault, it differs from liberalism in that liberalism was concerned with how to ‘contrive a free space of the market within an already given political society’, whereas neo-liberalism is concerned with ‘how the overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of a market economy’ (p. 131).

• Competition is both rigorous in its internal structure but historically fragile, and therefore needs the active support of government – it is not a state of nature (laissez-faire)

• 1939 Walter Lippmann Colloquium in Paris – emphasises the need for an active policy to maintain a market economy – classical liberalism is seen as naïve in this respect, as ‘the problem is not whether there are things that you cannot touch and things that you are entitled to touch … [but] the problem is the way of doing things, the problem, if you like, of governmental style’ (p. 133).

• The problem of monopolies provides a recurring question for neo-liberalism, as it suggests that competition may contain its own negation – the question becomes one of showing how other factors – most notably law – can maintain monopoly, raising the question of the need to understand specific political-institutional frameworks in the development of capitalism. They shift the question away from intervention to prevent monopoly, or even to support it, to one where ‘non-intervention is necessary on condition, of course, that an institutional framework is established to prevent either individuals or public authorities intervening to create a monopoly’ (p. 137)

• Eucken (1952) – liberal government must intervene through regulatory actions and through organising actions. Regulatory actions are those policies which set the rules of the game. Neo-liberalism recommends a focus on price stability, and not policies such as full employment. Organising actions are those which set up the framework for commercial activities e.g. European agricultural policy.

• Social policy marks a major point of difference between Keynesian economics and what in France was known as the economics of the Popular Front, and neo-liberalism. Keynesianism recommends a redistributive social policy that modifies the effects of the market and economic competition, through social provision of essential goods and services (welfare state), redistributive taxation, and greater social spending as a reward for economic growth. The ordoliberals argue that social policy and economic policy cannot be founded on contradictory principles, as a social policy premised upon equalizing outcomes will undercut the economic mechanisms of the market. They favour private provision over social provision, social policy based upon individuals rather than collective groups, and a policy which maintains and encourages risk-taking rather than one which compensates for economic risk.

• German social policy under the social market economy could not be based upon such principles due to popular resistance, and it marks an important point of differentiation between German ordoliberalism and the American neo-liberalism of the Chicago School. Its core principle, however, is that social policy should not be a counterpoint to economic policy, and the German ordoliberals want a ‘policy of society’ rather than a ‘government of society’

• The new art of government is one that seeks to generalize the enterprise form throughout society. A range of social conditions are identified as correlates for this including: promoting access to private property; encouraging medium-sized towns and private home ownership; decentralizing economic activity; developing policies favourable to small business; and planning urban environments in order to minimize environmental degradation. This is what Rüstow referred to as a Vitalpolitik, or a ‘politics of life’, that ‘is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society’ (p. 148).

• One consequence of the enterprise society is that it has the potential to multiply sources of dispute, and hence it typically requires considerable legal arbitration and judicial activism.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Five

I have provided a summary of notes on the fifth lecture given by Michel Foucault at the College de France 1978-79, published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics. This lecture was given on 7 February, 1979.

• While classical liberalism and political economy raised the question of how to reconcile the expansion of the market and the objectives of raison d’Etat by proposing the paradox of ‘more state by less government’, the challenge facing German neo-liberals was how to legitimize a state in advance that both guarantees economic freedom and is guaranteed by it?

• The Freiberg School of German political economists (Watter Eucken, Franz Böhm, Müller-Armack, Wilhelm Röpke, Röstow) developed an influential reading of German history that saw a consistent rejection of liberalism over the C19th and early C20th as the path that led to the Nazi state

• By the early C20th, according to Foucault, the Marxist problematic of the contradictory logic of capital had been largely displaced in intellectual circles by the problematic of Max Weber around the ‘irrational rationality of capitalist society’. The Weberian problematic saw no internal limits to the logic of capital accumulation, but pointed to its paradoxical social consequences. While the Frankfurt School sought a new social rationality that could displace economic irrationality, the Freiberg School sought to redefine the economic rationality of capitalism in ways that could nullify its social irrationalities.

