BioPolitics: Jan 24 & 31, 1979

January 24, 1979

Foucault begins by describing raison d’Etat’s principle of equilibrium, which keeps one state from dominating the others. Under this model, economics is a zero sum game based on the finite amount of gold that exists in the world. The enrichment of one state comes as a result of a cost to the others. This lead to Pascal’s problem of how do you halt the game in order to divide the winnings?

As I understand Foucault's explination, the new model that emerged during the eighteenth century sought freedom through dual profits based on collective and unlimited enrichment. The seller achieves maximum profits while the buyer suffers minimum expense. Through globalization the entire world becomes an unlimited market, ending the zero sum game. The nature of the global market creates legal obligations forming judicial relationships (International Law) and guarantees perpetual peace, economically but not necessarily politically.

Liberalism is the unlimited economic development where the veridiction of the market is calculated by governmental utility. Under the new art of the government, freedom is not a given but “the actual relation between governors and governed,” which is consumed, produced, and organized. “Liberalism formulates simply the following: I am going to produce what you need to be free. I am going to see to it that you are free to be free” (p. 63). As freedom is produced in terms of the market, a new problem of security emerges as individual interests must be balanced with collective interests. Liberalism forms a culture of danger as both freedom and security are sought.

Another consequence of the liberal art of government is the need for procedures of “control, constraint and coercion” to be a counterweight to freedom. Political formulas such as Panopticism develop, which “enable one to supervise the conduct of individuals while increasing the profitability and productivity of their activites” (p. 67). Freedom is produced through interventions. However, economic interventions like welfare measures and Keynesian policies form liberal and capitalistic crisis of govermentality as these manufactured freedoms “produce destructive effects which prevail over the very freedom they are suppose to produce” (p. 69). Foucault’s goal is to study the crisis of the general apparatus of governmentality as it “is currently experienced, lived, practiced, and formulated”(70).

January 31, 1979

Foucault’s method starts without a theory of state where “the state is not a universal nor in itself an autonomous source of power” (p. 77). He proposes an analysis not of the state but the effects of crisis of governmentality “State-phobia.” Three themes he hopes will emerge from the study of American and German forms of liberalism are “Law and order, the state and civil society, and politics of Life” (p. 78). These liberal arts of government shared a common adversary Keynesian economics.

While America's liberalism was a response to Roosevelt's New Deal, Germany’s neo-liberalism arose from Keynsesian policies, which resulted from a post World War economic reconstruction that focused on state planning and socialization. The economy was freed from state controls as prices were deregulated. Ludwig Erhard the architect of the German recovery, believed that a socialist “state which abuses its power in the economic realm…violates the freedom of individuals…it forfeits its rights of representavity” (81). By creating a space that guaranteed freedom in the economic domain a liberal government establishes its political sovereignty. The economy legitimizes the state and creates public law, which produce a permanent consensus through the population’s adherence to the system and the regime. It was “recognized that not only was private ownership of the means of production perfectly legitimate, but that it had a right to state protection and encouragement” (88). Socialism where the state owns the means of production functions as a police state and collides with the principles of liberalism. Socialist policies have no rationality as an art of government and can only be connected to other governemtalities as a type of internal logic. An economy must be free to create a state and give it legitimacy.

Discussion Questions

1)Foucault discusses a crisis of governmentality when manufactured freedoms “produce destructive effects which prevail over the very freedom they are suppose to produce” (p. 69.) How does liberalism address these destructive effects? Also on the other side, what might be the destructive effects of the market having too much freedom?

2)According to Foucault, the liberal state’s legitimacy, “the population’s overall adherence to its regime and system,” is produced by “a permanent consensus,” which translates into “a political consensus, inasmuch as they accept this economic game of freedom” (p. 84). Within the liberal model, at what point might this consensus become a type of coercion and what type of a crisis of governmentaltiy would this create?

Points of Clarity

1)Foucault's goal is to clarify how the apparatus of government is currently experienced by examining history. In using this method, would you start in the present, then go to the past or vice versa?

2)Explain further Foucault’s procedure of starting without any universals and how it might work as a research method.