“In recent years, Michel Foucault has garnered a reputation as a fierce critic of the neoliberal order, especially through his analyses of micro-politics and governmentality. But the essays in this terrific collection raise important questions about Foucault's relation to neoliberalism. They show that Foucault himself was quite sympathetic to some of its core elements, and, more importantly, that his theory has in many ways diluted the intellectual resources that might enable more successful resistance to it. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in critical social theory and in contemporary political culture.”

Vivek Chibber, New York University

“Michel Foucault was a far-sighted theorist, but also a creature of his time. This superlative collection moves beyond early polemics in order to force reflection on the uses and limits of the great philosopher's now celebrated investigation of neoliberalism – in part by providing a reminder of how it fit in the various contexts of French intellectual life in the 1970s that informed it. Michael Behrent and Daniel Zamora deserve credit for offering precautions, rather than ‘burning’ Foucault, as the next stage of his reception unfolds.”

Samuel Moyn, Harvard University

“The antistatist turn of much of the global left has disturbing but largely unexamined affinities with neoliberalism. Michel Foucault, for all his greatness, is a key figure in this turn. This collection is a stimulating exploration of those affinities, and, to put it provocatively, but not inaccurately, Foucault's commonalities with the likes of Gary Becker and Friedrich Hayek. This excellent book will annoy many, but it has the potential, for those with sufficiently open minds, of being a productive annoyance.”

Doug Henwood, The Nation

“Foucault and Neoliberalism has already begun to launch a crucial historical and political debate. Its critique and historical contextualization of Foucault's late work open up new perspectives on the rise of neoliberalism in France and the general evolution of the intellectual left since the 1980s. From the retreat of class analysis to the triumph both of identity politics and of a conception of social justice limited to equality of opportunity, Foucault and Neoliberalism helps us first to understand and then to imagine an alternative to the political dead end of the contemporary left.”

Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago

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First published in French as Critiquer Foucault: Les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale © Les Éditions Aden, 2014

This collection © Polity Press 2016

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0176-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0177-9 (pb)

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Zamora, Daniel (Doctoral Candidate)

Foucault and neoliberalism / Daniel Zamora, Michael C. Behrent.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-5095-0176-2 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-5095-0177-9 (paperback : alk. paper) 1. Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984. 2. Neoliberalism. I. Title.

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Contributors

Jean-Loup Amselle is Professor of Anthropology at l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He is the Director of the Cahiers d'Études Africaines and is the author of Affirmative Exclusion: Cultural Pluralism and the Rule of Custom in France (Cornell, 2003).

Michael C. Behrent is an American historian who teaches modern French history and European intellectual history at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. He is currently preparing a book on the work of Michel Foucault during the 1970s and the neoliberal turn in French thought.

Michael Scott Christofferson is Associate Professor of History at Adelphi University, New York. Since completing a Ph.D. supervised by Robert Paxton, he has published French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (2004), and he is currently finishing a critical biography of François Furet.

Mitchell Dean is Professor of Public Governance at the Copenhagen Business School. While a dedicated Foucauldian for many years, he has come to question whether a Foucauldian problematic of power and politics is sufficient for present issues. This concern is reflected in his recent book The Signature of Power: Sovereignty, Governmentality and Biopolitics (2013).

Jan Rehmann is Visiting Professor of Critical Theory and Social Analysis at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. He also teaches philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. He is co-editor of the journal Das Argument and of the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HKWM). He has published (among other titles) Max Weber: Modernization as Passive Revolution. A Gramscian Analysis (2015), Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection (2014), Pedagogy of the Poor (2011, with Willie Baptist), and Postmodernist Neo-Nietzscheanism (2004).

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a researcher at the Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris. His work spans urban relegation, ethnoracial domination, the penal state, incarnation, and social theory and the politics of reason. His books have been translated into 20 languages and include Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2004; new expanded edition, 2015), The Two Faces of the Poor (2015), and Tracking the Penal State (2016). For more information, see loicwacquant.net

Daniel Zamora is a sociologist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) specializing in welfare policies under neoliberalism. His current work concerns the history of unemployment and poverty in Europe since the 1970s.

Introduction
Foucault, the Left, and the 1980s

Daniel Zamora

In an interview with Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault observed, in 1984, shortly before his death:

I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal, etc. … None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit I rather like what they mean.^¹

This wide array of labels, which are as contradictory as they are unsuited for describing this giant of twentieth-century French thought, are nevertheless consistent with his reputation. In his rich body of work, and through his ability to conceptualize and even anticipate the central questions of his time, Foucault always seemed able to interrogate major contemporary issues in exciting and innovative ways. As a member of the French Communist Party, during his Gaullist phase, and even when he gravitated toward Maoism, he always remained critical of the movements to which he adhered. As a “fellow traveler” in a period that he shook up, intellectually speaking, Foucault always seemed one step ahead of his contemporaries. This is why the wide variety of receptions and readings his work has received is understandable. As the outcome of the varied and contradictory schools of thought that influenced him, his work cannot, fundamentally, be reduced to a single label.

After Foucault's death in 1984, Paul Veyne went as far as saying that his work marked “the most important event of thought of our century.” Thirty years after his death, it is clear that he has well and truly become one of the most influential thinkers of the last 40 years, both in French intellectual life and abroad. His work is widely disseminated, translated, and taught around the world, well beyond educational institutions. His ideas, moreover, have been used in fields as diverse as history, philosophy, anthropology, political science, and sociology. His work has greatly inspired many contemporary thinkers in the fields of gender studies, postcolonial studies, and what is more generally known as postmodernism. His influence on intellectual life is vast and has significantly shaped the terms of intellectual debates of the second half of the twentieth century. Foucault has, for better or worse, become a central intellectual reference of our time.