• The Freiberg School’s historical reading argued that obstacles to liberalism had appeared successively in German history:

1. List’s principle in 1840 that national economy needed to take priority over liberal economy, and that Germany needs protectionism – liberalism seen as the policy of a maritime nation (Britain)
2. Bismarckian state socialism in late C19th that preserved national unity against the socialist challenge through a welfare policy that reintegrated the working classes
3. Preservation of the machinery of a planned economy after WWI, and support for economic planning by both socialist and non-socialist governments
4. Early adoption of Keynesian-style interventions from 1930 onwards
5. Nazism coalesced all of these already existing elements of German economic policy around the ‘total system’ of the war economy. Rather than being an aberration, Nazism – like Soviet planning – could be seen as the coalescence of a diverse range of non-liberal forms of governmental economic action.

• Nazism was seen by the Freiberg School as also drawing upon critiques of mass society under capitalism associated with Werner Sombart and others (society of the spectacle, loss of communitarian ties, individuals as isolated atoms), but only through intensifying mass society and spectacles – they reject the argument (associated with the Frankfurt School) that the liberal model of capitalism produces these ideas, but rather see them as a consequence of ‘a policy of protectionism and planning in which the market does not perform its function and in which the state or para-state administration takes responsibility for the everyday life of individuals. These mass phenomena of standardization and the spectacle are linked to statism, to anti-liberalism, and not to a market economy’ (p. 114). – contrast to Herbert Marcuse (p. 117)

• The Freiberg School attributes those irrationalities that others link to the market and to capitalism to the state and the absence of a fully-functioning market: ‘Nothing proves that the market economy is intrinsically defective since everything attributed to it as a defect and as the effect of its defectiveness should really be attributed to the state. So, let’s do the opposite and demand even more from the market economy than was demanded from it in the eighteenth century’ (p. 116).

• ‘The ordoliberals say we should completely turn the formula around and adopt the free market as organizing and regulating principle of the state, from the start of its existence up to the last form of its interventions. In other words: a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state’ (p. 116).

• Ordoliberalism is not a continuation or a reversion to classical liberalism, liassez-faire or Adam Smith. It fundamentally revises liberal political economy in three ways:

1. The focus is shifted from the market as a system of exchange generating prices but as a mechanism which ensures competition. If it is only competition that can guarantee economic rationality, then the state must play a role in ensuring that competition occurs, which raises the issue of monopoly as well as how the ‘rules of the game’ are structured by government – the competitive market is not a ‘natural order’, but must be continually guaranteed through the actions of government;
2. There can never be ‘pure competition’, but only a striving towards producing more competition - ‘Competition is therefore an historical objective of governmental art and not a natural given that must be respected’ (p. 120)
3. The relationship between the market/competition and the state/government cannot be a ‘reciprocal delimitation of different domains’ – ‘the essence of the market can only appear if it is produced, and it is produced by an active governmentality’ (p. 121).

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Four

I have provided a summary of notes on the fourth lecture given by Michel Foucault at the College de France 1978-79, published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics. This lecture was given on 31 January, 1979.

• State-phobia is a recurring theme across the political and ideological spectrum. Foucault rejects a theory of the state as being like an ‘indigestible meal’ (p. 77), instead focusing upon how activites are brought under governmental rationality or etatisation. ‘The state is not a universal nor in itself an autonomous source of power … The state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities’ (p. 77).

• German neo-liberalism rises to prominence in aftermath of WWII. Focus of post-WWII European economic policies was reconstruction, planning, and social objectives, all of which pointed towards greater governmental intervention in the key economic processes along Keynesian lines. Focus of German economic administration in 1948 was upon the removal of price controls and restoring market mechanisms at the earliest opportunity.

• Ludwig Erhard (1948): ‘Only a state that establishes both the freedom and responsibility of the citizens can legitimately speak in the name of the people’ (quoted on p. 81).

