On Liberalism: Limits, the Market and the Subject

Abstract

Between January and early April 1979, Foucault delivered a course entitled The Birth of Biopolitics at the Collège de France that contains a number of features distinguishing it from the rest; it is the only one that refers directly to historical sequences from the twentieth century, but also to burning issues of the day, while there is discrepancy between course title and content: biopolitics did not figure in it, and it dealt with liberalism in its classical and more contemporary versions. Publication of the course occasioned some very intense debates, which soon assumed a caricatural form: did Foucault venture a severe critique or a captivated praise of neo-liberalism? Yet this debate over Foucault’s “(neo-)liberal temptation” is slanted by the fact that, while perceived by all as extremely fresh, the course was delivered half a century ago and in the interval the meaning of “neo-liberalism” has changed profoundly. My intention in this chapter is to fix upon some of the principal concepts employed by him as vectors of identity for what he calls “liberal governmentality,” as well as for their neo-liberal reconfiguration in our immediate present.