This intellectual hegemony is particularly pronounced in the realm of academic critical theory. He has acquired an almost saint-like stature, as much for his work as for his conception of intellectual engagement, which he embodied in his many political battles. At present, there is no longer any university or group of critical reflection that has not, directly or indirectly, been affected in some way by Foucault's work.

This association of the man who gave us the “specific intellectual” with the contemporary critical Left should nevertheless be examined in the light of his positions and the movements with which he was associated in the final decade of his life. Indeed, if his Maoist period or his brief membership in the Communist Party are relatively uncontroversial among his leftist disciples, the same cannot be said of his later commitments.

Whether it be his support of the “new philosophers,” his analysis of governmentality, or his ambiguous relationship to neoliberalism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, these later positions make many Foucault scholars uneasy. Indeed, Foucault did not content himself merely with questioning certain aspects of neoliberal thought: he seems, rather, to have been seduced by some of its key ideas. These issues, far from simply embodying the development of an intellectual, illustrate more generally some of the shifts that occurred in the Left post-1968, its disillusionment, and a profound transformation of the French intellectual field.

The 1980s were, after all, a decade of renunciation: first on the part of the Socialist government (as it largely abandoned the program on which it rode to power), then of intellectuals. François Mitterrand's 1981 victory paved the way for many a disappointment and failure, particularly the abandonment of the project of “transforming the world” for that of accommodating neoliberalism. Yesterday's fellow travelers became neoliberalism's facilitators and passionate opponents of any attempt to transform society. All they had once celebrated was now seen as part of a problematic that inevitably led to the “totalitarian temptation.” In this way, the state, social security, redistribution, public property, and nationalization came to be seen as outdated and conservative ideas.

How should we interpret Foucault's radical position on social security, which he essentially saw as the culmination of “biopower?” Or his support – stronger than we would like to think – of the “new philosophers”? How should we view his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics and his presumed sympathy for the emerging and very social-liberal “Second Left”? One might, finally, question his illusory belief that neoliberal forms of power would be less disciplinary and that prisons would ultimately disappear. These questions pertain not only to Foucault himself, but also to the ambiguities inherent in the Left (or at least a part of it), and especially some of its intellectual spokespersons, in light of neoliberalism's rising tide.

Whether on the question of the State, social security, “care of the self,” prison, autonomy, or power, it is clear that criticisms traditionally made by the “libertarian” Left have been profoundly destabilized in the wake of the neoliberal offensive. Indeed, far from opposing these key libertarian ideas, the neoliberal movement, on the contrary, mobilized them in the (largely successful) symbolic coup d'état that it has launched against the defenders of the welfare state. The conception of social security as a system of “social control” and the Left's defense of individual autonomy during the “Thirty Glorious Years” of postwar growth, in opposition to the worker's alienation in the capitalist system of mass production, was recycled into a critique of the state and its “bureaucracy.” More generally, the freedom of individuals was celebrated, over and against the social structures which enslaved them, in what became a general critique of the state, unions, parties, the family, and all other intermediate structures that were being undermined to make way for neoliberal policies.

This intellectual recycling, which is the heart of capitalism's “new spirit,” should lead us to question retroactively the theoretical moves made by a number of leading left-wing intellectuals in the late 1960s, particularly the often astonishing trajectories of former Maoists who converted so suddenly to the dogma of the market economy. We should also ask whether this “conversion” is even all that surprising.

Did their opposition to all that the “old” Left and its institutions embodied not foreshadow their subsequent “betrayal”? This question, while perhaps provocative, is no less legitimate and stimulating. Understanding the 1980s and the triumph of neoliberalism requires an exploration of the most ambiguous redoubts of the intellectual Left during this period, and not least one of its most important figures. Many recent studies return to this period. Some see Foucault as enamored of neoliberalism,^² while others have maintained that he was critical of it and, more recently, have argued that he used neoliberalism to question social theory.^³ These very different (and even contradictory) readings are reflective of the ambiguities and tensions that have troubled the Left since 1968.

While it is impossible to know what path Foucault would have taken, it is nevertheless interesting to consider several episodes that show some of his lesser-known views. While the renunciation and “conversion” to neoliberalism of key figures of the intellectual Left is often emphasized, relatively little is said about how certain developments in Foucault's later work, which would seem to be beyond reproach, paradoxically functioned to legitimate a neoliberal common sense. Though they are frequently overlooked or dismissed by his supporters as “details” or “misunderstandings” of the author's real intentions, the ambiguities they reveal raise very stimulating questions about the period.

The purpose of this book is thus to examine Michel Foucault's work and commitments during his final years through various lenses – yet ones that nonetheless capture the key debates of the period, in which a Left that was victorious at the polls saw its intellectual foundations seriously weakened. Our intention is thus not to attempt to answer the wrong question: namely, whether Foucault became neoliberal at the end of his life. As an alternative to this question, which is sterile and limits the debate to very narrow considerations, we will consider a range of questions. It is not a matter of being “for” or “against” Foucault, but rather of discussing, engaging with, and critiquing him to better grasp the extent of his influence and the issues he opened up in the intellectual field.

This book thus seeks to open historical and theoretical inroads at junctures where it seemed stimulating to interrogate the choices and thinking of this superstar of twentieth-century French thought – not only to better understand a moment in time, but also to question our own assumptions about what a critical theory must be.

Copyright page

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction
Foucault, the Left, and the 1980s

Notes