• Erhard’s statement not only refers to the obvious need to renounce the recent Nazi past, but also reflects the question on the conditions on which a new German state can be founded if there is not historical or juridical legitimacy. The proposal is that economic freedom can in itself constitute the basis for political sovereignty. Germany as a performative state where ‘the economy, economic development and economic growth, produces sovereignty; it produces political sovereignty through the institution and institutional game that, precisely, makes this economy work’ (p. 84). ‘All these economic partners produce a consensus, which is a political consensus, inasmuch as they accept this economic game of freedom’ (p. 84).

• The German neo-liberal policy was at odds with British neo-Keynesianism of the time, and had its critics on the left and among the unions in Germany at this time. It also appeared to be at odds with Christian doctrine of a social economy. It was therefore proposed that the German liberal order could be a ‘middle way’ between capitalism and socialism, with each of the other categories ambigiuously defined.

• German social democracy (SPD) turns from its Marxist inspired socialism towards an acceptance of the market economy and private property at the Bad Godesberg Congress of 1959, as long as it is compatible with ‘an equitable social order’ and does not produce monopolies. Foucault does not approach this as an SPD sell-out of its Marxist/socialist principles, but rather as an indicator of the extent to which the neo-liberal program had constituted the revised basis of the German state itself.

• ‘What socialism lacks is not so much a theory of the state as a governmental reason, the definition of what a governmental rationality would be in socialism. That is to say, a reasonable and calculable measure of the extent, modes, and objectives of governmental action’ (pp. 91-92).

• ‘In actual fact, and history has shown this, socialism can only be implemented connected up to diverse types of governmentality. There is no governmental rationality of socialism. It has been connected up to liberal governmentality, and then socialism and its forms of rationality function as counter-weights, as a corrective, and a palliative to internal dangers’ (p. 92) – it can also function as the internal logic of the administrative apparatus of a police state, where there is a fusion of government and administration (Soviet/Eastern European model)

• There is a consistent questioning of what is “true” socialism – was it the Germany of Helmut Schmidt, Erich Honecker, or something else – but we never ask what is “true” liberalism, as liberalism is not concerned with conformity to texts, but rather with more pragmatic logics of governmentality.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Three

I have provided a summary of notes on the third lecture given by Michel Foucault at the College de France 1978-79, published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, which was given on 24 January, 1979.

• Raison d’Etat was premised upon a balance between the unlimited objectives of the state within its territory on the one hand, and limited external objectives on the other – Treaty of Westphalia (system of states) generally accepted – mercantilism as an economic policy was premised upon the impoverishment of other states, and could only co-exist with relatively limited trade within Europe otherwise it would create a zero-sum game

• The market generates the possibility of mutual enrichment through trade, exchange and commerce – this pointed to the possibility of ‘reciprocal enrichment through the game of competition’ (p. 54)

• The idea of a European progress is a fundamental theme in liberalism, which has as a condition the commitment to an extended market so that all can benefit – ‘we are invited to a globalization of the market when it is laid down as a principle, and an objective, that the enrichment of Europe must be brought about as a collective and unlimited enrichment’ (p. 55)

• ‘This opening of the economic game onto the world clearly implies a difference of both kind and status between Europe and the rest of the world. That is to say, there will be Europe on one side, with the Europeans as the players, and then the world on the other, which will be the stake. The game is in Europe, but the stake is the world’ (pp. 55-56) – this is ‘the start of a new type of global calculation in European governmental practice’ (p. 56) – maritime law, Kant’s idea of “perpetual peace”, international law – ‘The guarantee of perpetual peace is therefore actually commercial globalization’ (p. 58)

• This does not lead to an era of European peace at all, and the ‘historical paradox of Napoleon’ emerges, who is hostile to the idea of a police state internally, but committed to an imperial project in Europe

