Michel Foucault The Birth of Biopolitics

© Marius Gudmand-Høyer & Thomas Lopdrup Hjorth 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No 7, pp. 99-130, September 2009
REVIEW ESSAY
Liberal Biopolitics Reborn
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-
1979. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell (New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), ISBN: 978-1403986542
Marius Gudmand-Høyer & Thomas Lopdrup Hjorth, Copenhagen Business School
Introduction
What interest is there in talking about liberalism, the physiocrats, [Marquis]

d ‚rgenson, ‚dam Smith, Jeremy ‛entham, the English utilitarians, if not be-
cause this problem in fact arises for us in our immediate and concrete actuality?
What does it mean when we speak of liberalism – when we, at present, apply a lib-
eral politics to ourselves, and what relationship may there be between this and
those questions of right that we call freedoms or liberties [libertés]?1
There is something uncannily familiar about Michel Foucault s lectures at the Collège
de France in the spring of 1979. This twelve-lesson lecture course, intriguingly entitled
Naissance de la biopolitique, was published posthumously in French in 2004 and trans-
lated into English as The Birth of Biopolitics in 2008,2 and it now seems that Foucault
was already then describing the nativity of an imminent future in remarkable detail.
1 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Translated
by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 22 [Michel Foucault, Naissance
de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France 1978-1979. Edited by Michel Senellart (Paris:
Gallimard/Seuil, 2004), 25]. Throughout the essay the English translations are consulted
with – or, as in this case, modified with references to – the (more) original French text ver-
sions. References to the French original texts are provided in brackets after the reference to
the English translations.
2 An informative overview of the editorial conditions of the lecture course is found in Mike Gane,
Foucault on Governmentality and Liberalism, Theory, Culture & Society 25: 7-8 (2008): 353-
. Cf. also Michel Senellart, Course Context , in Michel Foucault, Security, Territory,
Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Translated by Graham Burchell (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 369- Michel Senellart, Situation des cours , in Michel
Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France 1977-1978. Edited by
Michel Senellart (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004), 379-411].
99
Gudmand-Høyer & Lopdrup Hjorth: review essay of The Birth of Biopolitics
Covering topics such as the art of government, population, liberalism and neo-
liberalism, the state, civil society, political economy, sovereignty, enterprise, liberty,
security, governmentality, and, not least, biopolitics, Foucault s account truly seems to
provide what he later called an ontology of the present. 3 The lectures seek to dis-
close the domain champ in which several of our currently possible experiences
come about as something we must engage in or relate to.4 But while Foucault had
previously explored more specific areas of modern experience – madness, the clinical
gaze, the rise of language as subject, delinquency, sexuality, etc. – the experiential do-
main at the center of Foucault s attention in 1979 is of a much more extensive nature.
In fact, The Birth of Biopolitics addresses nothing less than one of our greatest common-
places, that is, the experience of the social order that we currently take for granted,
which Foucault, characteristically, prefers to describe through the history of the do-
mains in which this experience has taken shape as well as place. Certainly, this is not
the phenomenological experience of society without calendar or geography, nor is it a
theoretical reconstruction of political philosophy; rather it has to do with the critical
experience of society after it has become the privileged site for the government of
men insofar as it appears as the exercise of political sovereignty. 5 Foucault s lectures
address a situation where the primary field of intervention for the arts of government
materializes as a civil society inhabited by a population that is somewhat self-
regulating and at the same time somehow juxtaposed to both the super-institution of
the state and the global environment of the market. It is in this context that Foucault
in 1979 studies the rationalization of governmental practice in the exercise of political
sovereignty as it has been worked out by different variants of liberalism.6
Compared to Foucault s other works, The Birth of Biopolitics has a relatively
simple outline. After a short review of classical eighteenth-century liberalism (Lec-
tures 1-3), Foucault presents his investigations of two forms of neo-liberalism of the
twentieth century: the German neo-liberalism associated with the ordo-liberals in the
1930-50s (Lectures 4-7) and the American neo-liberalism associated with the Chicago
School of Economics in the 1960s (Lectures 9-10), linked by a short reflection on French
liberalism in the 1950-70s (Lecture 8). After that, Foucault returns to a small selection
of related problematics of classical liberalism, including the creation of homo
œconomicus, the question of the invisible hand in Adam Smith, and the rise of civil so-
ciety in Adam Ferguson (Lectures 11-12). Yet, even if the subject of liberalism appears
to occupy most of the space in these lectures, the societal experience in question is not
reducible to the lack of society typically associated with neo-liberalism.7 The lec-
3 Michel Foucault Qu est-ce que le lumières , in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits IV. Ed-
ited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 687-688.
4 Ibid., 688.
5 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 2 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 3].
6 Ibid., 2 [4].
7 Cf. e.g., Margaret Thatcher: There is no such thing as society. There are individual men
and women, and there are families. Margaret Thatcher, Interview , Women’s Own (1987),
October: 8-10). Cf. also Sverre Raffnsøe, Alan Rosenberg, Alain Beaulieu, Sam Binkley, Jens
100
Foucault Studies, no. 7, pp. 99-130
tures do not address an experience we can simply distance ourselves from, be it his-
torically or academically, critically or ideologically, although this has often been the
case in the one-sided debate on neo-liberalism with reference to Foucault s work. The
lecture course also contains a philosophical exploration that runs in some way beneath
or parallel to the mainly sociological elaborations carried out from the governmental-
ity perspective, the existence of which is the main reason why the content of The Birth
of Biopolitics is not unknown even though the full text version has only been generally
available within the last few years.8 While The Birth of Biopolitics is obviously required
reading for anyone who aspires to advance and widen the studies of governmentality,
it is by no means exhausted by this perspective. The lecture course also demonstrates
how the societal experience has grown under our skin and is partaking of our every-
day working and private lives, whether on the margins or at the centre of the social
order. It has become the other face of our own governmentality, and in order to study
it a question such as this must be asked What is then this ever so fragile moment
from which we cannot detach our identity and which will carry this [identity] along
with it? 9 The immediate answer might simply be that it is a biopolitical moment.
However, in order to corroborate such a reading it is necessary first to take account of
the allegedly very limited reception of the role of biopolitics in The Birth of Biopolitics.
Even though the concept of biopolitics has received enormous attention in
modern research over a great range of societal and economic problematics, both in
conjunction with the governmentality perspective and more independently, there
seems to be an incompatibility between the title of The Birth of Biopolitics and its actual
content. On this ground a number of commentators have emphasized that the lectures
in fact do not deal with biopolitics, but rather represent a long digression into the his-
Erik Kristensen, Sven Opitz, Morris Rabinowitz, & Ditte V. Holm Neoliberal Governmen-
tality, Foucault Studies 6 (2009): 1-4.
8 This familiarity is not least due to Colin Gordon s introductory overview of Foucault s
and 1979 lectures in the seminal work published by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon & Pe-
ter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1991). Informative reviews of the reception of governmentality comprise
Jacques Donzelot and Colin Gordon, Governing Liberal Societies – the Foucault Effect in
the English-speaking World, Foucault Studies 5 (2008): 48-62; Nikolas Rose, Pat O'Malley
and Mariana Valverde, Governmentality, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2 (2006):
83– Sylvain Meyet, Les trajectories d un texte La gouvernementalité de Michel Fou-
cault, in Sylvain Meyet, Marie-Cécile Naves and Thomas Ribemont (eds.), Travailler avec
Foucault: Retours sur le politique Paris L Harmattan, and Thomas Lemke, Eine Kritik
der politischen Vernunft: Foucaults Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalität (Berlin/Hamburg:
Argument, 1997).
9 Michel Foucault, For an Ethics of Discomfort , in Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of
Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 3. Edited by James D. Faubion (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 443
Michel Foucault, Pour une morale de l incomfort , in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits
III. Edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1994), 783] (transla-
tion modified).
101
tory of liberalism.10 Even Foucault himself seems to be of this opinion. In the course
summary of the lectures he writes that this year s course ended up being de-
voted entirely to what should have been only its introduction, 11 and during the lec-
tures he almost apologizes for himself I would like to assure you that, in spite of eve-
rything, I really did intend to talk about biopolitics, and then, things being what they
are, I have ended up talking at length, and maybe for too long, about neo-liberalism. 12
However, although there might be good reasons for such a reading, the central argu-
ment of this review essay is that such a conclusion underemphasizes the extent to
which these lectures on liberalism and political economy actually do deal with biopo-
litics in a fundamental way. This review argues, not only that political economy al-
ready in its modern conception is biopolitical by nature,13 but also that Foucault s ac-
count, much more than a mere prelude to biopolitics, represents an exposition of bio-
politics analyzed in the register of liberal governmentality.
In order to substantiate this argument, the essay begins with (1) a brief account
of how the concept of biopolitics found in Foucault s lectures both differs and
concurs with the assorted characterizations of the concept he had previously pre-
sented. Here it is also demonstrated how The Birth of Biopolitics should not be re-
garded as a mere parenthesis in the history of liberalism, but as Foucault s most com-
prehensive analysis of modern biopolitics, situated within the framework of what he
in designated the history of governmentality 14 and in the general disposi-
tive [dispositif] of governmentality. 15 Having established a more comprehensive con-
10 Mark Kelly, ‚fterliberalism, Radical Philosophy 153 (2009): 46- Mike Gane, Foucault on
Governmentality and Liberalism, Theory, Culture & Society 25: 7-8 (2008) : 353-363; Thomas
F. Tierney, Review Essay Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the
Collège de France, 1977- , Foucault Studies 5 (2008): 90- Diogo Sardinha, Le découverte
de la liberté, Labyrinthe La ”iopolitique d’ après Michel Foucault, 22:3 (2005): 89-99; Jeanine
Hortoneda, Sécurité, territoire, population et Naissance de la biopolitique de Michel
Foucault , Empan, 59:3 (2005): 61- and Michel Senellart, Course Context , -401
Michel Senellart, Situation des cours , -411]. Cf. also Lars Gertenbach, Die Kultiverung
des Marktes: Foucault und die Governementalität des Neoliberalismus (Berlin: Parodos, 2008),
158-164; Laurent Jeanpierre, Une sociologie Foucauldienne du néoliberalisme est-elle
possible? Sociologie et Sociétés 38:2 (2006): 87-111; Didier Fassin, La biopolitique n est pas
une politique de la vie, Sociologie et Sociétés 38:2 (2006): 35-48; and ‛ernard ‚ndrieu, La
fin de la biopolitique chez Michel Foucault, Le Portique: Foucault: usages et actualités, 13-14
(2004): 1-20.
11 Foucault, Course Summary , in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 317 [Foucault, Nais-
sance de la biopolitique, 323].
13 Cf. Lars Thorup Larsen, Speaking Truth to ‛iopower On the Genealogy of ‛ioeconomy,
Distinktion 14 (2007): 9-24.
14 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 108-109 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 111-
112].
15 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 70 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 71] (translation mo-
dified). Here Foucault himself uses the French word dispositif , which we choose to trans-
late not with the common, yet inaccurate, apparatus , but with the old, now rather rare
102
cept of biopolitics, the next three sections review Foucault s studies of classical lib-
eralism, (3) German neo-liberalism, and (4) American neo-liberalism, with special em-
phasis on how biopolitics is deeply involved in these liberal arts of government. As a
conclusion, the review (5) recapitulates the different accounts of liberal biopolitics and
outlines Foucault s analysis of French neo-liberalism in the 1970s.
1. Governmental Concepts of Biopolitics
‚nd this bio-politics must itself be understood on the basis of a theme developed
since the seventeenth century: the management of state forces [la gestion des forces
étastique].16
The reason why it is difficult to resolve whether Foucault s lectures of do or do

