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Michel Foucaults apology for

neoliberalism
ab

Mitchell Dean
a

Department of Management, Philosophy and Politics,

Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark
b

Department of Humanities and Social Science, University of

Newcastle, Ourimbah, Australia
Published online: 10 Oct 2014.

To cite this article: Mitchell Dean (2014): Michel Foucaults apology for neoliberalism, Journal of
Political Power, DOI: 10.1080/2158379X.2014.967002
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Journal of Political Power, 2014

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2014.967002

Michel Foucaults apology for neoliberalism

Lecture delivered at the British Library on the 30th anniversary of the death
of Michel Foucault, June 25, 2014

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Mitchell Dean*
Department of Management, Philosophy and Politics, Copenhagen Business School,
Frederiksberg, Denmark; Department of Humanities and Social Science, University of
Newcastle, Ourimbah, Australia
This lecture evaluates the claim made by one of his closest followers, Franois
Ewald, that Foucault offered an apology for neoliberalism, particularly of the
American school represented by Gary Becker. It draws on exchanges between
Ewald and Becker in 2012 and 2013 at the University of Chicago shortly before
the latters death. It places Foucault in relation to the then emergent Second
Left in France, the critique of the welfare state, and, more broadly, the latetwentieth-century social-democratic take-up of neoliberal thought. It indicates
three limitations of his thought: the problem of state veridiction; the question
of inequality; and the concept of the economy. It also indicates how these might
be addressed within a general appreciation of his thought.
Keywords: Foucault; Ewald; Becker; neoliberalism; Second Left; economy;
state

The title of my talk is Michel Foucaults apology for neoliberalism. I know its
a bit provocative. The word apology is in inverted commas, so that is acceptable;
but the phrase apology for neoliberalism slightly misquotes the words of perhaps
his closest and most inuential follower. Nevertheless, on this evening, the 30th
anniversary of his death, I want to raise the question of Foucaults critical and
political legacy, given his status today as among the most inuential thinkers in the
contemporary human and social sciences. What is at stake is less Foucault himself
than ourselves in a time of the active withdrawal of the critical vocation of these
sciences, in which the vocabulary of power would itself be suspect and replaced by
the idiom of governance, and in which empirical analysis is encouraged but narrowed. In our universities, academic quality has become increasingly measurable in
monetary terms. Certainly a cool and contextualized investigation of the case for
this apology is warranted. But so too would be a thinking beyond Foucault, or at
least to a place that is necessarily somewhat different from his to move laterally
like a craysh as he put it (2008, p. 78).
*Email: md.mpp@cbs.dk
Lecture delivered at Remembering Foucault event, Department of Law, London School of
Economics. The event was associated with the conference Governing Academic Life. I
must thank Anne Barron and Mary Evans for organising the event and for the invitation to
present this lecture, and to my colleagues, Sverre Raffnse, Marius Gudmand-Hyer and
Kaspar Villadsen for their moderation of a draft of this lecture.
2014 Taylor & Francis

