Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics

Foucault Studies

ARTICLE

Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
Trent H. Hamann, St. John’s University

ABSTRACT: This paper illustrates the relevance of Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal governance for a critical understanding of recent transformations in individual and social life in the United States, particularly in terms of how the realms of the public and the private and the personal and the political are understood and practiced. The central aim of neoliberal governmentality (“the conduct of conduct”) is the strategic creation of social conditions that encourage and necessitate the production of Homo economicia, a historically specific form of subjectivity constituted as a free and autonomous “atom” of self-interest. The neoliberal subject is an individual who is morally responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculations grounded on market-based principles to the exclusion of all other ethical values and social interests. While the more traditional forms of domination and exploitation characteristic of sovereignty and disciplinary forms of power remain evident in our “globalized” world, the effects of subjectification produced at the level of everyday life through the neoliberal “conduct of conduct” recommend that we recognize and invent new forms of critique and ethical subjection that constitute resistance to its specific dangers.

Key words: Foucault, neoliberalism, governmentality, biopolitics, homo economicus, genealogy, ethics, critique.

Introduction

In his 1978-1979 course lectures at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics; Michel Foucault offered what is today recognizable as a remarkably prescient analysis of neoliberalism. In the thirty years since he gave these lectures their pertence and resistance to its dangers.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979; translated by Carham Burchell, edited by Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Heneceorth, BB with page numbers given in the text.
Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikola Ralson (and by extension, neoliberalism) indicates rather than a specific historical moment or single cause and political reason; Neo-liberalism and Political Reason: Historicalism, New Literature and Political Reason: Political Reason.
Foucault defines governmentality” as an appeal to the population as its target, political economy and raises of security as its essential technical institution. Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 2019; Burchell, edited by Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Heneceorth, BB with page numbers given in the text). Throughout this paper I will follow the distinction value for a critical understanding of contempo- the United States have grown. As I illustrate be neoliberal ethics” operative within almost every lives with consequences that are dire for many us. Indeed the central aim of neoliberal govern- of social conditions conducive to the constitution subjectivity, with historical roots in traditional talism posits “economic man” as a “man of ex- sure that individuals are compelled to assume judgements and practices in order to amass suffi- and thereby become “entrepreneurs of themselves free and autonomous” atom“ of self-interest w the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculations grounded on market-based principles to the exclusion of all other ethical values and social interests. While the more traditional forms of domination and exploitation characteristic of sovereignty and disciplinary forms of power remain evident in our “globalized” world, the effects of subjectification produced at the level of everyday life through the neoliberal “conduct of conduct” recommend that we recognize and invent new forms of critique and ethical subjection that constitute resistance to its specific dangers.

Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.

I. Neoliberalism as Everyday Experience

One of the significant developments in contemporary life that might fall under the heading of “neoliberalism” can be recognized through the various ways that traditional distinctions between the public and the private on the one hand, and the political and the personal on the other have been gradually blurred, reversed, or removed altogether. The exposure of formerly private and personal realms of life has occurred not only through the more striking examples of growing government and corporate surveillance (think of the telecoms and the warrantless monitoring of electronic communications paid for with taxpayer dollars or the growing use of human implantable radio-frequency identification (RFID) microchips), but, more subtly, also significantly, the extent to which activities of production and consumption typically practiced in public spaces are increasingly taking place in the home, a space once exclusively reserved for leisure time and housework. It has become more and more common to find such activities as telecommuting, temarketing, and shopping via the Internet or cable television taking place within the home. Nearly ubiquitous technologies such as the telephone, home computers with wide web access, pagers, mobile phones, GPS and other wireless devices have rendered private space and personal time accessible to the demands of business and, increasingly, the interest of government. To put it simply, it is no longer true, as Marx once claimed, that the worker “at home when he is not working, and when he is working at his home.” Reality television, social networking sites, personal webinars and social blogging have all contributed toward exposing the private realm in ways foreseen by the well-known feminist adage from the 1960s: “the personal is political.”