not deal with biopolitics is that such judgments presuppose that the meaning of
'biopolitics' is both clear in itself and in Foucault s work. The judgment becomes even
more difficult since the notion of biopolitics, which was not originally invented by
Foucault, has a history that both precedes and succeeds his writings considerably. It
stretches from an eugenic kind of biopolitics, which was primarily advocated by Ger-
man and Swedish scholars of a National Socialist orientation in the early twentieth
century, to a biologically oriented biopolitics, which was originally delineated as a
subfield of political science focusing on biological factors involved in political behavior
by a group of American and French researchers in the 1960s. After Foucault, the con-
cept has been expanded even further to include not only a well-known biopolitical
distinction between bare life (tò zôon) and political existence (ho bíos) in relation to
sovereignty, but also a biopolitical mode of production in the world of postmodern
capitalism, although the most prevalent use of the concept is perhaps to be found in a
sizeable literature having as its critical target the biopolitics that is related to new in-
ventions of biotechnology and bioeconomy.17 None of these delineations of biopolitics
match Foucault s, although many have found inspiration in his work.
and obscure English word, dispositive. As a noun this word has the connotation of
something that disposes or inclines, but in accordance with the adjective form, also dis-
positive, which is more precisely designating: first, being characterized by special dispo-
sition or appointment second, having the quality of disposing or inclining: often op-
posed to effective, and so nearly [equivalent to] preparatory, conducive, contributory and,
third, having the quality or function of directing, controlling, or disposing of something;
relating to direction, control, or disposal cf. Oxford English Dictionary, OED Online, 2009,
s.v.).
16 Foucault, Course Summary , Security, Territory, Population, 367 [Foucault, Sécurité,
territoire, population, 377].
17 Informative studies of the history of biopolitics include: Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics
and Philosophy (2004). Translated by T. Campbell (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneso-
ta Press, 2008); Thomas Lemke, Biopolitik – zur Einfürung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag GmbH,
‚. Somit and S.‚. Peterson, ‛iopolitics ‚fter Three Decades – ‚ ‛alance Sheet,
103
It is not enough, however, to disentangle the relationships between the various

types of biopolitics and Foucault s use of the concept, since he does not employ the
notion of biopolitics with a stable set of connotations over time. When he first intro-
duced it in 1974, in the context of social medicine, he only loosely indicated that biopo-
litics had to do with a political regulation of the biological aspects of human beings
insofar they were members of given cities, nations or other groupings of people.18 In
the closing section of The Will to Knowledge (1976), meanwhile, in which sexual matters
from the eighteenth century and onward are described as a kind of contact point be-
tween a disciplinary anatomo-politics of the human body and a regulative biopolitics of the
population, the concept becomes more distinct.19 While the first dispositive or major
social technology of discipline works by atomizing a multiplicity of people into indi-
viduals in order to organize, monitor, utilize or cultivate them as discrete bodies, the
latter dispositive of biopolitics works by amalgamating the same multiplicity of people
into a population in order to stimulate, assist, regulate or manage them as a living re-
source residing in a particular environment.20 In Foucault s work, therefore, the notion
of biopolitics soon begins to designate a societal dispositive which is not only different
from the classic juridical dispositive of law and sovereignty that originates in medieval
times but also from the modern dispositive of discipline and surveillance established
at the beginning of the eighteenth century.21 It is also in continuation of this new regu-
latory dispositive of the late eighteenth century that Foucault can call attention to what
he regards as a decisive transformation in the general economy of power, from the
sovereign s right to take life and let live to the biopolitical capacity to foster life or disal-
low it to die, also described in 1976.22 Biopolitics now comes to involve a new set of
political techniques that situate human life at the center stage of the political order, but
also the effects of these techniques upon other political notions, phenomena and insti-
tutions such as sovereignty, the state, democracy, law, economy, civil society, etc.23 In
the second part of the eighteenth century, biopolitics thus came into view as a kind of
threshold of political modernity, 24 at the same time as the population appears as a
British Journal of Political Science 28 (1998): 559-571; and Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose,
‛iopower Today, BioSocieties 1 (2006): 195-217.
18 Michel Foucault, La naissance de la médicine sociale, in Foucault, Dits et écrits III, 210.
19 Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge. The History of Sexuality 1 (St. Ives: Penguin Books,
1990), 139 [Michel Foucault, La volonté de savoir. Histoire de la sexualité 1 (Paris: Gallimard,
1976), 173].
20 Michel Foucault, Les mailles du pouvoir / , in Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 188-193.
21 Ibid., 194.
22 Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 139-143 [Foucault, La volonté de savoir, 178-182]. Cf. also
Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended Lectures at the Collège de France 1 5-1976 (New
York: Picador, 2003), 240-241 [Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société Cours au Collège de
France 1975-1976 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997), 220].
23 Cf. R. Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, 13.
24 Lars Thorup Larsen, ‛iopolitical Technologies of Community in Danish Health Promotion.
Unpublished paper presented at the conference Vital Politics Health, Medicine and ‛io-
economics into the Twenty-first Century, London School of Economics, September -7,
104
machine of production for the actualization of prosperity and welfare by use of its
own resources and potentials.25
So it is true that The Birth of Biopolitics does not deal directly with these more
familiar instances of the concept. It does not address the mentioned biopolitics of so-
cial medicine, of sexuality, or of power of death versus power of life, nor the well-
known biopolitical war of races and state-racism in the nineteenth century, or even the
famous shift during which the ‚ristotelian human being, a living animal with the
additional capacity for political existence, becomes modern man, an animal whose
politics places his existences as a living being in question. 26 This is so because the
understanding of the concept of biopolitics that is at stake in Foucault s study of libe-
ralism in 1979 passes through the comprehensive history of governmentality he em-
barked upon in the previous lecture course of 1978 known as Security, Territory, Popu-
lation. Here many of the connotations of biopolitics are integrated into Foucault s re-
conceptualization of the ugly word governmentality , 27 but without leaving the bio-
political scope behind.28 In addition to referring the concept to the governmentaliza-
tion of the state, and to the historical conflict between this major social technology of
government and the dispositives of law and discipline, Foucault thus defines govern-
mentality as:
the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures analyses and reflections, calcula-

tions and tactics that allow the exercise of a very specific, albeit very complex,
power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of
knowledge, and dispositives of security as its technical instrument.29
It is through and in continuation of this historical triangulation that Foucault

develops the biopolitical framework in which he begins to study the liberal arts of
2003. Other important reviews and critical studies on Foucault s biopolitics include
‛ernard ‚ndrieu, La fin de la biopolitique chez Michel Foucault, Le Portique: Foucault:
usages et actualités, 13-14 (2004): 1-20; Michael Dillon & Luis Lobo-Guerrero, The
Biopolitical Imaginary of Species-‛eing, Theory, Culture, & Society 26:1 (2009): 1-23; Didier
Fassin, La biopolitique n est pas une politique de la vie, Sociologie et Sociétés 38:2 (2006):
35-48; Lars Thorup Larsen, Speaking Truth to ‛iopower On the Genealogy of
‛ioeconomy, Distinktion 14 (2007): 9-24; and Yves Charles Zarka (ed.), Michel Foucault
de la guerre de races au biopovoir dossier , Cités 2 (2000): 8-96.
25 Michel Foucault, Les mailles du pouvoir, in Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 193 (translated by
the authors).
26 Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 143 [Foucault, La volonté de savoir, 188].
27 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 115 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 119]. It
was Roland Barthes who, in Mythologies Paris Seuil, , originally coined the term gou-
vernementalité to indicate an ideological mechanism presenting the state as the effective
originator of all social relations. Cf. also Thomas Lemke, ‚n Indigestible Meal? Foucault,
Governmentality and State Theory, Distinktion 15 (2007): 43-64.
28 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 1 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 3].
29 Ibid., 108-109 [112] (translation modified; emphasis added).
105
government in The Birth of Biopolitics, which is also why a short summary is appropri-
ate here.30
First, Foucault considerably expands his conception of the population as a bio-
political target of government in 1978. When describing the emergence of the human
species l’espèce humaine as an alternative to mankind le genre humaine] in the
eighteenth century, he is not only referring to the integration of this new species of
living beings with biology, but also to the opening up of the public le public].31 Rep-
resenting the population when it is seen from the perspective of its opinions and be-
liefs, ways of doing things, customs and habits, forms of conduct and behaviour, re-
quirements, fears and prejudices, this is the field where the population becomes man-
ageable, but in a positive line of attack by way of campaigns, education, promotion,
alteration of attitudes, or assurances.32 So even if Foucault designates this new field of
biopolitical intervention as the natural environment or milieu of the population,
this environment does not match a biological habitat. Rather it is a particular biosocial
domain in human history, in which different series of events produced by the popula-
tion itself interconnect with the more circuitous natural events happening around the
living beings that constitute this population. For that reason, the population is not
merely a biological species, a group of legal subjects, or individual bodies of discipline;
it also represents its own natural or intrinsic logic, constituted as it is by different
probabilities, by uncertainties and temporalities, by dangers, risks, and contingent
events, in the same ways as this population varies with the climate, the material sur-
roundings, the intensity of commerce, the circulation of wealth, laws and traditions,
etc.33 Hence, in 1978 Foucault conceptualizes the governmental target of the popula-
tion as a new collective focus of biopolitics, representing a political object insofar the
population is that on which and towards which the acts of government are directed,
but also a political subject insofar as it is the population that is called upon to con-
duct itself in a particular way.34
30 Informative studies on this triangulation include: Michael Dillon, Governing Through Con-
tingency The Security of ‛iopolitical Governance, Political Geography 26:1 (2007): 41-47;
Charles Ruelle, Population, milieu et normes Note sur l enracinement biologique de la
biopolitique de Foucault, Labyrinthe La ”iopolitique d’ après Michel Foucault 22:3 (2005): 27-
‚nault Skornicki, Le biopouvoir détournement des puissances vitales ou invention
de la vie L économie politique, le pian et le peuple au XVIIIe siècle , Labyrinthe: La
”iopolitique d’ après Michel Foucault, 22:3 (2005): 55- Ute Tellmann, Foucault and the
Invisible Economy, Foucault Studies 6 (2009): 5- and Thomas F. Tierney, Review Essay
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977- ,
Foucault Studies 5 (2008): 90-100.
32 Foucault, Course Summary , in Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 367
[Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 377].
33 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 20, 70 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 22,
72].
34 Ibid., 42-43 [44-45].
106
Secondly, in Foucault s account the surfacing of a population being both self-

