Colin Gordon - Foucault, Neoliberalism Etc. 2015
Colin Gordon - Foucault, Neoliberalism Etc. 2015
Colin Gordon
Zamora says in his interview: “Even Colin Gordon, one of Foucault’s principal
translators and commentators in the Anglo-Saxon world, has no trouble
saying that he sees in Foucault a sort of precursor to the Blairite Third Way,
incorporating neoliberal strategy within the social-democratic corpus”, adding
subsequently, “Foucault, then, doesn’t advocate neoliberalism, but he adopts
all of its critiques of the welfare state. He attacks the supposed “dependency”
it produces, the very notion of “rights,” and its negative effect on the poor. His
Colin Gordon: Foucault, neoliberalism etc.
What I actually wrote (in 2007) was a little more nuanced and qualified than
Zamora suggests:
I am not aware that Blair ever read Foucault. Anthony Giddens, for a time
the Blair‐Clinton court philosopher, usually includes a caricatural account
of Foucault only as a marginal item in his doctrinal digests. But I think
parts of the formulae of Clinton and Blair for a ’third way’ may have
effectively carried out a form of the operation which Foucault might have
been taken as challenging the socialists to contemplate – the selective
incorporation, in an updated and corrected social democracy, of certain
elements of neoliberal analysis and strategy. In some ways, it is the
continuation of a trend initiated in the 70s by Schmidt in Germany, Giscard
in France and Healey in Britain, and in her different way by Thatcher – the
truth‐telling role of government, in a world of global economic uncertainty
and competition, as moral tutor of citizens in an ethic of enterprise and
responsibility. The success of this formula in Britain seemed for a long time
to be limited only by the irritability of citizens and the claims of the fourth
estate, the media, to make and unmake governmental power (both of these
reactions being severely aggravated, of course, by Blair’s extension of his
governmental agenda to include the neoconservative enterprise of
civilisational confrontation and global war on terror).
difficulties, in these terms. 1 Some more work of this kind would, I suggest,
still be useful.
1 William Davies, “The Governmentality of New Labour”, Public Policy Research 13, 4 (2006).
http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/files/ppr_dec06.doc
(a) Zamora alleges that Foucault here adopts overtly neoliberal arguments,
criticising and advocating the dismantling of the Post War welfare state, and
rejecting the principle of universal healthcare provision. In fact the
interview contains no reference whatsoever to neoliberalism or to any of the
key neoliberal ideas discussed in Foucault's lectures – the market, enterprise,
competition or human capital theory.
(b) Foucault says in this interview that the goal of a social security system is
to provide both security and autonomy: he says that, for understandable
historical reasons, the welfare state established in France since the inter-war
years provides security, but not autonomy; it needs to be modified to meet
the growing social demand for individual autonomy which has emerged in
society since the 1950s and 60s, while (crucially) still continuing to provide
for the needs of individual security as well: “we should expect our system
of social security to free usfrom dangers and from situations that tend to
debase of subjugate us”. (Power, 366). To achieve this, he says that “We must
transform the field of social institutions into a field of experimentation” and
untertake “a campaign of decentralisation... in order to bring the users
closer to the decsion-making centres on which they depend, and to tie them
into the decision-making process” (370).
Foucault News http://www.foucaultnews.com January 2015
As Foucault saw it, the most pernicious problem with Mitterrand and
his supporters was not their leftist orientation, but their inability to
recognize socialism’s constitutive shortcoming: the fact that there is “no
autonomous socialist governmentality.” 4 (564)
Let us leave aside the point that Foucault makes no mention in his
lectures of François Mitterrand, his party or his supporters. In Foucault's
lectures at this point we do indeed read the following:
At this precise moment, one might think Foucault has declared as an iron
historical law that socialism cannot produce its own governmentality. But he
then almost immediately qualifies this (emphasis added):
But in any case, I do not think that for the moment there is an autonomous
governmentality of socialism". (BoB 93)
After a further page (all of which is worth rereading, and which indeed
includes harsh words on actually existing socialisms) he says:
3 Michael C. Behrent, Liberalism without humanism: Michel Foucault and the free-
market creed, 1976–1979, Modern Intellectual History , 6, 3 (2009), pp 539-68.
Two years later, Foucault welcomed the electoral victories of Mitterrand and
his party, suggesting they had been made possible by what the socialists had
learned from the new social movements of the 70s. He spoke of recognising in
the new government's first measures what he called a “logic of the left”. As is
well known, the subsequent performance of the government did not live up to
his hopes, but it is clear that at this point he was ready to entertain hopes, and
indeed declared his own readiness to engage in dialogue with the government.
To those who read French, I recommend the chapter by Christian Laval,
“L'entreprise comme nouvelle forme de gouvernement. Usages et messages de
Michel Foucault”, in the recent volume Usages de Foucault, edited by Hervé
Oulc'hen. (PUF 2014). Laval notices, as I have done, that there has been a
degree of left/right cooperation in efforts to re-brand Foucault as a transfuge
from the Left to neoliberalism, involving not only those (among whom
Zamora is evidently not the first) who are keen to expose and denounce this
alleged conversion as a betrayal, but also those (amongst whom one should no
doubt count, in recent times, François Ewald, together with Zamora's co-
author Michael Behrent, himself the author of a somewhat gushing interview-
profile of Ewald) who are keen to recruit Foucault as a late convert to their
own views. Other commentators of whom one perhaps might have expected
better seem to have recently slid with surprising facility into a similar malaise
of confabulation and falsification. That topic would require another post. In
the meantime I suspect we will still have to wait some time before seeing
Foucault inducted into the Mont Pelerin Society's hall of fame, or awarded a
posthumous Nobel for neoliberal economics. It has become routine since the
publication of the lectures to credit Foucault's contribution with “prescience”,
where what we should really be asking is why he was so unusual in his
attentiveness to the visible developments of his present and recent past. It is
good that some people operating outside of sectarian bunkers are now not
only making intelligent uses of Foucault's work on neoliberalism, but
developing our critical understanding of many aspects of neoliberalism which
Foucault did not live either to witness or to describe. 5 This work needs to
continue.
5 Notably Jamie Peck (2010), Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford UP 2010), Philip
Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin The Making of the
Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard UP 2009), and William Davies, The Limits of
Neoliberalism Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Sage 2014). See also the
excellent chapter by Mary Poovey, “Stories We Tell about Liberal Markets: The Efficient
Market Hypothesis and Great-Men Narratives of Change”, in Simon Gunn and James Vernon
(Eds.) The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (UCP 2011).