Within this formerly public realm we now find that private interests or public/private amalgams have gained greater control and influence. In major urban areas Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) have appropriated many traditional increasingly fallen under the influence of private for whom the next quarter’s bottom line routed term common or public fund, Transnational and their global reach to dictate what are “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAEP), placing growth of slum populations worldwide “ownership” and the like have promoted the taxonomy and individualism, the reality is that more subject to the frequently harsh, unpredictable functions from financially strapped notation, and policing. For years the U.S. federal public goods such as parklands, water businesses, often in exchange for shallow and uplife interest. Many formerly public or government schools, and prisons are now managed private creasing numbers of people go without healthcauses numbers of people go without healthcare populations increase. An ongoing effort has been eliminated traditional social goods such as health addition, problems once recognized as social ill realm: poverty, environmental degradation, unseismic, and heterosensitia; all have been entwined with through voluntary charity, the in vading personal “sensitivity” towards others or Corporations, churches, universities and other mission to organize the mandatory training of each personal development and self-management; in ten addressed in the mainstream media as a point than an effect of poor environmental or a power and personal time accessible to the demands of business and, increasingly, the interest of government. To put it simply, it is no longer true, as Marx once claimed, that the worker “at home when he is not working, and when he is working at his home.” Reality television, social networking sites, personal webinars and social blogging have all contributed toward exposing the private realm in ways foreseen by the well-known feminist adage from the 1960s: “the personal is political.”

Within this formerly public realm we now find that private interests or public/private amalgams have gained greater control and influence. In major urban areas Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) have appropriated many traditional increasingly fallen under the influence of private for whom the next quarter’s bottom line routed term common or public fund, Transnational and their global reach to dictate what are “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAEP), placing growth of slum populations worldwide “ownership” and the like have promoted the taxonomy and individualism, the reality is that more subject to the frequently harsh, unpredictable functions from financially strapped notation, and policing. For years the U.S. federal public goods such as parklands, water businesses, often in exchange for shallow and uplife interest. Many formerly public or government schools, and prisons are now managed private creasing numbers of people go without healthcauses populations increase. An ongoing effort has been eliminated traditional social goods such as health addition, problems once recognized as social ill realm: poverty, environmental degradation, unseismic, and heterosensitia; all have been entwined with through voluntary charity, the in vading personal “sensitivity” towards others or Corporations, churches, universities and other mission to organize the mandatory training of each personal development and self-management; in ten addressed in the mainstream media as a point than an effect of poor environmental or a power and personal time accessible to the demands of business and, increasingly, the interest of government. To put it simply, it is no longer true, as Marx once claimed, that the worker “at home when he is not working, and when he is not at home.” Reality television, social networking sites, personal webinars and social blogging have all contributed toward exposing the private realm in ways foreseen by the well-known feminist adage from the 1960s: “the personal is political.”

Within this formerly public realm we now find that private interests or public/private amalgams have gained greater control and influence. In major urban areas Business Improvement

market forces and the kinds of impersonal judgements that evaluate them in terms of a cost-benefit calculus or economic risk, financial burden, productivity, efficiency, and experience. The recent collapse of the U.S. housing market, the rising costs of fuel and food, and record-breaking increases in unemployment rate perhaps illustrate not the failure of what sometimes has been called the “ownership society”, but rather its success in instituting a moralizing principle of punishing those who haven’t amassed sufficient “human capital”. Examples such as these do suggest that to at least some extent, the neoliberal strategy of infusing market values into every aspect of social life and shifting responsibility onto individuals has succeeded.