regulating and regulated in this way is incomprehensible without the second compo-
nent in the triangulation, that is, political economy. Here Foucault departs in a seminal
transformation from a mercantilist to a physiocratic problematization of scarcity and
the circulation of grain in the eighteenth century.35 While the mercantilist policy had
worked for the protection of the wealth of the state by preventing scarcity from occur-
ring by various disciplinary restrictions on the cultivation, pricing, storage and export
of grain, the physiocrats advocated for an opposite strategy that was based on the free
circulation of grain, both within and between nations. Instead of working to prevent
the one singular event of scarcity, this new approach allowed for spontaneous fluctua-
tions in a free circulation, being composed of various series of plural events – of
pricing, supply, demand, and production; of the behaviour of producers, consumers,
buyers, importers, and exporters; of weather conditions; and of the world market –
which were now all being analyzed as processes not to bring under control but to
grant their natural course.36 According to Foucault, the activation of the physiocratic
agenda thus entailed that economic government should not so much aim to prevent
something in advance in accordance with the logic of the established juridical-
disciplinary system as to be working within the reality of fluctuations between
abundance/scarcity [or] dearness/cheapness. 37 Parallel to widening the concept of the
population, Foucault also expands the relevant form of governmental knowledge rele-
vant for biopolitics to include not only such disciplines as social medicine, public hy-
giene, statistics and demographics but also political economy, constituting a science
that analyses and reflects upon the production of collective interest through the game
of individual desire along with its circulation within the household of society.38
Thirdly, Foucault stresses that the art of government requisite for the economi-
cal perception of the population s self-regulation is not that of the prototypical disposi-
tives of law and of discipline, the former working by prohibitions in relation to legal
subjects in a territory of sovereignty, and the latter by prescriptions in relation to indi-
vidual bodies in a coordinated space of surveillance.39 Instead, this government works
in accordance with the dispositive of security [ le dispositif de sécurité ], which seeks
to regulate the open series of events produced by the population in its natural envi-
ronment, not by assurance and safety sûreté , but by taking into account that
which can happen sécurité . ‚s such, security could oftentimes make use of
40
some instruments of prescription and prohibition, but then as means to an end and
not as goals in themselves, and this end would be to respond to a reality in such a
way that this response cancels out the reality to which it responds – nullifies it, or lim-
35 Ibid., 29-53 [32-56].

36 Ibid., 45 [47].
37 Ibid., 37 [39].
38 Ibid., 72 [74].
39 Ibid., 4-9 [6-11].
40 Ibid., 21 [23]. Cf. also Mariana Valverde, Genealogies of European States Foucauldian
Reflections, Economy and Society 36:1 (2007): 159-178.
107
its, checks, or regulates it. 41 Therefore it is not the case that security lets anything
happen at random or arbitrarily, but that it allows things to happen exactly at the level
where certain things are able to regulate themselves naturally. In other words, securi-
ty works by
allowing circulations to take place, controlling them, sifting the good and the bad,
ensuring things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually
going from one point to the other, but in such a way that the inherent dangers of
this circulation are canceled out [through] a progressive self-cancellation of phe-
nomena by the phenomena themselves.42
The basic principle that is set up for state government by this logic of security is that
government must in some way constrain itself in respect of the natural processes of the
population and not intervene too much by prohibitions and prescriptions. In its place,
the government will have to arouse, to facilitate, and to laisser faire, in other words to
manage [gérer] and no longer to control through rules and regulations [réglementer].
The central objective of this management [gestion] will be not so much to prevent
things as to ensure that the necessary and natural regulations work, or even to create
regulations that enable natural regulations to work. 43
Consequently, what Foucault establishes in the lectures of 1978 is an indisso-
luble triangulation of security, political economy and population, which should be
regarded as genuinely biopolitical insofar it does not dismiss his earlier conceptualiza-
tions but rather adds to or adjusts them. This adjustment is carried out within the his-
torical framework of governmentality, whose new fundamental objective will be
state intervention with the essential function of ensuring the security of the natural
phenomena of economic processes or processes intrinsic to the population. 44 Yet, it is
also in this historical development of the eighteenth century that Foucault discovers
how the questions of freedom and liberalism arise as internal problematics for the
new governmentality to handle. For the freedom that surfaces here is neither the old
aristocratic question of exceptions and privileges to be granted to certain individuals
nor the juridical question of legitimate individual rights as opposed to the abuses of
power of government or sovereignty.45 What arises is the problem of managing an
element of freedom that has become indispensable and vital to government itself, and
without which the government will fail to govern not right but well, that is, in accor-
dance with the self-regulation of the population. Thus Foucault corrects his earlier
claim that the establishment of liberal policies and demands for freedom in the eigh-
teenth century should be seen on a background of disciplinary observations and in-

42 Ibid., 65-66 [67-68].
43 Ibid., 353 [360-361].
44 Ibid., 353 [361].
45 Ibid., 48-49, 353 [49-50, 361-362].
108
structions, concurrently restricting and guaranteeing the exercise of this freedom.46 In

the biopolitical history of governmentality the major social technology against which
the conduct of free conduct should be analyzed is now security, according to which
freedom becomes nothing other than the correlative of the development of the dis-
positives of security, which cannot operate well except on condition that this free-
dom is given to the circulation of things. What Foucault discovers in this history is a
modern form of freedom, that is, the possibility of movement, change of place, and
processes of circulation of both people and things, which is also what the liberal arts
of government began venturing to secure and bring into play by acting on the actions
of the population.47
It is on the background of all this that Foucault launches his biopolitical explo-
ration of liberalism and neo-liberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics, which is clear from the
following note found in the manuscript for his first lecture in 1979:
With the emergence of political economy, with the introduction of the limiting
principle into governmental practice itself, an important substitution, or doubling
rather, is carried out, since the subject of right on which political sovereignty is ex-
ercised appears as a population that a government must manage [doit gérer This
is the point of departure for the organizational line of a biopolitics . 48
‛ut who does not see, Foucault continues, that this is only part of something much
larger, which is this new governmental reason? And then formulates the general
aim of the lectures To study liberalism as the general framework of biopolitics. 49 So
while liberalism and biopolitics are by no means equivalent constructs, they are not
entirely separable in Foucault s work of thought either. Rather they present them-
selves as major overlapping circles partly covering each other in a comprehensive
study of the way in which the specific problems of life and population have been
posed within a technology of government which, although far from always having
been liberal, since the end of the eighteenth century has been constantly haunted by
the question of liberalism. 50
46 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 48 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 49]. Cf.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, (London: Penguin Books: 1991) 221-224 [Michel
Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 223-225].
48 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 22n* [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 24 n*] (transla-
tion modified). Foucault did not present this point at the lecture but only in the manuscript,
which is found in a footnote in the published edition.
49 Ibid.
50 Foucault, Course Summary, in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 323-324 [Foucault,
Naissance de la biopolitique, 329] (tranlation modified).
109
2. Classical Liberalism
[S]tarting from the end of the eighteenth century, throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury, and obviously more than ever today, the fundamental problem is not the con-
stitution of states, but without a doubt the question of the frugality of govern-
ment.51
In Foucault s reading, the birth of liberalism is inseparable from the notion of frugal
government by which the question of the too much and too little develops into the
central criterion around which the art of government will revolve.52 However, in
order to understand how this principle attains the importance it does, it is necessary to
consider first Foucault s study of liberalism in the context of the governmental practice
and rationality associated with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century raison d’État or rea-
son of state, which was the topic of several of his lectures from 1978. Because this type
of government had the maximizing of the state s strength as its primary objective and
therefore was relatively autonomous in its workings, Foucault links it to mercantilism
regarded not only as proto-economical doctrine, but also as a particular organization
of commercial production and circulation, according to the principles that the state
should enrich itself through monetary accumulation, strengthen itself by increasing
the population, and uphold itself in a state of permanent competition with foreign
states.53 While this last principle was the permanent objective of an external military-
diplomatic technology of the state, Foucault finds the other two to be organized by an
internal technology of the police, also described in the 1978 lectures. Seeing that this
police technology, which represented a set of administrative techniques and statistical
knowledges concerned with maximizing the volume, productivity and health of the
inhabitants within the state territory in order also to maximize state power, was prin-
cipally exercised by means of permanent, continually renewed, and increasingly de-
tailed regulation, Foucault also links the birth of liberalism with the breaking up of
this over-regulatory police being unable to deal with the spontaneous regulation of
the course of things. 54
Yet, what Foucault in 1979 locates in the tradition of classical liberalism is first
of all an ongoing reflection on the question of how to rationalize that exercise of
government that was already established between state reason, mercantilism and the
police. Taking this existing governmental practice as a point of departure, the liberal
critique problematized and embarked upon correcting the rationale and practice of
reason of state from the inside. Rather than overthrowing the established order, the
51 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 29 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 30-31].