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M. Dean

On 9 May 2012, at the University of Chicago, Franois Ewald found himself in

a seminar in the presence of Gary Becker, the Chicago economist, whose work
Foucault addressed in several lectures of The Birth of Biopolitics in 1979. Ewald
described these lectures as the place where he (Foucault) made the apology of neoliberalism especially the apology of Gary Becker, who is referred to as the
most radical representative of American neoliberalism (Ewald in Becker et al.
2012, p. 4). Ewald, it must be said, spoke here with some authority. He completed
his doctorate on the Welfare State under Foucault and he has the honour of being
directly referred to in these lectures. He was his personal assistant at the Collge de
France. He would co-edit Foucaults shorter pieces (Dits et Ecrits) and act as general editor for the recent publication of his lectures at the Collge. Yet, he is something of a problematic gure for those on the Left: a right Foucauldian (Negri
2001), who would promote the policies and mechanisms for reconstructing
society according to neoliberal principles rst revealed to him in Foucaults lectures (Lazzarato 2009, p. 110). Ewald had been a militant Maoist who would enlist
Foucault in 1972 in what became known as LAffaire Bruay the dubious politics
surrounding the still unsolved murder of the teenaged daughter of a mining family
in northern France. He would nevertheless receive the Legion of Honour in 2006
for his services for the employers association, Medef. These included the break-up
of corporatist arrangements between employers, unions and the state, and the introduction of direct contractual negotiations, in what amounted to a self-styled coup
of civil society against the state at the time of the premiership of Lionel Jospin
(Behrent 2010, p. 619).
In Chicago, Ewald would claim that Foucault offered an apology of neoliberalism and an apology of Gary Becker. Even allowing for language difculties, perhaps he meant less an apology for than an apologia of neoliberalism and
Becker, that is, Foucault offered a form of public defence of them, of their relevance against those who would otherwise dismiss or denounce them. In fact,
Ewalds appraisal is even more positive than this. After discussing the post-68 situation, he suggests Foucault answered the demand for a theory of the state with the
notion of governmentality within which economists would act as truth-tellers in
relation to government. Foucault, he suggests, was searching for non-moral and
non-juridical theory and he found it in the economists. That is the celebration of
the economists work, of your work, he said to Gary Becker (Ewald in Becker
et al. 2012, p. 5). Ewald counselled Becker that Foucault discovered in him the
possibility of thinking about power without discipline and thus, to conduct the
behavior of the other without coercion, by incitation (Ewald in Becker et al. 2012,
p. 6). And there is no doubt that Ewald means all of this in an extremely complimentary way when he concludes this address with respect to Foucaults views:
Certain kinds of truth-telling are death for liberty, other kinds of truth-telling give
new possibilities for liberty. And he sees your work, your kind of analyses as creating the possibility to promote, to envision new kinds of liberty. Ewald would even
go so far as to claim that the idea of homo conomicus contained in Beckers theory was decisive in the movement of Foucaults thought between his earlier theory
of power and his later lectures about subjectivity (ibid., p. 7).
There were other interesting exchanges in this and the follow-up seminar. With
the recent death of Becker, they now assume importance as an intellectual-historical
dossier. Becker resolutely refused to see anything critical of his school or of himself in the lectures, leading the Foucauldian moderator, Bernard Harcourt, to make

Journal of Political Power

a decisive slip of the tongue that assumed Beckers disagreement with Foucault.
Becker immediately roundly corrected this. He also easily batted away Ewalds one
critical venture that the notion of human capital gave rise to a reductive vision of
man and a poor behaviorism by observing the richness of a vision of man based
on choice (ibid., pp. 1718). In the second meeting, Ewald weighed in to correct
Becker on his supposition that Foucault was a socialist:
Franois Ewald:
Gary Becker:

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Franois Ewald:

Socialist, no! On the Left.

But well, what does Left mean? In terms of the role of the government, lets say that Left usually means bigger government.
At this time, Foucault was in search of a new kind of governmentality. It was the research for a new possibility in politics that
motivated his work on governmentality.
(Becker et al. 2013, p. 19)

In an essay dated from the mid-1990s, Ewald concerned himself with the nature
of philosophical acts and explained what he had learnt from Foucault about the
present. Foucault posited that our current situation (actualit) is very fundamentally post-revolutionary: if there was an event in the 1970s, it was the disappearance of the revolution (1999, p. 85). In a nod to Francis Fukuyamas thesis, and
an explicit reference to Alexandre Kojve, Ewald suggests that it is clear that the
end of revolution and the end of History represent the same event: it is an event in
our consciousness of time (1999, p. 85). What is left belongs only to the order of
administration, of management. But this does not mean that the state assumes a
central importance. Quite the contrary, for the end of revolution brings about the
end of the philosophical relevance of the state: The stakes are with respect to
power, and this a totally different location, a totally different zone, a totally different type of reality (Ewald 1999, pp. 8687).
In Ewalds view, this situation does not portend a world without events. Rather,
anything can emerge from it. It makes possible new philosophical acts or events
which have the value of acts concerning being (Ewald 1999, pp. 84, 90). What
would a philosophical act look like, then, in the realm of a politics without revolution and with an irrelevant state, which has been reduced to the order of management and administration? It would seem to Ewald that Foucault found an exemplar
in Beckers theory and in neoliberalism.
Within a few years of these statements, and guided by his understanding of
Foucaults actuality, Ewald would be able to join in relations of power on the side
of the neoliberal fraction of business in France and seek a fundamental restructuring to the corporatist welfare state. For the disillusioned Maoist, Foucault was less
the theorist who extended politics to the domain of multiple local struggles and
more one who diagnosed the vacuity of a politics around the couple revolution/
state. It was not the extension of politics but its limitation that Ewald would take
from Foucault. This limitation would lead him to advocate a social restructuring
that would depoliticize the economy and be a last chance for organizations of
employers and employees to be the organizers of civil society (Ewald, cited in
Behrent 2010, pp. 620621).
For many of us, Ewalds interpretation of Foucaults lectures and their political
trajectory is completely mistaken. Thomas Lemke, for example, argues that
Foucault offers a critical genealogy of neoliberalism superior to ideology critique.
For Lemke, this critique sheds a sharper light on the effects of neoliberal

