The government of life: Foucault, biopolitics, and neoliberalism

Abstract

The debate concerning Michel Foucault's relationship to neo-liberalism has recently rekindled. Despite some claims to the contrary, Foucault's alleged turn to (neo) liberalism during the final decade of his life is hardly a new discovery. As Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter point out, the idea that Foucault became a liberal in the mid-1970s is a recurring legend, one that the book seeks to put to rest. Most of the contributions to this volume are either explicitly or implicitly at odds with the contention that Foucault would have embraced any type of liberalism in his late work. As Roberto Nigro puts it, 'It would be highly misleading to suggest that Foucault's reading of liberalism was liberal' (p. 130). That said, the essays in this collection offer much more than simply a defence of Foucault against those who would brand him as one or another type of liberal. Divided into four parts, the book provides contributions on the normative orders of neo-liberalism, the genealogies of biopolitics, the relationship between law and liberal governmentality, and ethics and embodiment. The essays are not confined to discussing the texts where Foucault explicitly examines neo-liberalism or biopolitics. Rather, they draw on a wide range of his writings, from the texts on the Iranian Revolution to his final lecture courses at the Collège de France. Furthermore, Foucault's work is discussed here not only in relation to the contemporary biopolitical canon-Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negribut also in relation to the thought of such diverse figures as Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Canguilhem, Friedrich Hayek, Jan Patočka and John Rawls. In addition to the breadth and depth of these engagements, the volume also deserves credit for acknowledging and drawing attention to existing readings of Foucault in languages other than English, most notably French, German and Italian. The editors suggest the concept of nomos, understood as 'normative order', as a way of bringing together the pastoral and the economic dimensions of social order (p. 6), thus hoping to draw attention also to the spiritual preconditions of power. This conception of nomos is proposed as the thread that weaves the chapters together. This is a welcome perspective considering that examinations of biopolitics often