52 Ibid., 28 [30].
53 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 5 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 7]; Foucault,
Security, Territory, Population, 285-310 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 293-318].
54 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 340, 354, 344 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population,
348, 362, 352].
110
critique pointed to an internal refinement of raison d’État, 55 being principally op-

posed to the continuously expanding government of state reason. An incessant and
indefinite government of this self-sufficient type, the liberal critique objected, would
never be able to give any comprehensive account as to why it was governing in the
first place, or how it was to govern in the best possible way. In opposition to the prin-
ciple of maximizing government, the liberal critique pointed to the principle that gov-
ernment should recognize and take account of the self-regulation of the governed,
which also implied that not just any type of government would be an appropriate
government. The regulation of government should take hold of this self-regulation of
the governed by imposing on itself what Foucault describes as a work of auto-
limitation. 56 Accordingly, classical liberalism established itself as an art of govern-
ment that was to economize with its interventions on a scale between minimum and
maximum, almost by the same logic as the dispositive of security mentioned above,
but always prioritizing the minimum as the optimum, as long as this was possible and
appropriate with regard to the self-regulation of the population.
This is why Foucault suggests that this biopolitical and liberal art of governing
of the late eighteenth century is describable as the emergence of a new frugal gov-
ernment within the governmentality of raison d’État it was the entry into the art of
government of the problematics pertaining to the question of the necessary amount
and extent of governmental intervention.57 Here a good government is no longer au-
tomatically equal to a detailed and comprehensive government. Rather, a good gov-
ernment is a government that takes into consideration, reflects upon and fine-tunes its
operations according to its overall goals, as well as the nature of what it governs. As
such, good government also reflected the answer that a group of merchants, in Mar-
quis d'Argenson s famous account, should have given to a mercantilist minister asking
them what he could do for commerce: Laissez-nous faire.58
In this period of time, when Europe began to gain the position of a particular
and privileged region of unlimited economic development in relation to a world mar-
ket, Foucault also identifies two interrelated problematics of primary importance for
the formation of the new art of government. The first of these is the installation of the
market as a place and instrument for the formation of truth.59 From the Middle Ages
to the eighteenth century, the market was essentially a site of justice, 60 in the sense
that it was characterized by an extreme and thorough regulation pertaining to what
55 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 27, 20-22 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 29, 23-24].
56 Ibid., 10 [12].
57 Ibid., 28 [30].
58 D ‚rgenson, Lettre à l auteur du Journal économique au sujet de la Dissertation sur le commer-
ce de M. le Marquis Belloni, Journal économique, April (1751): 107-17; quoted in Foucault, The
Birth of Biopolitics, 25 n16-17 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 28, n16-17]. D ‚rgenson
was also the originator of the related expression pas troup governer do not govern too
much .
60 Ibid., 30 [32].
111
products were to be sold, their origin and manufacture, and not least their price. This
price had to reflect the just price, that is to say, a price that was to have a certain rela-
tionship with work performed, with the needs of the merchants, and, of course, with
the consumers needs and possibilities. 61 Adding to this, the market was a site of jus-
tice, tightly organized in order to prevent fraud and theft. Overall, the market could
thus be seen as a site of jurisdiction in the sense that it functioned as a place where
what had to appear in exchange and be formulated in the price was justice. 62 Mean-
while, what happens in the eighteenth century is a fundamental transformation of sig-
nificant importance for the formulation of a liberal art of government. By way of
eighteenth-century political economy the market is reconfigured as a place that has a
certain naturalness, which one has to be knowledgeable about. From being an ordre
artificiel, established and regulated through the mercantilist policies, the market now
becomes an ordre naturel. From being a site of jurisdiction, the market becomes a site
for the formation of a normal, good, natural or true price that is, a price that
fluctuates around the value of the product and is determined by the interplay be-
tween the costs of production and the concrete demand.63 Thus, to the extent prices
are formed through 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. 64 In this sense, the market becomes a site of the formation of
truth, a regime of veridiction as to the governmental practice.65 Not because politi-
cal economy as such tells the truth to government, but because political economy
points to the site where government will have to look to find the principle of truth of
its own governmental practice. 66
Foucault associates the second problematic of importance for the formation of
the new art of government with nineteenth-century English radicalism and utilitarian-
ism. Here a new critique of the proper limitation of government was established based
on an estimation of the utility versus the non-utility of governmental actions and in-
terventions.67 Being less directed at the question of whether government had the legal
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 31 [33].
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid., 32 [34].
65 Ibid., . With his neologism of the regime of veridiction which is later on also called an
alethurgia Foucault aims at studying under what conditions and with what effects a
verdiction is exercised, that is to say, a type of formulation falling under particular rules
of verification and falsification ibid., [38]). Therefore Foucault does not seek to study
what truth is as such, but rather how something has come to work as truth in particular
ways. In connection with this he can also retrospectively point to his earlier work on the
psychiatric institution, the penal system and the sexual confessional, to some degree in-
cluded in the same formation of specific veridictional regimes with political signific-
ance ibid., -38]).
66 Ibid., 32 [34].
67 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 51 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 53]. Cf. also Fou-
cault, Security, Territory, Population, 74 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 76].
112
right or not to interfere as is does, this critique considered instead government in

terms of its concrete objectives and whether the exercise of government was in accor-
dance with these objectives or if it was governing too much or too little. This critical
question about the appropriate and desirable way to limit governmental practice was
therefore also a question regarding what kind of auto-limitation government should
impose on itself given that it was to regulate in agreement with the self-regulation of
the governed and with their natural environment and actual conditions. With
reference to the general utility of the governmental practice the critique was to con-
front cases where regulation would be unreasonable, counterproductive or simply
futile, and for that reason it would seek to define the limits of governmental compe-
tence on the basis of what it would be useful or useless for government to do or not to
do. It is from this position that the radical limitation-critique can persistently raise the
question to every single governmental action: Is this useful and for what? Within
what limits is it useful? When does it stop being useful? And when does it become
harmful? But even if these questions are very close to what Jeremy Bentham sought to
distinguish as the agenda and the non-agenda, designating the economic actions of gov-
ernment with regard to whether or not they increase general happiness according to
the utilitarian principle of maximizing happiness and minimizing pain,68 Foucault is
cautious not to reduce English radicalism to a mere projection of utilitarian theory or
ideology onto the field of political practice.69 Instead, it is utilitarianism that could be
regarded as more than a philosophy or science, since it is first and foremost to be con-
sidered a technological attempt to define the competences of the art of government,
with a more or less direct reference to what Foucault regards as the fundamental
question of liberalism What is the utility value of government and all actions of
government in a society where exchange determines the true value of things? 70
These two central elements – the market as a site of veridiction operating
through the principle of exchange and the limitation calculus by which the utility of
government is measured – Foucault understands as tied together by the category of
interest. The new art of government is not organized around a self-referring state,
seeking the maximization of its power, men and wealth, but must deal with the com-
plexities of interests as they become manifest in the complex and delicate interplay
between individual and collective interests, between social utility and economic profit,
between the equilibrium of the market and the regime of public authorities, between
basic rights and the independence of the governed. 71 From directly interfering with
68 Jeremy Bentham, Method and Leading Features of an Institute of Political Economy (including fi-
nance) considered not only as a Science but also as an Art (1800-1804); quoted in Foucault, The
Birth of Biopolitics, 24, n9 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 26-27, n9]. Besides the agenda
and the non-agenda Bentham also works with the third category of sponte acta, designating
the economic activities spontaneously developed by the members of the community with-
out governmental intervention.
70 Ibid., 46 [48].
71 Ibid., 44 [46].
113
and regulating things, men and wealth with the aim of maximizing the strength of the
state, as in the logic of state reason, government should now only deal with these inso-
far as they are of interest to somebody. Hence, as Foucault states, government is only
interested in interest. 72 ‛ut at the same time government must not obstruct the in-
terplay of individual interest, not only because of respect for freedom of circulation
and self-regulation of the population, but also because it is impossible for government
to have full knowledge of the logic of this multiplicity of interests it seeks to encour-
age.73 This is why Foucault accentuates the invisibility rather than the hand in the
famous analogy of Adam Smith. In addition to the existence of something like a
providence bringing together the multiple threads of individual interests, the analogy
also refers to the fact that the connection between individual pursuit of interests and
profit and the growth of collective wealth and welfare is essentially imperceptible.74
Both to facilitate the formation of individual interests for the collective good and to
allow this invisible formation to self-regulate thus becomes another exigent balance for
the liberal art of government to work with again from the standpoint of too much or
too little.
It is in continuation of this liberal and biopolitical art of governing, which re-
volves around the balancing of individual and collective interests, that Foucault re-
turns to the question regarding the relation between security and freedom that he initial-
ly raised in the 1978 lectures. According to Foucault, it is futile to state that a liberal
mode of governing is more tolerant and flexible than previous modes of governing,
because it is founded on and utilizes freedom in a particular way. Such an idea should
be avoided, since it presupposes that freedom is a quantitative measurable entity, but
also because it implies that freedom is a universally given that is progressively rea-
lized over time. Foucault instead proposes that freedom is never anything other –
but this is already a great deal – than an actual relation between governors and go-
verned, a relation in which the measure of the too little existing freedom is given by
the even more freedom demanded. When Foucault employs the term liberal, he is
therefore not referring to an art of government that is content to respect or guarantee
particular forms of freedom. Instead he is referring to a governmental practice that is
a consumer of freedom since it can only function insofar as a number of freedoms
actually exists: freedom of the market, freedom of discussion, possible freedom of ex-
pression. 75 This entails that liberalism is an art of government that constantly has to
manufacture and produce freedom, just as it must make sure that there is a sufficient
amount of freedom in order to benefit from the natural capacities inherent in the self-
regulation of the population and the market. The actual freedoms called for and en-
tailed by this governmentality are not first and foremost established according to ju-
ridical principles. Rather, they are balanced according to the dispositive of security
72 Ibid., 45 [47].
73 Ibid., 280 [282].
74 Ibid., 278-282 [275-284].
75 Ibid., 63 [65].
114
that functions as a counterweight and ensures that the wellbeing of the population is
not endangered by an overflow and excess of freedom. According to Foucault, liberal-
ism s production, consumption and utilization of freedom is thus inseparable from the
establishment of a variety of limitations, interventions and controls that show up in
limiting the freedom of the market through anti-monopoly legislation, for example, or
special taxes on import:
In short, strategies of security, which are, in a way, both liberalism s other face and
its very condition, must correspond to all these imperatives concerning the need to
ensure that the mechanism of interests does not give rise to individuals or collec-
tive dangers. The game of freedom and security is at the very heart of this new go-
vernmental reason. The problems of what I shall call the economy of power pecu-
liar to liberalism are internally sustained, as it were, by this interplay of freedom
and security.76
The emergence of this type of governmental activity also contributes to Foucault s