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M. Dean

governmentality, and on the relations between neoliberal freedoms, domination and

exploitation (Lemke 2001, p. 203). Indeed, a major critical point comes in the nal
lecture of The Birth of Biopolitics. It concerns the possibility of a relationship
between neoliberalism and behavioural techniques of manipulation through adjusting stimuli in the environment (in fact, this is the point raised by Ewald). Foucault
pinpoints the paradox of homo conomicus. On the one hand, starting in the
eighteenth century, from the point of view of a theory of government, homo
conomicus is the person to be let alone (Foucault 2008, p. 270). Now, in
Beckers denition, homo conomicus appears precisely as someone manageable,
someone who responds systematically to systematic modications articially introduced into the environment (ibid., p. 271). When this was put to him in 2012,
Becker responded: I mean, yes, if you have things under certainty, theres a certain
deterministic aspect of behavior you can modify a lot. But within that broad spectrum, people have a variety of choices they can take (Becker in Becker et al.
2012, p. 18). Choice, for the neoliberal, would seem to be caveat that dissolves the
critical point of this observation. After all, someone exercising choice cannot be
wholly manipulated.
It is therefore incorrect to say that Foucault offered an uncritical account of neoliberalism. Yet, it would also be incorrect to say that his pointing out this paradox
would devastate neoliberals. But despite this, he found at least one positive thing in
the American brand. After discussing its approach to crime and punishment,
Foucault nds in American neoliberalism a precisely dened alternative to the other
kinds of power and regulation he had analysed:
you can see that what appears on the horizon of this kind of analysis is not at all
the idea or a project of an exhaustively disciplinary society in which the legal network
hemming in individuals is taken over and extended internally by, lets say, normative
mechanisms. Nor is it a society in which the mechanism of general normalization and
the exclusion of those who cannot be normalized is needed. (2008, p. 259)

This statement concerns governing crime, but not just that. It is all quite straightforward when it is read in terms of the movement of Foucaults thought through forms
of power. What is envisaged then is a form of regulation that is not one of a sovereign power exercised through law, or of disciplinary society with its norms, or even
of the general normalization of a biopolitics of the population. It is not one of the
major forms of regulation discussed by Foucault previously in the 1970s, but rather
a new programme and vision:
On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a
society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the eld
is left open to uctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are
tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on
the players, and nally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead
of the internal subjugation of individuals (de lassujettisement interne des individus).
(Foucault 2008, pp. 259260, 2004, p. 265, original French)

We have seen that Foucault expresses reservations about the project of the manipulation of choice through environmental interventions of the behavioural type. These
would seem simply to be the costs in his language, the dangers of a form of
regulation that he nds has certain benets or at least, a certain opening. Chief
among these is that regulation no longer entails the internal subjectication

