Abstract
LAST WEEK I TRIED to show you how ordoliberalism necessarily entailed a Gesellschaftspolitik, as it was called, that is to say, a policy of society and a social interventionism that is at the same time active, multiple, vigilant, and omnipresent. So, on the one hand there is a market economy, and on the other an active, intense, and interventionist social policy. But we should again carefully underline that this social policy in ordoliberalism is not to function like a compensatory mechanism for absorbing or nullifying the possible destructive effects of economic freedom on society or the social fabric. In actual fact, if there is a permanent and multiform social interventionism, it is not directed against the market economy or against the tendency of the market economy. On the contrary, this interventionism is pursued as the historical and social condition of possibility for a market economy, as the condition enabling the formal mechanism of competition to function so that the regulation the competitive market must ensure can take place correctly without the negative effects that the absence of competition would produce. The Gesellschaftspolitik must not nullify the anti-social effects of competition; it must nullify the possible anti-competitive mechanisms of society, or at any rate anti-competitive mechanisms that could arise within society.
Second aspect of the “policy of society” according to the neo-liberals: the problem of law in a society regulated according to the model of the competitive market economy. ∼ Return to the Walter Lippmann colloquium. ∼Reflections based on a text by Louis Rougier. (1) The idea of a juridical-economic order. Reciprocity of relations between economic processes and institutional framework. ∼Political stake: the problem of the survival of capitalism. Two complementary problems: the theory of competition and the historical and sociological analysis of capitalism.∼(2) The question of legal interventionism. ∼ Historical reminder: the Rule of law (1 Etat de droit) in the eighteenth century, in opposition to despotism and the police state. Re-elaboration of the notion in the nineteenth century: the question of arbitration between citiKens and public authorities. The problem of administrative courts. ∼ The neo-liberal project: to introduce the principles of the Rule of law into the economic order. Rule of law and planning according to Hayek. ∼ (3) Growth ofjudicial demand. ∼ General conclusion: the specyficity of the neo-liberal art of government in Germany. Ordoliberalism faced with the pessimism of Schumpeter.
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Footnotes
The just price (justum pretium) was fixed as the ideal model of transactions by medieval scholasticism on the basis of the Aristotelian doctrine of commutative justice (Nicomachean Ethics, Book V). See S.L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), Volume One, pp. 58–59: “Lieutenants general of police, commissaires, inspectors, grain measurers and local officials repeatedly invoked the ‘just price’ which they construed as their obligation to assure & The just price was a price which would neither ‘disgust’ merchants nor ‘wound’ consumers. It was predicated upon an ideal of moderation which tended to vary with the circumstances. A price was thought just when merchants settled for a moderate profit and the bulk of the people, who lived in a state of chronic misery, did not suffer immoderately, that is to say, more than they did usually. In untroubled moments the just price was simply the current price (as the theologians had recommended), fixed by common estimation rather than imposed by merchant maneuvers or governmental fiat.” See J.W. Baldwin, The Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists, canonists and theologians in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1959); Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, edited from a manuscript by E. Boody Schumpeter (London and Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1982) pp. 60–61, and pp. 88–89. See the complementary bibliography given in S.L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy, p. 59, note 14. On the question of price, see Les M.ots et les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) ch. 6, section 4; English translation by A. Sheridan, The Order of Things. An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock and New York: Pantheon, 1970) ch. 6, section 4: “The pledge and the price” (where the question of price is essentially treated in relation to the function of money).
Pierre Le Pesant, seigneur de Boisguilbert (1646–1714), the author notably of Détail de la France (1695) and the Traité de la nature, culture, commerce et intérêt des grains (1707). He is seen as being the precursor of the physiocrats. See Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, p. 215 note 1, and especially A. Sauvy, Pierre de Boisguilbert, ou la Naissance de l’économie politique (Paris: INED, 1966) 2 volumes. However, it seems that Boisguilbert does not use the concept of “natural price.” He sometimes speaks of “price of proportion” (or “proportional” price) without a precise analytical content (buyers and sellers draw the same advantage) and “price de rigueur,” with reference to (minimum acceptable) cost of production.
See, E. Depitre, introduction to Dupont de Nemours, De l’exportation et de l’mportation des grains (1764), (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1911) pp. xxiii–xxiv: “In the physiocratic system nothing is easier to determine than the good price: it is the common and hardly varying price of the general market, the one established by competition between freely trading nations.” See also, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, lecture of 5 April 1978, note 25; Security, Territory, Population, p. 361.
See A. Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan and Co., 1890), and Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, p. 189 and p. 220.
On this new definition of the market as site of veridiction or of the truth of prices, see, for example, E. [Bonnot de] Condillac, Le Commerce et le Gouvernement considérés relativement l’un à l’autre (Amsterdam-Paris: Jombert & Cellot, 1776) Part 1, ch. 4: “Des marchés ou des lieux où se rendent ceux qui ont besoin de faire des échanges.” See especially p. 23 of the 1795 edition (reprinted, Paris-Geneva: Slatkine, 1980): “[ & ] prices can only be regulated in markets, because it is only there that the gathered citizens, by comparing their interests in exchanging, can judge the value of things relative to their needs. They can only do that there because it is only in markets that everything is put on view: it is only in markets that one can judge the relationship of abundance and scarcity between things that determines their respective prices.”