more formal re-conceptualization in of governmentality, now being the way in
which one conducts the conduct of men, 77 where the latter notion, la conduite in
French, has a twofold meaning for Foucault: (a) the activity of conducting [conduire]
and of conduction [la conduction] and (b) the way in which one conducts oneself [se
conduire], lets oneself be conducted [se laisse conduire], is conducted [est conduit] – that
is to say, the way in which one finds oneself to behave [se comporter] as an effect of a
conduct [une conduite] that represents an action of conducting or of conduction.78
When the law prohibits certain acts and legitimizes certain rights, and when discipline
prescribes an obligatory behavior under supervision, the economy of power associated
with this new formal governmentality approaches the modern freedom of liberalism
insofar as both the political conduct of others and the ethical conduct of oneself
actively presupposes and seeks to regulate a freedom that is always already at hand
but equally in need of security measures in order not to deteriorate or be led astray.79
The intrinsic challenges for this economy of biopolitical power are clearly discernable
in the two adaptations of neo-liberalism that Foucault also studies in the 1979 lectures.
76 Ibid., 65 [67].
77 Ibid., 186 [192].
78 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 193 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 196-
197].
79 Cf. Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd Ed. (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, and Foucault, Un système fini face à une demande infinite, in
Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 374.
115
3. German Neo-Liberalism
The German model which is being defused, debated, and forms part of our actually,
structuring it and carving out its real shape, is the model of a possible neo-liberal
governmentality.80
The 1979 course gives considerable attention to German neo-liberalism, primarily in

the form of the ordo-liberals of the Freiburg School. Central figures in this School are
the economist Walter Eucken and the jurists Franz Böhm and Hans Grossmann-
Doerth, but Foucault also analyses the work of Alfred Müller-Armack, Wilhelm Röpke
and Alexander Rüstow, who were not part of the Freiburg School but still played im-
portant roles in shaping neo-liberal thinking and policies in Germany in the twentieth
century.81 Foucault focuses on these thinkers not just because of their historical prece-
dence in regards to American neo-liberalism, which was inspired by the Germans, but
also because the governmental style that marks the specific form of German neo-
liberalism is something that we are immersed in – the contemporary neo-liberalism
which actually involves us. 82
Foucault begins his analysis of German neo-liberalism by considering the wide-
spread contemporary state-phobia that united otherwise discordant groups all
across the political spectrum. He does this in order to show how the phobia of the
state is actually caught up in a much more fundamental and important crisis of gov-
ernmentality, 83 manifesting itself in a number of re-evaluations of the liberal art of
government:
Everyone is in agreement in criticizing the state and identifying its destructive and
harmful effects. ‛ut within this general critique through and in the shadow of
this critique, will liberalism in fact be able to bring about its real objective, that is to
say, a general formalization of the powers of the state and the organization of so-
ciety on the basis of the market economy? 84

81 Cf. Viktor J. Vanberg, The Freiburg School Walter Eucken and Ordoliberalism, Freibur-
ger Discussionpapers on Constitutional Economics, 04/11 (2004): 1-21. Informative studies on
Foucault s reading of ‚merican neo-liberalism include: Lars Gertenbach, Die Kultiverung
des Marktes: Foucault und die Governementalität des Neoliberalismus (Berlin: Parodos, 2008);
Laurent Jeanpierre, Une sociologie Foucauldienne du néoliberalisme est-elle possible?
Sociologie et Sociétés 38:2 (2006): 87-111; Mark Kelly, ‚fterliberalism, Radical Philosophy 153
(2009): 46-4 and Thomas Lemke, The ‛irth of ‛io-Politics Michel Foucault s Lecture at
Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality, Economy and Society 30:2 (2001): 190-
207.
82 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 133, 101 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 137, 105].
83 Ibid., 76 [78].
84 Ibid., 117 [121].
116
‚longside or below the state-bashing efforts and the incautious, imprecise and mis-
leading accusations of the state becoming fascist,85 Foucault thus identifies a more
fundamental and relevant problem which turns on the re-evaluations and proposals
on renewing the art of government in Germany immediately before and after the
Second World War. In the same way as Discipline and Punish had illustrated how the
humanization of the practice of punishment was caught up in a more general discipli-
narization of the social corpus,86 and The Will to Knowledge had shown how the repres-
sion-hypothesis was bound up in a more wide-ranging transformation marked by a
proliferation of discourses on sex,87 Foucault here links the wide-spread contemporary
critique of the state with a more fundamental transformation emerging as a crisis and
reformulation of governmentality. In doing so, he marks out some important shifts
that distinguish German neo-liberalism from the preceding classical form, especially
when it comes to the principle of laissez-faire and the extension of the associated biopo-
litics.
First of all, Foucault emphasizes that German neo-liberalism brings with it a
reversed relationship between the state and the market. Where the problem for clas-
sical liberalism was how to make room for a market given an already existing and legi-
timate state, the problem for the German neo-liberals is the opposite given a state
that does not exist, how can we get it to exist on the basis of this non-state space of
economic freedom? 88 The space for this renewal is cleared by the way in which histo-
ry had said no to the German State, 89 and from the neo-liberals reevaluation of
historical events in light of their experience with Nazism. All the supposed ills of capi-
talism (one-dimensionality, standardization, uniform mass society, etc.) are according
to neo-liberals actually not the result of the market and its allegedly inherent failures.
Rather, they are the result of a set of interventionist anti-liberal policies , which the
neo-liberals locate as invariant components employed and utilized in a wide set of
government-programs ranging from the Beveridge Plan and the New Deal to the poli-
cies of the Soviet Union and Nazism.90 Since all the dangers and problems hitherto
associated with capitalism and the market s mode of functioning have their origin in a
set of more or less radical interventionist anti-liberal policies, the solution, according to
the German neo-liberals, will be to adopt the free market as organizing and regulat-
ing principle of the state, from the start of its existence up to the last form of its inter-
85 In connection with protests against the arrest, incarceration and extradition of the German
lawyer of the Baader-Meinhof Group, Klaus Croissant, Foucault had refused to sign a peti-
tion circulated by Félix Guattari because it described West Germany as being fascist. Cf.
Senellart, 393.
86 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 104-131 [Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 106-134].
87 Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 15-49 [Foucault, La volonté de savoir, 23-67].
88 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 86-87 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 88].
89 Ibid., 86 [88].
90 Ibid., 111 [115].
117
ventions. 91 In other words, a state supervised by the market, rather than the other
way around.
Yet, this neo-liberal proposal of adopting the market as organizing and regulat-
ing principle does not imply a subscription to the naturalness inherent in the classical
liberal conception of the market; in fact, the German neo-liberals find it both erroneous
and counterproductive to believe in the virtues of laissez-faire and a naturally free mar-
ket. Instead, the market is conceptualized as a political-cultural product, based on a
constitutional order that requires careful cultivation for its maintenance and proper
functioning. 92 But, although ‚dam Smith s invisible hand is in need of a helping
hand to function, this helping hand need not interfere directly in the market or with its
outcomes. Rather, it should only work on the conditions allowing it to function, which
first and foremost means setting up the necessary preconditions for the flourishing of
competition. In this prioritization of competition over exchange as the distinctive es-
sence of the market, the neo-liberals diverge from classical liberalism, but in doing so
they accentuate what a range of nineteenth century economists – like Leon Walras and
Alfred Marshall – had already attributed so much importance to.
Furthermore, since government should not prioritize redistributing wealth, but
instead seek to establish the conditional rules under which competition will flourish,
this also entails a radical reversal of social policy as traditionally understood. It is no
longer a question of compensating for the unfortunate effects of a market economy.
Instead, what is to be established is a government that is not against but for the mar-
ket.93 ‚nd since this necessitates an active, intense, and interventionist social policy,
aspiring to nothing less than the government of society, it is an exaggeration when
Foucault apologizes for having spoken for too long about German neo-liberalism in-
stead of addressing the biopolitical problematic head on.94 Instead of opposing the
two, Foucault s examination of the social policy proposed by the German neo-liberals
should be read as an analysis of biopolitics par excellence, since the neo-liberal pro-
posals imply interventions that would govern everything but the economy, including
the population, its conditions of life and social surroundings.
This social policy is a far-reaching and widely encompassing form of biopolit-
ics, geared towards governing society by reference to and in accordance with the mar-
ket. While this could sound like the reappearance and intensification of the commodi-
fication process already denounced by Karl Marx,95 Foucault emphasizes the singulari-
ty of German neo-liberalism by stressing its difference from a society of commodities,
in which exchange value will be at the same time the general measure and criterion of
elements. 96 It is not the man of exchange or man as consumer who provides the idea-
91 Ibid., 116 [118].

