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Michel Foucault’s ‘apology’ for

neoliberalismMitchell Dean

ab

a Department of Management, Philosophy and Politics,

Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmarkb Department of Humanities and Social Science, University of

Newcastle, Ourimbah, Australia

Published online: 10 Oct 2014.

To cite this article: Mitchell Dean (2014): Michel Foucault’s ‘apology’ for neoliberalism, Journal of

Political Power, DOI: 10.1080/2158379X.2014.967002

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2014.967002

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Michel Foucault’s ‘apology’ for neoliberalism

Lecture delivered at the British Library on the 30th anniversary of the death

of Michel Foucault, June 25, 2014

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, FrançoisEwald, that Foucault offered an apology for neoliberalism, particularly of theAmerican school represented by Gary Becker. It draws on exchanges betweenEwald and Becker in 2012 and 2013 at the University of Chicago shortly beforethe latter ’s death. It places Foucault in ½ relation to the then emergent SecondLeft in France, the critique of the welfare state, and, more broadly, the late-twentieth-century social-democratic take-up of neoliberal thought. It indicatesthree limitations of his thought: the problem of state ‘veridiction’; the questionof 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 Foucault ’s ‘apology’ for neoliberalism’. I know it ’s

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 Foucault ’s 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 nar-

rowed. 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: [email protected] Lecture delivered at ‘Remembering Foucault ’ event, Department of Law, London School of Economics. The event was associated with the conference ‘Governing Academic Life’. Imust thank Anne Barron and Mary Evans for organising the event and for the invitation to

present this lecture, and to my colleagues, Sverre Raffnsøe, Marius Gudmand-Høyer andKaspar Villadsen for their moderation of a draft of this lecture.

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

Journal of Political Power , 2014

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

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On 9 May 2012, at the University of Chicago, François 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 neo-

liberalism – 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 Collège de

France. He would co-edit Foucault ’s shorter pieces ( Dits et Ecrits) and act as gen-

eral editor for the recent publication of his lectures at the Collège. Yet, he is some-

thing 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 Foucault ’s lec-

tures (Lazzarato 2009, p. 110). Ewald had been a militant Maoist who would enlist

Foucault in 1972 in what became known as L’ Affaire Bruay – the dubious politicssurrounding 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 intro-

duction 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 neoliberal-

ism’ and an ‘apology of Gary Becker ’. Even allowing for language dif culties, per-

haps he meant less ‘an apology for ’ than ‘an apologia of ’ neoliberalism andBecker, that is, Foucault offered a form of public defence of them, of their rele-

vance against those who would otherwise dismiss or denounce them. In fact,

Ewald’s appraisal is even more positive than this. After discussing the post-68 situ-

ation, 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 andnon-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 compli-

mentary way when he concludes this address with respect to Foucault ’s 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 creat-

ing the possibility to promote, to envision new kinds of liberty’. Ewald would even

go so far as to claim that the idea of homo œconomicus contained in Becker ’s the-

ory was decisive in the movement of Foucault ’s 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-historicaldossier. Becker resolutely refused to see anything critical of his school or of him-self in the lectures, leading the Foucauldian moderator, Bernard Harcourt, to make

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a decisive slip of the tongue that assumed Becker ’s disagreement with Foucault.

Becker immediately roundly corrected this. He also easily batted away Ewald’s 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. 17 – 18). In the second meeting, Ewald weighed in to correct

Becker on his supposition that Foucault was a socialist:

François Ewald: Socialist, no! On the Left.Gary Becker: But well, what does Left mean? In terms of the role of the govern-

ment, let ’s say that Left usually means bigger government.François Ewald: At this time, Foucault was in search of a new kind of governmen-

tality. 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 (actualité) is very fundamen-

tally post-revolutionary: if there was an event in the 1970s, it was the disappear-

ance of the revolution’ (1999, p. 85). In a nod to Francis Fukuyama’s thesis, and

an explicit reference to Alexandre Kojève, 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 differ-ent type of reality’ (Ewald 1999, pp. 86 – 87).

In Ewald’s 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 revolu-

tion and with an irrelevant state, which has been reduced to the order of manage-

ment and administration? It would seem to Ewald that Foucault found an exemplar

in Becker ’s theory and in neoliberalism.

Within a few years of these statements, and guided by his understanding of

Foucault ’s ‘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 restructur-

ing 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. 620 – 621).