• ‘Freedom is never anything other … than an actual relation between governors and governed, a relation in which the measure of the “too little” existing freedom is given by the “even more” freedom demanded’ (p. 63)

• ‘If I employ the word “liberal”, it is first of all because this governmental practice in the process of establishing itself is not satisfied with respecting this or that freedom, with guaranteeing this or that freedom. More profoundly, it is a consumer of freedom. It is a consumer of freedom inasmuch as it can only function insofar as a number of freedoms actually exist: freedom of the market, freedom to buy and sell, the free exercise of property rights, freedom of discussion, possible freedom of expression, and so on. The new governmental reason needs freedom therefore, the new art of government consumes freedom. It consumes freedom, which means that it must produce it. It must produce it, it must organize it. The new art of government appears as the management of freedom.’ (p. 63)

• At the heart of this liberal practice is an always different and mobile problematic relationship between the production of freedom and that which in the production of freedom risks limiting and destroying it … The liberalism we can describe as the art of government formed in the eighteenth century, entails at its heart a productive/destructive relationship with freedom … Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats, etc.’ (p. 64)

• ‘Freedom in the regime of liberalism is not a given … Freedom is something which is constantly produced. Liberalism is not acceptance of freedom; it proposes to manufacture it constantly, to arouse it and produce it, with, of course, the system of constraints and the problems of cost raised by this production’ (p. 65) – the cost of freedom is security, and ‘the problem of security is the protection of the collective interest against individual interests. Conversely, individual interests have to be protected against everything that could be seen as an encroachment of the collective interest’ (p. 65)

• ‘The problems of what I shall call the economy of power peculiar to liberalism are internally sustained … by this interplay of freedom and security’ (p. 65)

• Consequences of this continuing need to arbitrate over the interplay of freedom and security:

1. ‘The motto of liberalism is” “Live dangerously”’ (p. 66) – individuals continuously have to deal with danger and asses their exposure to it, and how to protect against it – ‘There is no liberalism without a culture of danger’ (p. 67)
2. Development of disciplinary and supervisory techniques as a necessary correlate of liberal government derived from economic freedom
3. Controls become a way of protecting freedoms – rise of ‘crisis of governmentality’ where ‘democratic freedoms are only guaranteed by an economic interventionism that is denounced as a threat to freedom’ (p. 68)
4. Possibility of an ‘inflation of the compensatory mechanisms of freedom’ – too many protections in order to guarantee the freedom of the liberal state?

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter Two

Following from yesterday's post, I have provided a summary of notes on the second lecture given by Michel Foucault at the College de France 1978-79, published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics. This lecture was given on 17 January, 1979.

• Liberal art of government is ‘not something other than raison d’Etat, an element external to and in contradiction with [it], but rather its point of inflection in the curve of its development’ (p. 28) – idea of frugal government - the permanent question of ‘too much and too little’ government – the ‘question of liberalism’ is the frugality of government rather than constitutionalism

• The market becomes ‘the site of truth’ of liberal government (p. 30) – move from the market as a site of justice (setting of just prices), to market mechanism as generator of a natural, normal price through supply and demand

• ‘Inasmuch as prices are determined in accordance with the natural mechanisms of the market they constitute a standard of truth which enables us to discern which governmental practices are correct and which are erroneous’ (p. 32) – the market as a ‘site of verification-falsification for governmental practice’

• There is no singular cause of the rise of the market as the ‘site of truth’ of liberal government, but arises from a complex set of developments in C18th Europe

• History of truth is always coupled with the history of law – rejects the critique of European rationality associated with Frankfurt School and romanticism

• Foucault notes that in France faculties of law were long coupled with faculties of political economy – C18th economists also tended to be theorists of public law (Beccaria, Adam Smith, Bentham)

• ‘There is a shift in the centre of gravity of public law … the problem becomes how to set juridical limits to the exercise of power by a public authority’ (p. 39)