92 Vanberg, 9.
94 Ibid., 160 [165]
95 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, ‛uch I Der Produktionsprozeß des Kapitals -1890); men-
tioned in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 147.
118
lized figure of the German neo-liberals, but rather the competitive and productive
creature of enterprise:
The individual s life must be lodged, not within a framework of a big enterprise
like the firm or, if it comes to it, the State, but within the framework of a multiplici-
ty of diverse enterprises connected up to and entangled with each other, enterpris-
es which are in some way ready to hand for the individual, sufficiently limited in
their scale for the individual s actions, decisions, and choices to have meaningful
and perceptible effects, and numerous enough for him not to be dependent on one
alone. Finally, the individual s life itself – with his relations to his private property,
for example, with his family, household, insurance, and retirement – must make
him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise.97
In programming this new art of government, the multiplication and dissemination of

the enterprise form within the societal body plays a crucial role. Not merely to be un-
derstood as a particular institution, it is the mobilization of a special social êthos mark-
ing out a whole competitive and enterprising way of being and behaving in terms of
personal plans and projects and with specific objectives, tactics and agendas.98 Thus, it
is a matter of nothing less than making the enterprise into the formative power of
society. 99 It is a matter of intervening deeply in the very fabric, tissue or vital parts of
society by way of a policy of life – that is, what the economist and originator of the
term Neo-liberalismus, Alexander Rüstow, refers to as Vitalpolitik: a politics of life,
which is not essentially oriented to increased earnings and reduced hours of work, like
traditional social policy, but which takes cognizance of the worker s whole vital situa-
tion, his real, concrete situation, from morning to night and from night to morning,
including material belongings and moral hygiene, sense of property and of social inte-
gration.100 What is at stake here is a biopolitics that should address all the factors on
which the happiness, well-being and contentment of man truly depend, and which
should take into account what Rüstow and Röpke conceptualize as the worker s four-
fold embeddedness in his community, in nature, in his property, and in his tradi-
tion.101 This is the comprehensive biopolitical and neo-liberal governmentality that is
formulated in Germany, and it is this German model, not the ‛ismarckian state be-
coming the Hitler state, which is being diffused, debated, and forms part of our ac-
tuality. 102
97 Ibid., 241 [247].

98 Ibid., 147, 175 [152, 180].
99 Ibid., 148 [153].
100 Alexanter Rüstow is quoted from Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 157, n62.
101 Cf. Jan Hegner, Alexander Rüstow: Ordnungspolitische Konzeption und Einsfluß auf das wirt-
schaftpolitische Leitbild der Nachkriegszeit in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Stuttgart: Lucius,
1999), 52-68.
119
4. American Neo-Liberalism
Liberalism in America is a whole way of being. It is a type of relation between

the governors and the governed much more than a technique of governors with
regard to the governed.103
Whereas the ordo-liberals endorsed the idea that society should be governed for the
market, the effort of the American neo-liberals was rather to redefine all of society as
an economic domain or form.104 Noticing this as a general background of the Ameri-
can adoption of neo-liberalism, Foucault s examination focuses on the governmental
and biopolitical implications of the proposed expansion of economic analysis and pro-
gramming to areas of the social field not formerly associated with economic principles
or rationality. This analysis is primarily based on work by economists like Henry C.
Simons, Theodore W. Schultz and Gary Becker, whereas Foucault pays less attention
to other famous figures of the Chicago School such as Milton Friedman and George
Stigler.105
In his reading of the American neo-liberals Foucault accentuates their recon-
figuration of the homo œconomicus that was already on the agenda in the works of clas-
sical economics. But while economic man in this context was interpreted as a creature
of exchange in accordance with his needs and wants, which implied that he repre-
sented one of two partners in a process of exchange, the economic man in the anarcho-
liberal context is, as with the German neo-liberals, recast as a creature of competition,
whose inclination towards competing may not always be actualized by itself, but al-
ways potentially ready to be encouraged and spurred. Accordingly, the freedom that
is in need of security here becomes the freedom of liberated competiveness, and the
associated competitive homo œconomicus comes into view not just as an entrepreneur
of himself, 106 as was the case in German neo-liberalism, but also as the living being
who is in need of being set free to freely compete. The human creature of competition
cannot therefore be a man of exchange for the reason that, instead of being one among
103 Ibid., 218 [224].

104 Ibid., 239-241 [245-246].
105 Cf. e.g., Johan Van Overtveldt, The Chicago School: How The University Of Chicago Assembled
The Thinkers Who Revolutionized Economics And Business (Chicago, IL: Agate, 2007). Informa-
tive studies on Foucault s reading of ‚merican neo-liberalism comprise: Jacques Donzelot,
Michel Foucault and Liberal Intelligence, Economy and Society 37:1 (2008): 115-34; Frances-
co Guala, Critical Notice Naissance de la biopolitique, Economics and Philosophy 22 (2006):
429- Thomas Lemke, The Birth of Bio-Politics Michel Foucault s Lecture at Collège
de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality, Economy and Society 30:2 (2001): 190-207; Mi-
chael Peters, Education, Enterprise Culture and the Entrepreneurial Self a Foucauldian
Perspective, Journal of Educational Enquiry 2:2 (2001): 58- Jason Read, ‚ Genealogy of
Homo Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Foucault Studies 6
(2009): 25- and Maarten Simons, Learning as Investment Notes on Governmentality
and Biopoli-tics , Educational Philosophy and Theory 38:4 (2006): 523-540
120
other partners in a process of exchange, he is converted into a subject of personal en-

terprise, who not only earns his own wages, administers his own consumption and
produces his own satisfaction, but also embodies his own assets and productivity.107
Here even consumption becomes another entrepreneurial activity used for the produc-
tion of personal satisfaction, which also implies that the opposition between an active
production and a passive consumption ceases to have any meaning.108 In short, man
has become an amount of human capital, which may always be still further aug-
mentable with reference to his acquired and hereditary resources. The distinctive
mark of human capital, Theodore W. Schultz writes in , is that it is a part of
man. It is human because it is embodied in man, and it is capital because it is a source
of future satisfactions, or of future earnings, or of both. 109 It is the biopolitical implica-
tions of this kind of economization of everyday life that draws Foucault s attention.
Through this reconfiguration of the economical man the interventional field of
anarcho-liberal biopolitics becomes a radicalization of the Vitalpolitik of the German
neo-liberals, as it includes not only every aspect of enterprising human conduct across
all possible social fields but also the very genetic makeup predisposing this conduct of
enterprise.110 But besides venturing to stimulate and ameliorate the human population
all the way down to their hereditary equipment, and to prepare for potential situations
where this equipment could pose a danger, 111 it is primarily on the side of the ac-
quired and acquirable factors that this neo-liberal biopolitics endeavours to have an
indirect effect on the economy. It is especially in regard to the making of a compe-
tence-machine producing a continuous surplus of human capital that Foucault points
to how this neo-liberal biopolitics identifies the problems for which it also proposes its
solutions. In the case of educational investment, for example, professional and school
education is evidently important for the development of human capital. But this radi-
cal biopolitics also argues on an experimental basis that the very development of the
human being acquiring competences is also relevant and includes factors such as the
time spent by the parents on the formation of their child, the emotional atmosphere in
the family, or the quality of the child s social relationships. Foucault thus locates the
competence-machine within a comprehensive neo-liberal environmental analysis of
human capital, entailing the possibility of analyzing
the simple time parents spend feeding their children, or giving them affection, as
investment which can form human capital. Time spent, care given, as well as par-
ents education – because we know quite precisely that for an equal time spend
with their children, more educated patents will form a higher human capital than
107 Ibid., 225 [231].

108 Cf. Donzelot.
109 Theodore W. Schultz, Investment in Human Capital: The Role of Education and Research (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 148; quoted in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 23
n33.
111 Ibid., 228-229 [234-235].
121
parents with less education – in short the set of cultural stimuli received by the
child: all this will contribute to the formation of those elements that can produce
human capital.112
Every subject matter on the basis of which the population is potentially inclined to
reach an end – in childhood, in youth, at work, on vacation, in marriage, in civil life, as
parents, in friendships, on retirement, in health care – comprises a field of economic
analysis because it is also the ground from which human capital can be extracted and
put into production. Accordingly, Foucault mentions how the American neo-liberals
also point to the potential human capitalization of assets pertaining to social phenom-
ena such as social mobility, migration, and the innovations conceptualized by Joseph
A. Schumpeter.113 Even public hygiene, health care, criminality and the function of
penal justice emerge as economic forms in this analysis of the Chicago School.114
Is it in continuation of this that Foucault draws attention to the neo-liberal con-
struction of a grid of economical intelligibility with which it becomes possible to
appraise a long range of human behaviours not usually deemed economic as economic
nevertheless.115 With this grid it is not only possible to analyze all facets of the rela-
tionship between mother and child in terms of investments, being measurable in terms
of time and convertible into human capital. It becomes possible to invert a vast multi-
plicity of human conducts and behaviours, which were previously the objects of disci-
plines such as demography, psychology and sociology, so that they, on a certain level,
become visible for the economic rationality at the same time as they begin to express
an economic rationality themselves. In this context, however, it is not only every ra-
tional aspect of human conduct and life that is amenable to economic analysis, in ac-
cordance with the classical formulation that economics is the science of human be-
haviour as a relationship between end and scarce means which have mutually exclu-
sive uses. 116 According to Gary Becker, this already very extensive definition does
not go far enough since economical analysis can perfectly well be applied also to indi-
vidual non-rational behaviour, with the only criterion being that the conduct in ques-
tion reacts to reality in a non-random way. Given that the irrational conduct responds
to the modifiable stimuli of the environment in a systematic way, given that the con-
duct in spite of irrationality accepts reality in ‛ecker s words,117 it is apposite for
economic analysis, and economics become the science of the systematic nature of re-
sponses to reality in the form of environmental variables.118
112 Ibid., 229 [235-236].

