Abstract
TODAY I WOULD LIKE to start from the things I have been explaining over the last weeks and go back a bit toward what I took as my starting point at the beginning of the year.Last week I tried to show how American neo-liberals apply, or at any rate try to apply economic analysis to a series of objects, to domains of behavior or conduct which were not market forms of behavior or conduct: they attempt to apply economic analysis to marriage, the education of children, and criminality, for example. This of course poses a problem of both theory and method, the problem of the legitimacy of applying such an economic model, the practical problem of the heuristic value of this model, etcetera. These problems all revolve around a theme or a notion: homo œconomicus, economic man. To what extent is it legitimate, and to what extent is it fruitful, to apply the grid, the schema, and the model of homo œconomicus to not only every economic actor, but to every social actor in general inasmuch as he or she gets married, for example, or commits a crime, or raises children, gives affection and spends time with the kids? So there is a problem of the validity of the applicability of this grid of homo œconomicus. Actually, this problem of the application of homo œconomicus has become one of the classics of neo-liberal discussion in the United States.
The model of homo ceconomicus. ∼ Its generakation to every form of behavior in American neo-liberalism. ∼Economic analysis and behavioral techniques. Homo aeconomicus as the basic element of the new governmental reason appeared in the eighteenth century. •-, Elementsfor a history of the notion of homo ceconomicus before Walras and Pareto. ∼The subject of interest in English empiricist philosophy (Hume). • The heterogeneity of the subject of interest and the legal subject: (1) The irreducible nature of interest in comparison with juridical will. (2) The contrasting logics of the market and the contract.Second innovation with regard to the juridical model: the economic subject’s relationship with political power. Condorcet. Adam Smith’s“invisible hand”: invisibility of the link between the individual’s pursuit ofprofit and the growth of collective wealth. The nontota4ble nature of the economic world. The sovereign’s necessary ignorance. •-, Political economy as critique of governmental reason: rejection of the possibility of an economic sovereign in its two, mercantilist and physiocratic,forms. Political economy as a science lateral to the art of government.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Footnotes
I.M. Kirzner, “Rational action and economic theory,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 70 (4), August 1962, pp. 380–385.
See G. Becker, “Irrational action and economic theory,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 70 (1), August 1962, pp. 153–168.
Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–1990), American psychologist and psycho-linguist, is one of the main representatives of the behaviorist school. Harvard professor from 1947, he published many books, amongst which, Science and Human Behavior (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1953); Verbal Behavior (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1957); and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1971). Hostile to the use of statistics, he thought individual behavior should be studied, which presupposes control of the environment in which the subject is placed and the definition of informative measures of response. ( … ) When a subject moves in his environment, some of his behavior produces detectable modifications in the latter (contingencies of reinforcement). The effective response is a class of responses defined by the consequences it has for the subject and emitted in a given situation without being causally dependent on a stimulus of the situation. A rigorous control of the contingencies thus enables repeatable behavior to be selected Encyclopaedia Universalis, Thesaurus, 1975, vol. 20, p. 1797. The end sought is therefore “selection of the relevant behavior by manipulation of programs of reinforcement” ibid.
F. Castel, R. Castel and A. Lovell, La Société psychiatrique avancée: le modèle américain (Paris: Grasset, 1979) ch. 4, pp. 138–139; English translation by Arthur Goldhammer, The Psychiatric Society (New York: Columbia University Press) pp. 113–115, on behavior modification, inspired by the principles of conditioning (Pavlov) and behaviorism (Thorndike, Skinner) in the psychiatric milieu (see also ch. 8, pp. 299–302; English, pp. 265–266).
John Locke (1632–1704), the author of Essay concerning Human Understanding (London: printed by E. Holt for T. Basset, 1690).
David Hume (1711–1776), An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975, 3rd edition), Appendix 1, “Concerning Moral Sentiment” p. 293: Ask a man why he uses exercise; he “will answer, because he desires to keep his health. If you then enquire, why he desires health, he will readily reply, because sickness is painful. If you push your enquiries farther, and desire a reason why he hates pain, it is impossible he can ever give any. This is an ultimate end, and is never referred to any other object.”