• Difference between the axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach to law (Rousseau and French Revolution – Rights of Man), and the approach that starts from governmental practice itself, and asks what would be the ‘desirable limits’ of government in terms of limits to its spheres of competence – ‘the problem of English radicalism is the problem of utility’ (p. 40)

• ‘We have therefore two absolutely heterogeneous conceptions of freedom, one based in the rights of man, and the other starting from the independence of the governed … they have different historical origins and I think they are essentially heterogeneous or disparate’ (p. 42) – the ambiguity between these is a feature of both C19th and C20th liberalism

• Centrality of concept of interests to the new art of government. ‘Government is only interested in interests … It deals with the phenomena of politics, that is to say, interests, which precisely constitute politics and its stakes; it deals with interests, or that respect in which a given individual, thing, wealth, and so on interests other individuals or the collective body of individuals’ (p. 45)

• ‘Liberalism posed the fundamental question of government, which is whether all the political, economic, and other forms which have been contrasted with liberalism can really avoid … formulating this question of the utility of a government in a regime where exchange determines the value of things’ (p. 47)

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics - Chapter One

I am convening a reading group on Michel Foucault's lectures at the College de France 1978-79, now published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, at QUT tomorrow. Information about the meeting can be found here, and the rationale for the event is as follows:

In light of considerable interest in the term “neo-liberalism”, its historical origins, and its uses and misuses – including its use by Australian Prime Minster Kevin Rudd – we have decided to get together an informal working group to discuss how the term was developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Foucault’s lectures at the College de France in 1978-79 have only now been translated and published. In these lectures he traces a history of liberalism as an “art of government”, and its relationship to political economy and to government policy.

In the lectures, Foucault focuses upon the origins of the term “neo-liberalism” among the Freiberg School of German social thinkers, and its later uses by the Chicago School of American political economists. This is traced to changing ideas about the relationship between the individual, the state, society and economy.

The first meeting will focus upon how the idea of neo-liberalism was developed in Germany and applied through the “social market economy” in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Later meetings will consider American neo-liberalism as developed by Milton Freidman, Gary Becker and others, and contrasts between the neo-liberal “art of government” and alternative approaches.

As part of the preparation for these gatherings, I am summarising the lectures on this blog. Below are my notes on the first lecture, which was presented by Foucault on 10 Janaury, 1979.

• “Art of government” – interest in this instance is in “government … insofar as it appears as the exercise of political sovereignty” (p. 2)

• Why an “art”? Not a description of how governors really governed, but rather “the level of reflection in the practice of government and on the practice of government” - “the study of the rationalization of governmental practice in the exercise of political sovereignty” (p. 2)

• Starting point is not with pre-given objects or universal categories, but rather “starting from this practice as it is given, but at re same time as it reflects on itself and it rationalized, show how certain things – state and society, sovereignty and subjects etc. – were actually able to be formed” – aim is “to start with these concrete practices and … pass these universals through the grid of these practices” (p. 3)

• Raison d’Etat (reason of state) – established the state as both the object and the instrument of governmental practice – ‘a practice … which places itself between a tstae presented as given and a state presented as having to be constructed and built’ (p. 4) – strengthening the state as the guiding principle of government – principles included mercantilist economics, ‘police’ as an unlimited system of internal management, and permanent military-diplomatic apparatus

• Juridical challenge to raison d’Etat proposes that the law must set limits to the sovereign power – contract theory, natural law, parliament/Crown balance in England – ‘the opposition always takes a legal challenge to raison d’Etat and consequently uses juridical reflection, legal rules and legal authority against it’ (p. 9)

• Political economy emerges not as an external challenge to raison d’Etat, but rather as ‘establishing a principle of limitation that will no longer be extrinsic to the art of government, as law was in the C17th, but intrinsic to it; an internal regulation of governmental rationality’ (p. 10). Six principles of this internal limitation:

