The battle between political rationalities

Elaborated in 1978 in a series of public lectures, Foucault’s early account of Atlanto-European neoliberalism would not seem to be the obvious place to look for these next steps. The Birth of Biopolitics is necessarily out of touch with current

Critique in a neoliberal age 9 complexities and new developments and Foucault’s ambivalent reception of neoliberalism and his hostility to the social democratic project appear to disqualify it for refining the tasks of ideology critique in a neoliberal age. It turns out, though, that the untimeliness of Foucault’s early diagnosis is well placed to clarify neoliberalism as a project, unmasking the strategies it has used to entrench its political rationalities against main rivals. Foucault offers a still relevant account of neoliberalism’s self-defining bid to block and replace a social democratic rejoinder to classical liberalism in the post-war world. Foucault had a sneaking admiration for neoliberalism and we can work with this also. He approved of its repudiation of humanist anthropologies that underpinned liberalism and were, he supposed, taken over in a social democratic response to it. Foucault’s early diagnosis takes us to where the bodies are buried as we search for the normative grounds for ideology critique in a neoliberal age.

Focusing on the rise of Ordo-liberalism in post-war Germany, Foucault is intrigued by this early neoliberal challenge to classical liberalism. More than a set of policy initiatives, neoliberal political rationality changed the liberal relationship between state and the economy. The extent of this revision is not to be underestimated. Political liberalism had already embraced an idea of state power that, rather than standing guard over a pre-political domain of natural rights, is limited by demands rising from market imperatives. Market relations no longer seek external justifications but are locked in by the naturalization of their necessary motivations and required behaviours. This homo economicus is a ‘naturally’ self-interested, pragmatic, self-contained soul who is bent upon maximizing his/ her capacity to provide for his/her own needs. The market is a reserved space of unimpeded freedom and demands only to be left alone. Government should be economical, expending only the power that is required for affective administration of society and protection of private property. By contrast, neoliberalism promises to ‘economize’ the state. No longer a limit on the state, the economy is the new essential model for, as well as the object of, goveriunent itself.

How does this revolutionary new idea take place? Foucault finds its origins in Freiburg in the late 1940s, a little university town that was just beginning to grapple with the history of Nazism. It might be supposed that the aftermath of Nazism would have seen an enthusiasm for revitalizing the classical liberal tradition that had presented itself as a natural enemy to Nazism. However, the Ordo-liberals around Walter Eucken find some agreement with Nazism’s critique of a liberal market that ripped people out of organic communities and ‘reduced individuals to the state of atomistic subject to an abstract authority in which they do not recognize themselves’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 139). The Ordo-liberals are persuaded that in Nazism’s promise to rid society of the deficits of private property, standardizing consumption and mass spectacle, there is a deep hypocrisy. Instead, these mass phenomena of standardization and spectacle should be sheeted back to the state. Henceforth, the eighteenth-century call for limits on state intervention on the market economy is to be replaced by the demand that the free market offer itself as the organizing and regulating principle of the state (Foucault, 2008, p. 140).

Classical liberalism had been swept along in the romance of a ‘naive naturalism’: the market was a given of nature, the spontaneous organization of self-interested appetites, instincts and behaviours. Yet the seismic convulsions of the markets of the 1930s that had precipitated policies of protectionism and planning had blasted apart the old confidence in laissez-faire. Just as redistributive social democratic welfare programs offered to respond to this crisis of confidence, so too neoliberalism’s proposal to replace liberalism with an economic constructivism calls upon state power to exert ‘permanent vigilance, activity and intervention’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 143) in the market. Intervening in the market to manage uncertainty and to offer the more efficient allocation of resources, the Keynesian state undertook to cushion workers against a system that was designed to extract surplus value from labour. In the neoliberal state, economic growth, global competitiveness and maintenance of a strong credit rating increasingly vouches for the success of government policy.

Keynesian reforms offered a regime of mutual checks, regulations and corrections: the market would provide the individual with a domain of freedom against the state and the state would watch over the market for the well-being of citizens (Skidelsky, 2009, pp. 161-2). Abandoning this fraught ambition to balance rival claims, the neoliberal state is modelled after the economy and also intervenes in it, though not for the demos, not for a public interest. How is this double profile of the market as model for the state and the object of its inteiventions supposed to work? This brings us to the second major way in which neoliberalism breaks with classical liberal thought. Foucault is convinced that there is no debilitating paradox in the neoliberal state, once the difference between market logics and market behaviours is taken into account. It is the logic of the market, its set of internal norms and its organic principles of rationality, its ‘invisible hand’, which provides the model for the state. Reference to market behaviour suggests a mode of conduct, a modus operan di, that is required of the self, and this behavioural ‘logic’ of individuals in the market place requires ‘permanent vigilance’. While welfare state interventions into the market are rationalized against the separate requirements of redistributive justice, neoliberal intervention has no limit, its object, human behaviour radically expands the scope of governmentality. ‘Government does not correct the destructive effects of the market on society, it has to intervene in society itself, in its fabric and depth’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 143).