See D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) Book III, Part III, section III, p. 416: “Where a passion is neither founded on false supposition, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it. ’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”
William Blackstone (1723–1780): conservative jurist and professor of Law at Oxford, where Bentham was his student 1763–64 (who later appears, on the basis of his Fragment on Goverment (1776_) as the “anti-Blackstone” (Halévy)). The author of Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765–1769) in 4 volumes. See E. Halévy, La Formation du radicalisme philosophique, vol. 1, 1995 ed., pp. 55–56; The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, pp. 35–36; Mohammed El Shakankiri, La Philosophie juridique de Jeremy Bentham (Paris: LJDJ, 1970) pp. 223–237.
See Commentaries, vol. 1 (there is a good summary in M. El Shakankiri, pp. 236–238). On the mixture of juridical and utilitarian principles in Blackstone’s justification of the penalty, see E. Halévy, La Formation du radicalisme philosophique p. 101; The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, p. 58, who detects here a lack of coherence.
D. Hume, “Of the Original Contract” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987) p. 481: “We are bound to obey our sovereign, it is said; because we have given a tacit promise to that purpose. But why are we bound to observe our promise? It must here be asserted, that the commerce and intercourse of mankind, which are of such mighty advantage, can have no security where men pay no regard to their engagements.” See also A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part II, section VIII, “Of the source of allegiance.”
A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part II, section IX, p. 553: “( … ) if interest first produces obedience to government, the obligation to obedience must cease, whenever the interest ceases, in any great degree, and in a considerable number of instances.”
Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), author of the famous Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924; reprinted Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988).
Foucault means “last year.” See Sécurité, Territoire, Population; Security, Territory, Population, lectures of 18 January and 5 April 1978.
Condorcet (Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, marquis de, 1743–1794), Esquisse d’un tableau his-torique des progrès de l’espirit humain (1793), Ninth era (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1988) p. 219: “How, in this astonishing variety of works and products, of needs and resources, in this frightening complication of interests, which links the isolated individual’s subsistence and well-being to the general system of societies, which makes him dependent on all the accidents of nature and every political event, which, as it were, extends his capacity to experience enjoyment or privation to the entire globe, how, in this apparent chaos, do we see nonetheless, through a general law of the moral world, the efforts each makes for himself serving the well-being of all, and, despite the external clash of opposed interests, the common interest requires that each knows how to interpret his own interest and is able pursue it without obstruction?” [See below, note 28; G.B.]
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, eds. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), Vol. I, Book IV, ch. 2, p. 456.
Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), philosopher and theologian, member of the Oratorians. Foucault is referring here to the “occasionalist” thesis, or theory of “occasional causes,” defended by Malebranche in several of his works—De la Recherche de la vérité (1674), XV Éclaircissment, Œuvres, t. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1979) pp. 969–1014; Entretiens sur la méta-physique et la religion (1688), VII, Œuvres, t. II (1992) pp. 777–800, etcetera—according to which “only God is a real cause. What we call a natural cause is not at all a real and genuine cause, but simply, if we insist on keeping the name, an occasional cause, which, as a consequence of general laws, determines that God manifests his action, which alone is effective, in this way” (V. Delbos, “Malebrance et Maine de Biran,” Revue de métaphysique, 1916, pp. 147–148). This omnipresent, but hidden God is the source of every movement and active inclination: “God, who alone can act in us, is now hidden from our eyes; his operations are not perceptible, and although he produces and conserves every being, the mind that so ardently seeks the cause of every thing has difficulty recognizing it, although it encounters it at every moment” (De la Recherche de la vérité, XV Éclaircissement, p. 969). On the theological sources of Smith’s conception of the “invisible hand,” see J. Viner, The Role of Providence in Social Order (Philadelphia: Independence Square, 1972) ch. 3: “The invisible hand and the economic order.”
A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, p. 456: Nor is it always the worse for the society that it [the end, promotion of the publick interest] “was no part of it [the individual’s intention].”
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966). Ferguson’s Essay was first published in Edinburgh in 1767. The French translation by M. Bergier, Essai sur l’histoire de la société civile, appeared in the Librairie Mme Yves Desaint in 1783, although the text was printed five years previously This translation, revised and corrected, was republished with an important introduction by C. Gautier (Paris: PUF, 1992).
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2008 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Senellart, M., Ewald, F., Fontana, A. (2008). 28 March 1979. In: Senellart, M., Ewald, F., Fontana, A. (eds) The Birth of Biopolitics. Michel Foucault. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594180_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594180_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-8655-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59418-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)