For many of us, Ewald’s interpretation of Foucault ’s 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

Journal of Political Power 3


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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 adjust-

ing stimuli in the environment (in fact, this is the point raised by Ewald). Foucault

pinpoints the ‘ paradox’ of homo œconomicus. On the one hand, starting in the

eighteenth century, ‘from the point of view of a theory of government, homo

œconomicus is the person to be let alone’ (Foucault 2008, p. 270). Now, in

Becker ’s denition, homo œconomicus ‘appears precisely as someone manageable,

someone who responds systematically to systematic modications articially intro-

duced 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, there’s a certain

deterministic aspect of behavior you can modify a lot. But within that broad spec-

trum, 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 bewholly manipulated.

It is therefore incorrect to say that Foucault offered an uncritical account of neo-

liberalism. 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 allthe idea or a project of an exhaustively disciplinary society in which the legal network hemming in individuals is taken over and extended internally by, let ’s say, normativemechanisms. Nor is it a society in which the mechanism of general normalization andthe 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 straightfor-

ward when it is read in terms of the movement of Foucault ’s thought through forms

of power. What is envisaged then is a form of regulation that is not one of a sover-

eign 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 asociety in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the eldis left open to uctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices aretolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than onthe players, and nally in which there is an environmental type of intervention insteadof the internal subjugation of individuals (de l ’ assujettisement interne des individus).(Foucault 2008, pp. 259 – 260, 2004, p. 265, original French)

We have seen that Foucault expresses reservations about the project of the manipu-

lation 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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(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

Rocard’s minor socialist faction, the PSU, and a major trade union, the CFDT

(Conferation Française Democratique des Travailleurs). Their principal concernwas ‘self-management ’ (autogestion) understood as a decomposition and distribu-

tion of the state into a voluntary institution (Behrent 2009, pp. 552 – 554). Foucault

replied favourably to the work of the major Second Left theorist, Pierre Rosanval-

lon, 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). Rosanvallon’s work even suggested the core of

Foucault ’s 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 obsta-cles 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 histori-

cally 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’ anddeploy the language of ‘lifestyles’ (ibid., pp. 164 – 5). They seek a ‘social security

that opens the way to a richer, more numerous, more diverse and more exible

relation with oneself and one’s 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 proba-

bly 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 Hayek ’s The Road to Serfdom or Milton Friedman’sCapitalism and Freedom, that is as a militant statement of a neoliberal philosophy



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intended for the larger public. The closest example in the Anglophone world one

can think of is perhaps that of Anthony Giddens’s 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 market-

oriented philosophies and developments. What makes Foucault ’s ‘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 identi-

es 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 Foucault ’s understanding in these areas (Dean 2013). Indeed, I would

suggest that his view of sovereignty as grounded in a ‘right of death’ reproducesthe 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 dif-

ferent conceptions of the market: as natural or as constructed, as founded on

exchange (Adam Smith) or as realizing the principle of competition (the Ordoliber-

als). 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

Hayek ’s view of the market as a kind of gigantic information processor superior tohighly 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). Foucault ’s 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 ‘of ce’ 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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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 Foucault ’s own work on forms

of truth-telling or veridiction, particularly in his last two lecture series that deal

with parrhesia (2010 – 2011), and his schemata for the analysis of techniques of the

self in the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality (1985 – 1986).

These provide key resources for the task of analysing the techniques of self-cultiva-

tion of the public of cial and the forms of truth-telling characteristic of public

of ce. Such a project, it must be said, has been initiated by a group of t hinkers

originally located at Grif th 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

Ewald’s case for the apology, but also in Foucault ’s 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 histime, that is to say, the time of the post-revolutionary movements of the 70s con-

cerned 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 Röpke 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 people’s feelings, their moral choices, their relationship withthemselves, and … the institutions that surround them’ (2008, pp. 161 – 162). In this

respect, his vantage point is not very different from the generation of social theo-

rists 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 organiza-

tional forms. From the perspective of our time, after the nostrums of Labour ’s

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 Foucault ’s time are now rather depressingly famil-

iar. 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 useFoucauldian governmental and ethical analytics to analyse the demand for a work



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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 diagno-

sis 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 exam-

ple, debt itself can be a form of the government of conduct: whether of the individ-

uals 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 discus-sion 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 transfor-

mations of capital themselves. While Foucault ’s 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 subjec-

tivity 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 think-

able, including by Foucault, and what was possible politically. Thus, taking neolib-eralism 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 Foucault ’s ethics to notions of ‘of ce’ in more posi-tively statist direction, see Hunter (1990) and Minson (1998).