The neoliberal marketization of society does not always just involve monetization, an even more radical principle of reconstruction is at stake. Intending to remodel behaviour as such, neoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities, even where money is not an issue, configuring human beings exhaustively as market actors. To find neoliberals expressly describing the effort to transform the behaviour of subjects, Foucault is persuaded that we must switch our attention from the German Ordo-liberals to the American anarcho-liberal variant of neoliberalism. As we have seen, in Germany, Ordo-liberalism emerged from the mid-1930s in response to Nazism. To economize society it was crucial that everyone had access to private property and this meant assistance to the unemployed, interventions in housing policy and so on.

In certain respects, this intervention did resemble social welfare policies and ambitions of the economists in the Keynesian camp. By contrast, the Chicago School of Economics reacted against and wholly repudiated New Deal Keynesianism. Shaped by the liberal individualism of a pioneering past, this American brand of neoliberal economics embraced the unlimited extension of the market into every endeavour and sphere of action.

The classical liberal homo economicus, a naturally self-interested agent dedicated to a life of calculating equivalences and deal making, was to be replaced by a neoliberal version. For the neoliberal homo economicus, there is nothing natural about market conduct. Self-interested, self-promoting behaviours must be actively shaped and continuously cultivated. The neoliberal self is not rooted in the naturalization of a strategizing, calculating psychology nor is its conduct rationalized by a market logic that is governed by the principle of exchange. Competition drives the market and its conditions and motivational resources must be actively produced. Crucially, for Foucault, while the classical liberal self was retardant of power, radically self-contained, desirous only of being left alone, the neoliberal individual is ‘eminently governable’. He/she is actively produced through a network of social policies and institutions all pitched to fit out the entrepreneurial, competitive, resourceful self for the economic game of winners and losers.

Destined to shift for him/herself, the liberal homo economicus had been pushed to the limit by economic crises and world war and needed putting back on his/her feet. For the social democrat, this had partly meant that supporting material conditions needed to be put in place. By the mid-1980s, Habermas was reflecting on the contradictions between the libertarian goals and the bureaucratic methods that had deeply strained this undertaking (1989). Already in the late 1970s, Foucault had been alert to the authoritarian, normalizing implications of the state offer to support the failing liberal self. By contrast, neoliberal interventions were restricted to manipulations of the environmental contexts and this promised to release the individual both from essentializing liberal discourses and from the straitjackets of a welfare state concerned about their well-being.

Michael Behrent is persuaded that it was his abiding hostility to humanism that made neoliberalism attractive to Foucault (2016, p. 27). A humanist tradition that had affirmed ‘man as the measure’ had fallen victim to Foucault’s diagnosis of the repressive philosophical underpinnings of disciplinary power. As he saw it, this was a normalization that would install a particular image of ‘man’ as its standard and so Foucault came to register an apparent libertarian gain for a pluralistic ideal of autonomy in neoliberalism’s post-liberal image of homo economicus. The neoliberal project had sought to justify its marketization of society as an increase of freedoms, and this ‘liberalism without humanism’ did not mean the mere expansion of the entitlements of a rights bearing subject. Instead, it meant the interventions to expand modes of conduct that embraced risk, affirmed initiative and abandoned all repressive measures of difference.

Foucault approves of the utilitarian direction that the justification of policies and programs had taken in neoliberalism’s radical reworking of liberalism.

The state was to supply the legal framework that permits market competition to approximate its ideal form. Its interventions into the fabric of social life did not appeal to the primacy of any anthropological measures, only to a necessary scoping of the environmental conditions that would reward entrepreneurial behaviours. In this regard, Foucault was attracted to the ‘negative tax' policies that were initiated by the Chicago economist Friedman. With the negative tax the government breaks with the distinction between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ poor and severs the tendency of the welfare state to link payments to behaviours. Targeting ‘illness, accidents and usefulness for work’, what matters is solely that the recipients are guaranteed an income that allows them to be players in the economic game (Foucault, 2008, pp. 202-5). The rules of the game would be acted upon, not the players. This would be an intervention into contexts that does not internally subjugate individuals.

The tasks of the ideology critique in the neoliberal age now come more clearly into focus. We saw that in order to do the work that Horkheimer sets for it, critique must ensure that it is not simply buying into already set standards of measure, convicting ideological world views of lapses and contradictions as it undertakes to do better. However, while ideology critique is required to reflect upon and review the normative grounds that underpin such judgements, it cannot make do with simply affirming the difference of its own competing value ideals. Ideology critique is an ‘accusation’ that discloses the interests and disarms the strategies that ideological settings deploy as they contrive to shut down the grounds of review. How is this reinstated rationality to establish its worth, its credentials to be the measure? Following up Foucault’s reflections on the rise of neoliberal political rationality has permitted us to shift this question out of the realm of rejected philosophies of history, leaving behind also any appeals to anthropological truths. This diagnosis allowed us to track how neoliberalism had suppressed a rival social democratic normativity along with its repudiation of classical liberalism. Zoning further into the normative territory that might be retrieved as the ground of ideology critique in the neoliberal age, we draw upon aspects of what we also learnt in our discussion of Streeck about the effort that would be required to rethink what the social democratic project is doing.