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Journal of Political Power

(assujettisement) of the individual. Thus, Foucault here distinguishes the neoliberal

programme from those forms of regulation and power such as discipline that
subjugate individuals through the production of subjectivity, that is through tying
individuals to the truth of their identity, e.g. the born criminal, the occasional
criminal, the recidivist, etc. For Foucault, in this passage, neoliberalism does not
subjectify in this sense. In doing so, it opens up the space for tolerating minority
individuals and practices and optimizing systems of differences.
This does not mean that Foucault was or became a card-carrying neoliberal. But
it does demonstrate that like many progressive intellectuals of his period and later,
he would look into the liberal and neoliberal political repertoire to nd ways of
renovating social democratic or socialist politics and escaping its perceived fatal
statism. In the case of Foucault, there is his (unfullled) desire to write a book on
the art of government and socialist politics (Foucault 2008, p. 100, n. 53). Then,
there is also his close association with the Second Left, particularly with Michel
Rocards minor socialist faction, the PSU, and a major trade union, the CFDT
(Conferation Franaise Democratique des Travailleurs). Their principal concern
was self-management (autogestion) understood as a decomposition and distribution of the state into a voluntary institution (Behrent 2009, pp. 552554). Foucault
replied favourably to the work of the major Second Left theorist, Pierre Rosanvallon, participated in its conferences, and contributed an interview entitled A Finite
Social Security System Confronting an Innite Demand to one of its collections
published in 1983 (Foucault 1988). Rosanvallons work even suggested the core of
Foucaults approach to liberalism as an art of government, in which the market
functions as a test and a privileged site of experiment (2008, p. 320).
In this interview, conducted by the then general secretary of the CFDT, Foucault
diagnoses the current problems of social security as one of facing economic obstacles that are only too familiar, as being limited against the political, economic
and social rationality of modern societies and having the perverse effects of an
increasing rigidity of certain mechanisms and a growth of dependence (Foucault
1988, p. 160). This dependence arises not only from marginalization, as it historically had, but also from integration in the social security system itself (ibid.,
p. 162). His answers to these problems are framed in terms of a way of life and
deploy the language of lifestyles (ibid., pp. 1645). They seek a social security
that opens the way to a richer, more numerous, more diverse and more exible
relation with oneself and ones environment, one that guarantees a real autonomy
(ibid., p. 161). To combat welfare dependency, as many would later call it, Foucault
also suggests a process of decentralization that would lead to a closer relation
between users of services and decision-making centers (ibid., p. 165). In short,
the structural economic problems of the scal crisis of the welfare state of his time
were to be met with new forms of subjectivation and the decomposition of the
state. In fact, he concludes the welfare system should become a vast experimental
eld and that the whole institutional complex, at present very fragile, will probably have to undergo a restructuring from top to bottom (ibid., p. 166). These few
remarks, consonant with the orientation of the Second Left, give us a clue to what
the book on the art of government and socialist politics might look like.
It is true that Foucault never completed the proposed book. But even allowing
for the French intellectual idiom, it is highly unlikely such a book would have ever
functioned in the manner of Hayeks The Road to Serfdom or Milton Friedmans
Capitalism and Freedom, that is as a militant statement of a neoliberal philosophy