1. It is a de facto limitation rather than a legal one, meaning there is no illegimitacy to exceeding this limit, but it will lead to less effective government
2. It is nonetheless a general one and ‘the problem is precisely one of defining this general and de facto limit that government will have to impose on itself
3. The principle of limitation is itself calculated through governmental reason and its objectives rather than something external to it (God, law, social contract etc.)
4. This establishes a division between what must be done by government and what it is advisable not to do, but not in terms of a domain of freedom and constraint grounded in individuals, but rather in the ‘agenda’ and the ‘non-agenda’ (Jeremy Bentham)
5. This arises in the context of transactions between subjects rather than a historically or theoretically defined ‘principle of right’
6. Critical governmental reason thus becomes internal to government – a continual practice of criticism about ‘how not to govern too much’ (p. 13)

• Political economy as it emerges between 1750 and 1810-1820 is central to this, but it does not develop in opposition to raison d’Etat, but rather within the principle of governmental reason to maximize wealth in the context of competition between states e.g. the issue is not whether or not a tax is legitimate, but rather what the optimal rate of tax may be in light of its possible effects – it is an empirical practice concerned with making mechanisms intelligible ‘success or failure, rather than legitimacy or illegitimacy, now become the criteria of governmental action’ (p. 16)

• Political economy is central to liberalism as a new regime of truth alternative to that of raison d’Etat, where ‘a government is never sufficiently aware that it always risks governing too much, or a government never knows too well how to govern just enough’ (p. 17) – ‘With this question of self-limitation by the principle of truth, I think political economy introduced a formidable wedge into the unlimited presumption of the police state’ (p. 17)

Charles Leadbeater presentation in Brisbane for EIDOS 21 Sept

I had a 5am start this Monday morning to get in the car and head 50km to Brookwater Golf Club for breakfast at 7am on a Monday morning, as you do. The reason why myself at 99 other luminaries hit the Ipswich Motorway this morning was to hear the British writer, thinker and former Blair government advisor Charles Leadbeater present on The User-Generated State: Public Services 2.0.

The presentation was brought to us by the EIDOS Institute, headed by Bruce Muirhead, and with participation from a number of universities (including QUT) and industry participants.

I had the opportunity to meet Charles Leadbeater when he was in Brisbane as part of the launch of the QUT Creative Industries Faculty in 2002, so it was great to hear him again, even at what appeared to be an unlikely venue at an unlikely time (a few golfers could be spotted at the club among the more formally dressed attendees).

The gist of Charles's presentation could be summarised as saying we are entering into a third age of thinking about public services. The first, which characterised the post-WWII welfare state, was driven by need. Services needed to be delivered to people, and questions of quality were subordinated to the importance of delivery. The second was driven by want, or people exercising power as consumers (encouraged by government policies and philosophies of the 1980s and 1990s) to demand more responsive and personalised services. In the third stage, the key word is can - can the service provider give me a voice in this, and can I take some personal responsibility over how this is provided?

What follows is that thinking in terms of service delivery is not enough. There needs to be more emphasis on three C's:

• Collaboration between service providers and citizen-consumers;
• Conversation - particularly in times of greatest need, people don't want a purely transactional model, but want someone to talk with;
• Capability - how can a service be provided in such a way that the need to provide it dminishes after a certain point, as people have got more control over their own affairs.

Leadbeater cautioned that people who claim they want to do something for you often want to do something to you. He gave the example of his Personal Funds manager, whose friendliness belies the fact that he wants some of his cash in service fees. Rather than thinking in terms of for and to, it is recommended that thinking be in terms of with. Participation is where leading edge thinking about the future of public services is, according to Leadbeater.

This also necessitates a shift of thinking away from the institution as the starting point. His example from cultural policy was that the building of cultural institutions (fixed infrastructure with high up-front costs) is often the starting point of this sector, but that there is obviously a plethora of "culture" that happens well away from these institutions (You Tube, Facebook etc.), that is lower-cost and more distributed, participatory and agile.

NB: Charles Leadbeater took up some of these themes in a recent article in The Guardian.

Update: Charles Leadbeater's talk can now be accessed from You Tube.