See Sécurité, Territoire, Population, lecture of 18 January 1978, p. 33 sq; Security, Territory, Population, p. 30 sq.
This expression had already been employed by Foucault in the lecture delivered in May 1978 at the Société française de philosophie, “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, 84th year, no. 2, April-June 1990, p. 51, with regard to the difference between genealogy and the procedures of explanatory history: Let’s say roughly that, in contrast with a genesis orientated towards the unity of an originating cause pregnant “with a multiple descent, it would be a matter of a genealogy, that is to say something which tries to reconstruct the conditions of appearance of a singularity on the basis of multiple determining elements, from which it arises not as the product, but as the effect. Establishing intelligibility (mise en intelligibilité), therefore, but in which we should see that it does not function according to a principle of closure.” Foucault had already dwelt on this problem of intelligibility in history in Sécurité, Territoire, Population, lecture 8 March 1978, p. 244; Security, Territory, Population, pp. 238–239. On the distinction between genesis and genealogy, see ibid., lecture of 8 February 1978, p. 121; pp. 116–117.
On Foucault’s relationship with the Frankfurt School, see: “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” pp. 42–43; “‘Omnes et singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 3: Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000) p. 299; French translation by P.E. Dauzat, “‘Omnes et singulatim’: vers une critique de la raison politique” in Dits et Écrits, 4, p. 135; “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” Essential Works, 3, pp. 357–358; French translation by F. Durand-Bogaert, “Espace, savoir et pouvoir,” Dits et Écrits, 4, p. 279; “Structuralisme et post-structuralisme,” interview with G. Raulet, Dits et Écrits, 4, pp. 438–441; English translation by Jeremy Harding, amended, “Structuralism and Post-structuralism,” Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998) pp. 440–443.
Author of the famous treatise Dei delitti e delle pene (An Essay on Crimes and Punishments) which “was published in Livorno in 1764, Cesare Bonesana, marquis de Beccaria (1738–1794) in 1769 obtained the chair of cameral and economic sciences established shortly before at Milan (he renamed it the chair of political economy), which he left after two years for employment in the Milan administration. His lecture notes were published for the first time in 1804 by P. Custodi, with the title Elementi di economia pubblica (Scrittori italiani di economia politica: Parte Moderna, vol. XI and XII) (Milan: G.G. Destefanis, 1804). See also the Discours de M. le Marqui Cesare Beccaria Bonesana&.professeur royal de la chaire nouvellement établie par ordre de S.M. impériale pour le commerce et l’administration publique, prononcé à son installation dans les écoles Palatines, trans. J.A. Comparet (Lausanne: F. Grasset, 1769) [translated from the original Italian edition, Prolusione letta dal regio pro-fessore Marchese Cesare Beccaria Bonesana nell’apertura della nuova cattedra di scienze camerali ultimamente comendata da S.M.I.R.A. (Florence: G. Allegrini e comp., 1769)] and, Principes dve conomie politique appliqués à l’agriculture par l’auteur du “Traité des délits et des peines” (Paris: VVe D i 1 TT 1 HQnN tt-T-1 T- 11 £1 ■ ■ V ■1 £ . Bouchard-Huzard, 1852). The bulk of his economic writings consisted of those government reports” (Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, p. 179); Schumpeter describes Beccaria as the “Italian A. Smith,” ibid. See, Atti di governo by Beccaria, being published in the projected seventeen volumes of the Edizione nazionale (five volumes so far published: vol. VI-X, 1987–2000). These writings address very diverse questions: money, mines, weights and measures, manufacture and commerce, fairs and markets, etcetera. I owe these clarifications to the recent thesis of Ph. Audegean, “Philosophie réformatrice, Cesare Beccaria et la critique des savoirs de son temps: droit, rhétorique, économie” (University of Paris 1-Sorbonne, 2003).
Adam Smith (1723–1790), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Straham & T. Cadell, 1776), and more recently, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) in two volumes.
See., Jeremy Bentham’s Economic Writings (see above, lecture of 10 January 1979, note 9), and T.W. Hutchison, “Bentham as an economist,” Economic Journal, LXVI, 1956, pp. 288–306.
See, “Il faut dfendre la société,” lecture of 4 February 1976, p. 84 sq; “Society Must be Defended,” pp. 98 sq. The word “radicalism” is not employed by Foucault here. See the works of Christopher Hill, with which Foucault was very familiar (see A. Fontana and M. Bertani, “Situation du cours”; “Course context,” ibid. p. 262; ibid. p. 290).
See Surveiller et Punir. Naisssance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) pp. 51–58; English translation by Alan Sheridan, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, and New York: Pantheon, 1977) pp. 48–57. See also the 1972–1973 course, “La Société punitive,” course summary in Dits et Écrits, 2, pp. 456–470; English translation by Robert Hurley, “The Punitive Society” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997) pp. 23–37.
French translation by M. Chevallier, Des délits et des peines (Geneva: Droz, 1965) § XII, p. 24: “But des châtiments”; English translation, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, 1807), ch. XII, “Of the Intent of Punishments,” pp. 41–42. See, Surveiller et Punir, pp. 106–134, “La douceur des peines”; Discipline and Punish, “The gentle way in punishment” pp. 104–131.
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Senellart, M., Ewald, F., Fontana, A. (2008). 21 February 1979. In: Senellart, M., Ewald, F., Fontana, A. (eds) The Birth of Biopolitics. Michel Foucault. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594180_7
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