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M. Dean

intended for the larger public. The closest example in the Anglophone world one
can think of is perhaps that of Anthony Giddenss book, The Third Way (1998).
Here, a prominent thinker, social theorist and intellectual tried to cast a general
policy framework or a form of statecraft for a newly elected centre-Left
government, in this case, the British Labour Party, that would learn from marketoriented philosophies and developments. What makes Foucaults apology or
apologia relevant, in retrospect, is not its distinctiveness, but that it starts to mark
out a now well-trodden intellectual pathway for progressive thought in the years
following the post-war Long Boom and amidst trenchant questioning of Keynesian
macroeconomic policies and the welfare state from both Right and Left. He identies a particular intellectual-political space even if his ethos prevents him from fully
occupying it.
So let me come back to the present. I have argued at length elsewhere for the
need for an analytics of sovereignty and a political archaeology of glory and for
the limits of Foucaults understanding in these areas (Dean 2013). Indeed, I would
suggest that his view of sovereignty as grounded in a right of death reproduces
the liberal scary imaginary of sovereignty and state. Here, however, I indicate
three more modest but interrelated lines that are closely tied to this discussion of
neoliberalism.
The rst of these concerns the problem of the relationship between the market
and truth. The fundamental thesis of The Birth of Biopolitics is that the market
becomes the site of veridiction (or truth-telling) for liberalism and neoliberalism.
This means quite simply that the the market must tell the truth, it must tell the
truth in relation to governmental practice (Foucault 2008, p. 32). A liberal art of
government thus deploys the market as a regime of veridiction, so that it constitutes
a set of rules enabling one to establish which statements in a given discourse can
be described as true or false (Foucault 2008, pp. 32, 35). There are of course different conceptions of the market: as natural or as constructed, as founded on
exchange (Adam Smith) or as realizing the principle of competition (the Ordoliberals). But the idea of the market as a site for the production of truth and falsehood
that is unknowable by the sovereign or its representatives is close to Friedrich
Hayeks view of the market as a kind of gigantic information processor superior to
highly limited human knowledge or the meddling of political actors. In his efforts
to deconstruct the state, Foucault manages to back into another cold monster, that
of the market, and reproduces the asymmetry between the invisible hand of the
market and the (im)possibility of sovereign knowledge that is found in liberalism.
Most important for us are the implications for state and public authority. While
Foucault does indicate that utility acts as a measure internal to the assessment of
public authority in classical liberalism, this measure is not a regime of veridiction
but of jurisdiction, that is of the legal delineation of public authority (2008,
p. 44). Foucaults decentred and decomposed state, unlike the abstract and universal
notion of the market, does not act as a principle of veridiction for governmental
practice. But, against the enthusiasms of contemporary anti-statism, from new
managerialists, civil society advocates, to the Tea Party, we require an analysis of
how state ofce can be a site of particular modes of truth-telling with particular
ethical comportments such as discretion, impartiality and party political neutrality
that are supported indeed by technologies of the self and different styles of
self-cultivation. While Foucault views liberalism as fundamentally a critique of

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Journal of Political Power

state reason, he fails to analyse the persistence of a state rationality within the
liberal-democratic constitutional state and its forms of public authority.
There is no doubt that this can be remedied by Foucaults own work on forms
of truth-telling or veridiction, particularly in his last two lecture series that deal
with parrhesia (20102011), and his schemata for the analysis of techniques of the
self in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality (19851986).
These provide key resources for the task of analysing the techniques of self-cultivation of the public ofcial and the forms of truth-telling characteristic of public
ofce. Such a project, it must be said, has been initiated by a group of thinkers
originally located at Grifth University in Australia, some two decades ago.1
The second line concerns the problem of inequality or, rather, of inequality and
subjectivity. We have seen that the question of subjectivity was at stake not only in
Ewalds case for the apology, but also in Foucaults analysis of neoliberalism. By
focusing on questions of subjugation and subjectivity, on the way in which we are
subjectied in technologies of power and we work on ourselves (or subjectivate)
through techniques of the self, Foucault belonged very much to the politics of his
time, that is to say, the time of the post-revolutionary movements of the 70s concerned with a politics of identity and difference, a critical ontology of ourselves
as he would say. In our time, whatever weight we might give to the recent nancial
crisis and ongoing sovereign debt problems in Europe, or the movements against
debt and the one percent in Europe and the United States, or indeed the notoriety
of an economist such as Thomas Piketty, economic inequality has become again
the target and focus on political action and public debate. Foucault frankly had very
little to say about it. Perhaps his best word on it was the unsourced attribution to
the Ordoliberal Wilhelm Rpke that inequality is the same for all (Foucault 2008,
p. 143), which at least reminds us that the problematization of inequality does not
necessarily point in the direction of greater equality.
The solutions Foucault offered to the crisis of the welfare state are very much
to the point here. When dening the present situation in the interview on social
security, Foucault explicitly refused the structural social and economic situation, the
totality of economic and social mechanisms and claimed to speak only of the
relation between peoples feelings, their moral choices, their relationship with
themselves, and the institutions that surround them (2008, pp. 161162). In this
respect, his vantage point is not very different from the generation of social theorists and policy-makers who would follow him, among them Giddens and Ulrich
Beck. They would advocate active policies, life planning and reform in the name
of individualization for clients of the welfare state and new decentralized organizational forms. From the perspective of our time, after the nostrums of Labours
Third Way and US welfare reform under Clinton, and other such experiments
from Australasia to the Nordic countries, the diagnosis and solutions that might
have sounded somewhat fresh in Foucaults time are now rather depressingly familiar. We might say that the movements of the 70s (against institutionalization, over
identity and the politics of difference) objected to the Marxist and socialist attempt
to answer the question of subjectivity with that of inequality. What the history of
welfare-state reform over the last two decades amply demonstrates is that it is not
possible to answer questions of economic inequality in the language of subjectivity
without intensifying domination and increasing inequality itself. We can use
Foucauldian governmental and ethical analytics to analyse the demand for a work