113 Ibid., 230-231 [236-238].
114 Ibid., 248-261 [254-266].
115 Ibid., 246 [253].
116 Lionel C. Robbins, Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science
quoted in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 222 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 228].
117 Gary ‛ecker, Irrational ‚ction and Economic Theory, Journal of Political Economy 70:4
(1962): 153-168; quoted in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 287, n6-7 [Foucault, Naissance de
la biopolitique, 290-291, n6-7].
122
Meanwhile, in conjunction with this grid of economic intelligibility Foucault

also points to the neo-liberal construction of a critical assessment instrument di-
rected at the exercise of public power in terms of the market.119 Where the first con-
struction was analytical in its scope, because it was able to make social processes
visible and intelligible in a generalized economic form, this second construction is
rather programmatic in capacity, because it makes it possible to test governmental
action, gauge its validity, and to object to activities of the public authorities on the
grounds of their abuses, excesses, futility, and wasteful expenditure. 120 Together the
two constructions form an effective analytic-programmatic technology with which a
great part of the social field can be reconstructed so they take part in an economic real-
ity, and with which a permanent economical-political criticism of almost all political
and public authorities can be secured and empirically substantiated in terms of the
market. All governmental initiatives can be met with this critical assessment accord-
ing to principles of supply and demand, cost and benefit, efficiency, and the potential
losses due to public interventions in the field of the market. In contrast to the ordo-
liberal rejection of a natural sphere constituting the beneficial functioning of the prin-
ciple of laissez-faire, Foucault argues that the American anarcho-liberals rather turn this
principle upside-down by means of their analytic-programmatic technology. Here
the laissez-faire is turned into a ne-pas-laisser-faire directed at the government, in the
name of a law of the market that will permit each of its activities to be measured and
assessed. 121 This conversion of the laissez-faire principle leads to a situation where the
market no longer functions as the veridictional regime for the self-limitation of gov-
ernment as in classical liberalism, since the market converts into something that is now
hostile towards the government. What emerges is a sort of permanent economic tri-
bunal, the truth-telling of which is no longer responsive and oracular but determined
and antagonistic when it comes to guiding government. Additionally, Foucault speci-
fies, this economic tribunal is not merely a private or cooperate matter, but has been
institutionalized in a number of American organizations or think tanks, such as the
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, the Consumer Safety Product
Commission, and the Food and Health Administration, from whence the permanent eco-
nomic tribunal can be brought into action in an almost positivistic critique of the non-
sense and contradictions of governmental procedures and actions.122 In concert
with this radical economization of government action, the American neo-liberals there-
fore also express a now familiar aspiration to extend the market across all social and
political domains, thus breaking down the traditional divisions between the economic,
the social and the political in what constitutes not a governementalization but a mar-
ketization of both state and civil society.
119 Ibid., 246 [253].

120 Ibid.
121 Ibid., 247 [253] (translation modified).
122 Ibid., 246-247 [252-253].
123
5. Conclusion: Liberal Biopolitics and the Economic Game
The lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics represent Foucault s last encounter with modern
biopolitics. Despite its distinctly biopolitical title, the subsequent (still unpublished)
lecture course of 1980, On the Government of the Living, begins to trace back to Early
Christianity the important connection between the pastoral conduct of conduct and
another regime of veridiction that took the form of the specific truth-production by
which individuals bring into being subjective evidence about themselves.123 While this
study was a revitalization of Foucault s interest in procedures for truth-telling (e.g.,
mesure, enquete, examen) in the early 1970s,124 it was also the beginning of a journey that
led him further back to alternative relationships between truth and government of the
self and of others (e.g., chresis aphrodesiôn, epimeleia heautou, parrêsia) established in
Roman and Greek antiquity.125 But since Foucault never returned from this journey to
the ancient world, he was unable to inaugurate that full-scale genealogy of contempo-
rary biopolitical power that he the year before his death in 1984 not only asserted
could be done but also had to be done. 126 Therefore The Birth of Biopolitics in fact
represents Foucault s very last, and most comprehensive, attempt to uncover the na-
123 Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Essential
Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. I. Edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Penguin, 2000), 81-85
Foucault, Du gouvernement des vivant, in Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 125-129]. It is also in
these lectures that Foucault develops the substitution of power/knowledge [pouvoir/savoir]
problems with problematics of government/truth [gouvernement/vérité] which he began in
with the concept of the veridiction regime of the economy Cf. Lecture at Collège de
France, 9 January authors transcription).
124 The study of mesure, enquete and examen is summarized in Michel Foucault, Penal Theories
and Institutions in Foucault, Ethics, 17- Michel Foucault, Théories et institutions
pénales in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits II. Edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald
(Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1994) 389-393]; but see also Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 184-194
[Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 186-196].
125 The study of chresis aphrodesiôn is found in the lecture course of 1981, Subjectivity and Truth, in
Foucault, Ethics, 87- Foucault, Subjectivité et vérité, in Foucault, Dits et écrits IV, 213-
218], in Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasures (St. Ives: Penguin, 1990) [Michel Foucault,
L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984)], and in Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (St
Ives: Penguin, 1990) [Michel Foucault, Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984)]. The study of
epimeleia heautou is primarily found in Foucault, The Care of the Self [Foucault, Le soici de soi],
and in Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-
1982 (New York: Palgrave, 2005) [Michel Foucault, Le herméneutique du sujet: Cours au
Collège de France, 1981-1982 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2001). The study of parrêsia is found in
Foucault s last Collège de France-lectures – that is, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours
au Collège de France, 1982-1983 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2008) and Le gouvernement de soi et des
autre: Le courage de la vérité: Cours au Collège de France, 1983-1984 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil,
2009); but see also the U.S. lectures from 1983 in Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los
Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2001).
126 Michel Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics ‚n Overview of Work in Progress,
in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Herme-
neutics, 2nd Ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 232.
124
tivity of modern biopolitics. It is here that he for the last time studies the biopolitical
rationalization of liberal arts of government being concerned with securing those self-
regulatory processes of the population and the economy.127 Hence, in the summary of
the 1979 lectures, where Foucault, as touched upon, expresses some regret as to only
having covered the introduction to the birth of biopolitics, he also maintains that by
biopolitics he meant the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rational-
ize the problems posed to a governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a
set of living beings forming a population. 128 And although this summary only men-
tions such well-known phenomena of life as health, morbidity, hygiene, mortality,
natality, life expectancy, and race, a careful reading of the full lecture course also re-
veals the manifestation of biopolitical phenomena such as competition, consumption,
danger, education, enterprise, family life, freedom, genetic equipment, human beha-
vior, innovation, interests, limitation, nature, rights, risks, will and work. The biopolit-
ical nature of many of these phenomena has been exemplified in the previous sections.
Yet, in order to recapitulate more specifically it is therefore not so much on the
backdrop of Foucault s earlier biopolitics of social medicine, of sexuality or of the
threshold of life and death that the biopolitical scope of The Birth of Biopolitics should
be judged. Instead this scope should be evaluated in continuation of the type of bio-
politics that became an important factor in the history of governmentality and in the
ingrained triangulation of population, political economy and dispositives of security,
which are also the starting point of Foucault s exploration of the arts of government
pertaining to classical and more contemporary forms of liberalism. Accordingly, the
biopolitics of classical liberalism revolved around the biopolitical nature of the modern
economy and the political economists conception hereof insomuch as this field of ex-
change, intervention and knowledge from the very beginning was directed at a popu-
lation ranging from its biological embeddedness in the natural milieu, through the
human species with its desires, and up to the public with its interests.129 The objective
of this liberal biopolitics became the creation of a regulation that could assist the natu-
ral self-regulation of the population to work by way of the correlative logic of freedom
and security. It was also through this work of dynamic and facilitative laisser-faire that
governmental rationality came upon the need to restrain its activities in order to give
room for self-regulation in the new societal household. Likewise, it was in this process
that the auto-limitation of societal utility convened with the veridiction regime of the
market, in the same way that the process of principally infinite economic growth
enabling advancement in the welfare of populations convened with the interplay of
interests between the individual and the collective. By way of the new frugal govern-
128 Foucault, Course Summary, The Birth of Biopolitics, 317 [Foucault, Naissance de la
biopolitique, 323].
129 If this is true, it is therefore somewhat difficult to maintain that the economy has recently be-
come biopolitical, given that it has been so from its modern beginning in the eighteenth
century. On this point see Lars Thorup Larsen s important article Speaking Truth to ‛io-
Power: On the Genealogy of ‛ioeconomy, Distinktion 14 (2007): 9-24.
125
mentality, all these elements have worked their way into the political rationality of the
occidental world.
The biopolitics of both German and American neo-liberalism revolves around
the economical enterprization of virtually every individual agent of the population,
but does so in different directions. German neo-liberalism inscribes the human enter-
prise in a vertical movement by reversing the relationship between state and market
in order to establish conditions under which competition will flourish, being con-
vinced that regulation of prices by the market itself is so delicate that it must be sup-
ported and managed. For its part, American neo-liberalism inscribes the human en-
terprise in a horizontal movement by expanding the economic to principally all so-
cial forms in order to transform a long range of non-economic entities and activities
into means of competition, being confident that the grid of analysis and the decision-
making criteria it offers ought to be more generally applicable.130 While the German
conception of Vitalpolitik therefore stands for factual reconfiguration of traditional so-
cial politics focusing on enabling the individuals to become entrepreneurs of them-
selves (e.g., assistance to the unemployed, health care cover, and housing policies), the
American conception of human capital rather takes for granted the entrepreneurial
mode of existence and provides it instead with still new sources from which the capi-
tal of competition can be accumulated (e.g., family life, education, and genetic equip-
ment). Thus two biopolitics of facilitation emerge, endowed with a more societal and
a more individual proclivity respectively, but both breaking away from the natural-
ness of classical liberalism. Here German neo-liberalism projected instead a sort of
economic cultivation for the safeguarding and affluent performance of the market
by indirect governmental planning and intervention, whereas American neo-
liberalism planned for a kind of economic realism according to which a transversal
level of economic reality could incorporate almost all social forms in terms of econom-
ics, but which at the same time allowed them their differences on all other levels.131
Both strategies thus implied a massive enabling process directed at the population, but
in such a way that the population was effectively to enable itself by way of the econ-
omy as well. Here the population was not so much to comply with legal prohibitions
and disciplinary prescriptions as it was to vitally empower itself through economic
forms and work out its own personal norms for this activity, within the continual in-
terchange of freedom and security.
Meanwhile, it is on the topic of French neo-liberalism, which is presented be-
fore the anarcho-liberals in The Birth of Biopolitics but succeeding their work chrono-
logically, that Foucault most directly addresses the encounter between liberal biopoli-
tics and the question of social security. With reference primarily to Valéry Giscard
d Estaing, the French minister of finance and economy from 1969 to 1974, and the two
economists Christian Stoffäes and Lionel Stoléru, Foucault calls attention to a number
130 Foucault, Course Summary, The Birth of Biopolitics, 323 [Foucault, Naissance de la
biopolitique, 329].
131 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 256-259 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 266-269].
126
of features pertaining to the challenge of creating a social policy within a neo-liberal

