Neoliberal Governmentality: Foucault on the Birth of Biopolitics

Abstract

Foucault’s overriding interest was not in’ knowledge as ideology’, as Marxists would have it, where bourgeois knowledge, say, modern liberal economics was seen as false knowledge or bad science. Nor was he interested in ’knowledge as theory’ as classical liberalism has constructed disinterested knowledge, based on inherited distinctions from the Greeks, including Platonic epistemology, and endorsed by the Kantian separation of schema/content that distinguishes the analytic enterprise. Rather Foucault examined practices of knowledge produced through the relations of power.¹ He examined how these practices, then, were Merleau-Ponty; Heidegger; Derrida; and Foucault). He summarises Foucault’s notion as folused to augment and refine the efficacy and instrumentality of power in its exercise over both individuals and populations, and also in large measure helped to shape the constitution of subjectivity. Fundamental to his governmentality studies was the understanding that Western society professed to be based on principles of liberty and the Rule of Law and said to derive the legitimation of the State from political philosophies that elucidated these very principles. Yet as a matter of historical fact, Western society employed technologies of power that operated on forms of disciplinary order or were based on biopolitical techniques that bypassed the law and its freedoms altogether. As Colin Gordon (2001: xxvi) puts it so starkly: Foucault embraced Nietzsche as the thinker,,who transforms Western philosophy by rejecting its founding disjunction of power and knowledge as myth”. By this he means that the rationalities of Western politics, from the time of the Greeks, had incorporated techniques of power specific to Western practices of government, first, in the expert knowledges of the Greek tyrant and, second, in the concept of pastoral power that characterized ecclesiastical government.