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M. Dean

on the self in welfare rationalities and technologies. However, these frameworks

must never be mistaken for recipes for how such practices ought to operate.
Third, if Foucault creates a cold monster in the economy when he slays another,
the state, this leaves him doubly disadvantaged with respect to an economic diagnosis of the present were he alive today. First, he is disadvantaged with respect to
the economy itself. Maurizio Lazzarato has suggested that Foucault neglects the
functions of nance, debt and money (2012, p. 90). Ute Tellman argues that this is
because he is unable to think about economic relations per se and the mediation of
relations of power through money and value (2009, p. 8). In a very simple example, debt itself can be a form of the government of conduct: whether of the individuals who pledge their future to their creditors or societies and states that have
restricted public policy choices in the face of the aptly named sovereign debt.
Nietzsche already knew this, and, thus so did Foucault. It might be that debt is the
most effective way in which the contemporary arts of government have managed to
limit sovereignty and close down counter-conduct and contestation and indeed, the
potential temporal horizons of our societies. (This is possibly relevant to the discussion of student debt and academic political inertia we have had today). Secondly,
his work is unable to move beyond the analysis of the rationalities and techniques
of neoliberalism and the attempted production of the neoliberal subject to transformations of capital themselves. While Foucaults analysis can examine how human
capital theory enables a rationalization of public authorities, and how the enterprise
acts as a paradigm for subjectivity, it fails to capture the intersection of capital and
value with such rationalities and technologies. In this respect, the interpretation and
use of the Foucauldian legacy in the Italian autonomist tradition, associated with
Negri and Lazzarato, with its emphasis on how contemporary formations of subjectivity become fused to the co-creation of value, provides a signicant avenue of
investigation (Lopdrup-Hjorth 2013).
Rather than an apology for neoliberalism, let us say that Foucault belonged to a
present in which neoliberalism was shifting from a militant, if marginal, thought
collective to a regime of the government of the state (Mirowski and Plehwe 2009,
Dean 2014). That present placed limits and created potentials for what was thinkable, including by Foucault, and what was possible politically. Thus, taking neoliberalism seriously, or offering its apologia, was important. If we are to begin again
his project of a diagnostics of the present, however, we need to accept that we are
facing new limits, to be sure, but new potentials, ones that are very different from
30 years ago. The political sand dunes keep on shifting. Let us remain aware of
their movement lest they bury us.
None of this was apparent in 1979, when I was inspired by Michel Foucault to
leave Australia to investigate the archive. The archive I chose was that of the
British Library, then housed in the reading room of the British Museum. In my
own case, the archive was the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions of
poverty. I shall remain eternally grateful to Michel Foucault for that inspiration and
the British Library for helping me realize a little of my archival ambition.
Note
1. I am thinking here of the work of Jeffrey Minson, Ian Hunter and David Saunders. For
examples of their work that orient Foucaults ethics to notions of ofce in more positively statist direction, see Hunter (1990) and Minson (1998).

Journal of Political Power

Notes on contributor
Mitchell Dean, author of Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (2nd ed.,
Sage 2010), is professor of Public Governance, Copenhagen Business School and professor
of Sociology, the University of Newcastle, Australia. His most recent books are The Signature of Power (Sage 2013) and State-Phobia and Civil Society (co-authored with Kaspar
Villadsen), to be published by Stanford University Press in 2015.

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