framework.132 D Estaing held that government should completely separate that
which corresponds to the need of economic expansion from that which corresponds to
the concern for solidarity and social justice, because the social system can disrupt the
economic system with negative consequences (e.g., rise of wages, increase of unem-
ployment or uneven redistributions) even if social security is deduced solely from
earned wages.133 ‛y introducing an economic tax versus a social tax, d Estaing
projects a separation of the economy as a system with its own rules and the social as a
system with its own particular objectives, which should at once correspond to and be
entirely impermeable to each other. This decoupling, Foucault argues, is part of the
application of a seminal idea, being equally traceable in German, American and
French neo-liberalism, according to which the economy essentially is a game un
jeu . 134 This means, on the one hand, that the economy should progress as a game be-
tween partners and the whole society should be permeated by it, and that the role of
the state in this regard is restricted to defining the rules of the game and to making
sure that they are in fact applied. And since the rules of this game, on the other hand,
have to ensure that the economy develops and progresses as actively and keenly as
possible and to the advantage of the greatest possible number of players, the primary
and categorical rule of the game should be one that also ensures that the players do
not lose so much that they become unable to continue playing.
It is through this rule of non-exclusion in the economic game that Foucault
sees the policy of neo-liberal social security coming into view,135 which he sketches out
on the basis of negative tax as Stoléru and Stoffaës outlined it in the 1970s.136 In op-
position to positive income tax where government claims a portion of income and
where the sum paid increases as income rises, this negative tax system sends money
back to the taxpayers if, but only if, their earnings are below a given threshold, and
conversely reduces that payment as income rises. Through this system government
provides social security in the form of supplementary cash benefits relative to how
much the citizen is economically below the threshold, which is usually fixed at a vi-
132 Ibid., 196-197 [199-201].

133 Valéry Giscard d Estaing, Preface, in Économie et Société humaine: Rencontres internationales
du ministre de l’Économie et des Finances (Paris : Denöel, 1972); quoted in Foucault, The Birth
of Biopolitics, 211, n39-45 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 218-219, n39-45]. See also
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 198-202 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 205-209].
134 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 201 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 207] (translation
modified). Cf. e.g., Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, IL: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1962), 225-227.
136 Cf. Christian Stoffaës, Vaincre Rapport du groupe d’étude de l’impôt negative (Paris, 1973-74),
and Lionel Stoléru, Vaincre la pauvreté dans les pays riches (Paris: Flammarion, 1977). It was
Milton Friedman who made the negative income tax famous by proposing that all welfare
programs should be restructured with this system as the model, so that government sup-
port for those with low incomes would be withdrawn only at a low marginal rate and
would not distort the market; Cf. Friedman, chap. The ‚lleviation of Poverty.
127
tal minimum of elementary needs. 137 According to Foucault, this neo-liberal tax
policy has a number of consequences. First, it guarantees the non-exclusion of the eco-
nomic game because it ensures that citizens who are temporarily made redundant do
not end up below what is considered as a proper level of consumption. Second, it nev-
ertheless keeps this assured level of minimum consumption so low as to motivate, in-
centivize or frustrate the unemployed to always prefer working and participating in
the economic system before receiving benefits, thus counteracting the well-known
problems with the negative work incentives and benefits dependency of traditional
welfare programs as well. Third, the neo-liberal drift in this system is not only that it
fully decouples the economic tax and the social tax, but also that it does not pro-
vide the social security associated with a standard policy of full employment; people
are not forced to work if there is no interest in them doing so. It only guarantees the
possibility of minimum existence at a given level, essentially leaving the incentives to
be a matter for the jobless themselves.138
Although Foucault is perfectly aware that the negative tax system has never
been applied in full effect or in pure form, it is nevertheless here that he maps out his
last outline of neo-liberal biopolitics, chronologically speaking.139 Because the negative
tax provides something like a minimal level of social security, though at the lowest
possible level and principally substituting all welfare such as food stamps, public
housing, farm price supports or minimum wage laws with cash benefits defined with
regard to the threshold, it allows the economic system and the mechanism of competi-
tion to function in the rest of society. ‚bove the threshold the enterprise society of
vibrant competition and investment in the capital of oneself is thus given free to run
its course without any interruption from social security or inopportune citizens below
this threshold point:
Full employment and voluntarist growth are renounced in favour of the integra-
tion in a market economy. But this entails a fund of a floating population, of a limi-
nal, infra- or supra-liminal population, in which the assurance mechanism will en-
able each to live, after a fashion, and to live in such a way that he can always be
available for possible work, if market conditions require it.140
This type of biopolitics directed at a population that is dynamically divided according

to the threshold of enterprise looks as if it rigidly resigns itself and the human beings it
comprises to the economic order that was formerly the expression of the self-
137 Stoléru 23; quoted and translated in Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 213, n51 [Foucault,
Naissance de la biopolitique, 220, n51].
138 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 207 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 212-213].
139 Ibid., 204, 207 [209, 212]. A review of the factual experimentations with negative tax is
found in Robert ‚. Moffitt, The Negative Income Tax and the Evolution of U.S. Welfare
Policy, Journal of Economic Perspectives 17:3 (2003): 119-140.
128
regulatory household of the same population. According to Foucault, however, it is

also a very loose-fitting and alterable economic order:
[It] is not at all the ideal or project of an exhaustively disciplinary society in which
legal network hemming in individuals is taken over and extended internally by
normative mechanisms. On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the
image, the idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of
systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in
which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought
to bear on the rules of the game rather than the players, and finally in which there
is an environmental type of intervention instead of a internal subjugation of indi-
viduals.141
This theme-program, which he also designates an environmentalism open to un-

knowns and transversal phenomena, 142 is Foucault s last proposition of a neo-liberal
biopolitics, concurrently regulating the population both rigidly and loosely in accor-
dance with economic principles.
Conclusively, it is also within the framework of a neo-liberal biopolitics such as
this that Foucault locates an imperative mutation in the general dispositive of go-
vernmentality. Instead of finding its governmental rationality in its own strength, in
maximizing itself, or in calculating the forces of itself and others, as was the case in the
tradition of raison d’État in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the problem of this
new governmentality, being worked upon since the late eighteenth century, has now
grown to be a matter of fashioning government
on the rationality of those who are governed as economic subjects It is a matter

of modeling government [on] the rationality of individuals insofar as they employ
a certain number of means, and employ them as they wish, in order to satisfy these
interest in the most general sense of the term: the rationality of the governed must
serve as the regulating principle for the rationality of government. 143
Hence, what has characterized the development of liberal rationality in Foucault s

account is the rationalization of the art of government on the rational behavior of
those who are governed. 144
Evidently, this is also the situation in which government as regulation of self-
regulation, as conduct of conduct, as management of self-management, or as the arti-
culation of the crossing point between political technologies of power and ethical
techniques of the self, comes into view as imperative problematics to engage in both
practically and theoretically. Though Foucault s lectures were given thirty years ago,
the relationship between government and self-government in all its different forms,
141 Ibid.
142 Ibid., 261, n* [266, n*].
143 Ibid., 312 [316].
144 Ibid.
129
not only has long historical roots that need to be further sorted out, but also remains
with us and forms our actuality as something we still have to relate to and act upon in
our individual and collective ways of being. With the publication of The Birth of Biopo-
litics an important milestone in this historical work on the ontology of our present can
now finally reach a wider audience. Additionally, being brought back to the be-
ning of one of the most elaborate explorations of how modern liberal biopolitics has
grown into our cultural skin may also open an opportunity to bring even further our
critical evaluations of how this biopolitical endeavor continually seems to be reconfi-
gured and reborn.
130

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© Marius Gudmand-Høyer & Thomas Lopdrup Hjorth 2009

Liberal Biopolitics Reborn

What interest is there in talking about liberalism, the physiocrats, [Marquis]

1. Governmental Concepts of Biopolitics

The reason why it is difficult to resolve whether Foucault s lectures of do or do

It is not enough, however, to disentangle the relationships between the various

the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures analyses and reflections, calcula-

It is through and in continuation of this historical triangulation that Foucault

Secondly, in Foucault s account the surfacing of a population being both self-

35 Ibid., 29-53 [32-56].

41 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 47 [Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, 48].

structions, concurrently restricting and guaranteeing the exercise of this freedom.46 In

51 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 29 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 30-31].

critique pointed to an internal refinement of raison d’État, 55 being principally op-

right or not to interfere as is does, this critique considered instead government in

The emergence of this type of governmental activity also contributes to Foucault s

The 1979 course gives considerable attention to German neo-liberalism, primarily in

80 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 192 [Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 198].

91 Ibid., 116 [118].

In programming this new art of government, the multiplication and dissemination of

97 Ibid., 241 [247].

Liberalism in America is a whole way of being. It is a type of relation between

103 Ibid., 218 [224].

other partners in a process of exchange, he is converted into a subject of personal en-

107 Ibid., 225 [231].

112 Ibid., 229 [235-236].

Meanwhile, in conjunction with this grid of economic intelligibility Foucault

119 Ibid., 246 [253].

5. Conclusion: Liberal Biopolitics and the Economic Game

of features pertaining to the challenge of creating a social policy within a neo-liberal

132 Ibid., 196-197 [199-201].

This type of biopolitics directed at a population that is dynamically divided according

regulatory household of the same population. According to Foucault, however, it is

This theme-program, which he also designates an environmentalism open to un-

on the rationality of those who are governed as economic subjects It is a matter

Hence, what has characterized the development of liberal rationality in Foucault s

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