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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 Signa-ture of Power (Sage 2013) and State- Phobia and Civil Society (co-authored with Kaspar

Villadsen), to be published by Stanford University Press in 2015.

References

Becker, Gary, Ewald, François and Harcourt, Bernard, 2012. Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker: American neoliberalism and Michel Foucault ’ s 1979 ‘ Birth of Biopolitics’ lectures. Institute for Law and Economics Working Paper No. 614. Chicago, IL: Univer-sity of Chicago Law School.

Becker, Gary, Ewald, François and Harcourt, Bernard, 2013. Becker and Foucault on crimeand punishment . Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics Working Paper No.654. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Law School.

Behrent, Michael C., 2009. Liberalism without humanism: Michel Foucault and the free-

market creed, 1976 – 1979. Modern Intellectual History, 6 (3), 539 – 568.Behrent, Michael C., 2010. Accidents happen. François Ewald, the ‘antirevolutionary Fou-

cault ’, and the intellectual politics of the French welfare state. The Journal of Modern History, 82 (3), 585 – 624.

Dean, Mitchell, 2013. The signature of power: sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics.London: Sage.

Dean, Mitchell, 2014. Rethinking neoliberalism. Journal of Sociology, 50 (2), 150 – 163.Ewald, François, 1999. Foucault and the contemporary scene. Philosophy and Social Criti-

cism, 25 (3), 81 – 91.Foucault, Michel, 1985. The history of sexuality. Vol. 2: the use of pleasure (Robert Hurley,

Trans.). New York: Pantheon.Foucault, Michel, 1986. The history of sexuality. Vol. 3: the care of the self (Robert Hurley,

Trans.). New York: Pantheon.Foucault, Michel, 1988. Social security. In: Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed. Politics, philosophy,culture. Interviews and other writings 1977 – 84. New York: Routledge, 159 – 177.

Foucault, Michel, 2004. Naissance de la biopolitique [The birth of biopolitics]. Cours auCollège de France, 1978 – 1979. Michel Senellart, ed. Paris: Gallimard/Seuil.

Foucault, Michel, 2008. The birth of biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978 – 1979 (Graham Burchell, Trans.). London: Palgrave.

Foucault, Michel, 2010. The government of self and others. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982 – 1983 (Graham Burchell, Trans.). London: Palgrave.

Foucault, Michel, 2011. The courage of truth. The government of self and others II: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983 – 1984 (Graham Burchell, Trans.). London:Palgrave.

Giddens, Anthony, 1998. The third way. Cambridge: Polity.

Hunter, Ian, 1990. Personality as a vocation: the political rationality of the humanities. Economy and Society, 19 (4), 391 – 430.

Lazzarato, Maurizio, 2009. Neoliberalism in action: inequality, insecurity and the reconstitu-tion of the social. Theory, Culture and Society, 26 (6), 109 – 133.

Lazzarato, Maurizio, 2012. The making of indebted man. An essay on the neoliberal condi-tion (Joshua David Jordan, Trans.). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Lemke, Thomas, 2001. “The birth of bio-politics”. Michel Foucault ’s lecture at the Collègede France on neo-liberal governmentality. Economy and Society, 30 (2), 190 – 207.

Lopdrup-Hjorth, Thomas, 2013. Let ’ s go outside. The value of co-creation. Frederiksberg:Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies, Copenhagen BusinessSchool.

Minson, Jeffrey, 1998. Ethics in the service of the state. In: Mitchell Dean and Barry

Hindess, eds. Governing Australia: studies in contemporary rationalities of government .Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 47 – 69.



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Mirowski, Philip and Plehwe, Dieter, eds., 2009. The road from Mont Pèlerin. The making of the neoliberal thought collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Negri, Antonio. 2001. Interview. Le Monde. Available from: Libcom.org/library/interview-le-monde-negri [3 Oct 2001].

Tellman, Ute, 2009. Foucault and the invisible economy. Foucault Studies, 6, 5 – 24.

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Documents

Foucalt and Neoliberalism