The Emergence of Neoliberalism: Thinking Through and Beyond Michel Foucault’s Lectures on Biopolitics

Abstract

This paper uses Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics as a starting point for thinking historically about neoliberalism. Foucault’s lectures offer a rich and detailed account of the emergence of neoliberalism, but this account is far from complete. This paper addresses some of the blind-spots in Foucault’s lectures by focusing on the space between the decline of classical liberalism at the end of the 19th century and the subsequent attempt to develop a ‘positive’ or ‘ordo’ liberalism in post-war Germany. The primary concern of this paper is to chart the emergence of a new or neo- liberalism in the writings of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek through the 1920s and 1930s. These writings, which are barely considered by Foucault, are important as they redefine the liberal project against the political economy of the late 19th century and, in particular, against the threat of socialism. In conclusion, it is argued that by returning to the work of Mises and Hayek it is possible to develop a critical sociology of neoliberalism, one that not only engages with the writings of these two thinkers but which also exposes the fracture lines that exist within the neoliberal project, and reconsiders the political positions that neoliberalism initially sought to reject.

A critical reading of the European Union’s social innovation policy discourse: (Re)legitimizing neoliberalism

“…However, it fundamentally differs from both, from the former because despite its anti-state rhetorics neoliberalism gives a very important role to the state in contributing to construct markets in certain ways (Brown, 2003;Lemke, 2001;Peck, 2010), and from the latter because it is a political project (Brown, 2006;Harvey, 2005) which draws more on Austrian economics (Gane, 2014b;Mirowski, 2013). Critics of neoliberalism have focused on different aspects, from the activation and responsibilization of enterprising neoliberal subjects (notably Foucault, 2007Foucault, [1977[1978; and following his lead, Dean, 1999;Lemke, 2001;Munro, 2012;Rose, 1999) to the shaping of the neoliberal political project by and for the super-rich at the expense of the majority of the population (e.g., Harvey, 2005;Klein, 2007), through a number of studies of the historical intellectual development of neoliberalism (e.g., Gane, 2014a;2014b;Mirowski, 2013) and contributions emphasizing its impacts on politics and society (e.g., Davies, 2014;Peck, 2010). This rich, varied literature provides an excellent Post-print version Organization, 2017, Vol.…”

“…What foremost characterizes neoliberalism is the Hayekian notion that the market knows best, i.e., that it is 'an information processor more powerful than any human brain' (Mirowski, 2013: 54) and that it is a marvel (Hayek, 1948) that works through competition as a process of veridiction (Gane, 2014b). This notion is the basis for the claimed desirability of extending and disseminating market rationality to all spheres of human action (see Brown, 2003).…”

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“…A widely cited definition by David Harvey is 'a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade ' (2005, 2). The theoretical basis for neoliberalism can be found in the ideas of a group of economists and philosophers, including Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, who, beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, extended the classical theories of liberalism, such as that of Adam Smith, to argue for an active incorporation of the state into the market -that government should be subject to the principles of the market, its activities solely consisting of guaranteeing the protection of liberty and private property against all attacks (Gane 2014). Historically, these ideas of neoliberalism were put into practice on a large scale in the 1980s, when the Reagan and Thatcher governments, in the USA and UK, respectively, pushed for drastic economic reforms that abandoned the post-war Keynesian principles of state intervention that aimed for full employment, in an attempt to deal with heavy stagflation that characterized the global economy of the 1970s.…”

Complex Adaptive Systems and Global Capitalism: The Risk of a New Ideology of Global Complexity

“…This approach would only be an Downloaded by [Selcuk Universitesi] at 22:30 06 February 2015 ideological mystification, for as von Hayek himself admit the same active government intervention would be necessary at all times to shape and maintain the conditions of the "self-organized" capitalist economy (Hayek 1944, 17;Gane 2014). Unlike what the ideology tries to maintain, the historical evidence shows that neoliberal capitalism has never opposed the state and the government, but that has been developed in close partnership with both (Dardot and Laval 2009).…”