Foucault And Neoliberalism

Even if Foucault was not a scholar who worked within the history of economic thoughts, his insights in the revolution that led to the emergence of neoliberalism seem to be persuasive. In this chapter, Foucault’s analysis is to be seen as a starting point, or, otherwise as other authors and other strains of contemporary critical theory will be considered to achieve a deeper comprehension of neoliberalism  or, better, in order to posit neoliberalism as a research object that can be defined and grasped in its autonomy and self-consistency. Nevertheless, before the offer of an outline of what Foucault understands with neoliberalism, it is important to pay attention to the reasons that led him to shift his research to this subject.

The difference

Within these Lectures, he introduces the term of ‘biopolitics’ within his philosophical vocabulary  ‘Birth of Biopolitics’ is, in fact, the title of the Lecture (Foucault 2008). This notion is strictly bound to another important element we find in Foucault’s toolbox from the second half of the Seventies, namely with the notion of ‘governmentality’. Asking rhetorically to his audience why an analysis of some scholars of the Twentieth century belonging to the discipline of economics should provide an explanation of what biopolitics and governmentality are, Foucault answers that methodological reasons led him to take that step. These reasons are strictly related to the question of how power structure arise and propagate within society. In order to better understand that point, it is mandatory to step back to the former year Lectures . The topics of the Lectures Foucault held in 1977-78, ‘Security, Territory, Population’ (Foucault 2007), gave birth to modern state. The reason for this

Surely, not only the enforcement of laws, but also the more general set of interventions - focused to guarantee the ordered development of societal intercourses - requires the presence of the public hand  it demands, in other words, those kinds of intervention that Foucault designates through the notion of discipline. What Foucault deeply counterclaims, however, is the idea that the state action can be always and mainly recognized and represented as a bundle of forces coming from ‘above’ and floating ‘down’ to the social structure taken as a whole. Actually, Foucault complains the idea that it is possible to identify and isolate a clear line dividing the public sphere and society itself, whereas the latter is meant as the sphere within which individuals negotiate their own position in front of the pervasiveness of public interference in order to preserve their freedom of action. Foucault, against the concept of state action that reduces the latter to disciplinary power, suggests considering the state  since its inception at the beginning of the modern era  as the central node of a broader network with a vast array of agencies whose aim is the government of individual life. According to Foucault, politics is nothing but the art of governing people. The modern