II. Neoliberalism As Governance

In his 1978-79 course lectures, Foucault analyzed liberalism as a historical form of biopolitical governmentality, that is, as a form of political rationality concerned with the government of populations and the conduct of individual conduct in accord with the internal rate of maximum economy” (B8, 318). His genealogical analysis of liberalism led him to examine the West German Ordo-liberalism of the period from 1942 and the American neoliberalism of the Chicago School, which developed later on. Foucault noted that both forms of neoliberalism were conceived from the very beginning as interventionist and critical responses to specific forms of governmentality. For the West Germans, who were faced with the daunting task of building a new state from scratch it constituted a critique of the excessive state power of Nazism and for the Americans it was a reaction to the overextended New Deal welfare state and its interference in market mechanisms. In this regard both schools were linked from the start to classical liberalism insofar as they were forms of “critical governmental reason”, or political rationality that theoized government as immanently self-limiting by virtue of its primary responsibility for supporting the economy. Whereas the pre-modern state had utilized the economy to serve its own ends, the emergence of political economy within the liberal reason of state reversed the traditional relationship between government and economy (B8, 12-3). What fascinated Foucault about the American neoliberals in particular, and distinguished them from the West German Ordo-liberals, was their unprecedented expansion of the economic enterprise form to the entire social realm. The Americans sought “to extend the rationality of the market, the schemes of analysis it offers and the decision-making criteria it suggests, to domains which are not exclusively or not primarily economic the family and the birth rate, for example, delinquency and penal policy” (B8, 323). Government is also reconsidered as an enterprise to be organized, operated, and systematically critiqued according to an “economic positivism” (B8, 247). Within the reason of state of American neoliberalism, the role of government is defined by its obligations to foster competition through the installation of market-based mechanisms for constraining and conditioning the actions of individuals, institutions, and the population as a whole. In fact, the governors cost-benefit rule of maximum economy while “way of doing things” becomes one and only another significant feature of neoliberalism the fact that neither the market nor economic control reality with self-evident or intrinsic law realism consists of values and principles that must be reassessed at all levels in federal governmentality seeks to minimize state cognizes that the market can only be kept via legal support. Likewise, it explicitly acknowledges vidials can only be fostered through social codes, ordered and reassessed by market value rationality of neoliberal governmentality it is nomic marr is not a natural being with predictive behavior, but instead a form of subjectivity maintained through social mechanisms of “economic man” is a subject that must be proved and relations of power aimed at encouraging an subjectivation.

III. Homo Economias as Everyday Expert

Covering people is not a way to force people is always a versatile equilibrium, with complex techniques which assure correction and process structured or modified by himself.

Foucault’s analysis in The Birth of Biopolitics note liberalism was with identifying the reasoning involved his or her life’s finite capacities and limb goal or agenda rather than another. Referring Buecker, Foucault discussed the neoliberal theory both of which focus on economic principles of making processes and action. For example, an individual who is obliged to sell his or her utility, neoliberalism describes wages as income or thematically critiqued according to an “economic positivism” (B8, 247). Within the reason of state of American neoliberalism, the role of government is defined by its obligations to foster competition through the installation of market-based mechanisms for constraining and conditioning the actions of individuals, institutions, and the population as a whole. In fact, the governors cost-benefit rule of maximum economy while “way of doing things” becomes one and only another significant feature of neoliberalism the fact that neither the market nor economic control reality with self-evident or intrinsic law realism consists of values and principles that must be reassessed at all levels in federal governmentality seeks to minimize state cognizes that the market can only be kept via legal support. Likewise, it explicitly acknowledges vidials can only be fostered through social codes, ordered and reassessed by market value rationality of neoliberal governmentality it is nomic marr is not a natural being with predictive behavior, but instead a form of subjectivity maintained through social mechanisms of “economic man” is a subject that must be proof and relations of power aimed at encouraging an subjectivation.

III. Homo Economias as Everyday Expert

Covering people is not a way to force people is always a versatile equilibrium, with complex techniques which assure correction and process structured or modified by himself.

III. Homo Economias as Everyday Expert

Covering people is not a way to force people is always a versatile equilibrium, with complex techniques which assure correction and process structured or modified by himself.

III. Homo Economias as Everyday Expert

Covering people is not a way to force people is always a versatile equilibrium, with complex techniques which assure correction and process structured or modified by himself.

III. Homo Economias as Everyday Expert

Covering people is not a way to force people is always a versatile equilibrium, with complex techniques which assure correction and process structured or modified by himself.

Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.

man capital", which consists of both an individual's innate genetic qualities as well as his or her acquired skills abilities, tastes, and knowledge. This accumulated "human capital" is interpreted as the result of prior and ongoing investments in goods like education, nutrition, and training, as well as love and affection. In this reconstruction of the wage earner, workers are no longer recognized as dependent on an employer but instead are fashioned as free and autonomous entrepreneurs fully responsible for their presumably rational self-investment decisions. Foucault notes that this definition of economics gives itself the task of analyzing a form of human behavior in terms of its internal rationality. Economics is no longer viewed as the analysis of processes but rather, as the analysis of "the strategic programming of individuals" activity" (83, 223). For Pierre Bourdieu, the institution of these new forms of entrepreneurial activity has meant that levels of competition traditionally characteristic of relations between businesses and corporations are now deeply entrenched at the level of the workforce itself.

Competition is extended to individuals themselves, through the individualization of the wage relationship; establishment of individual performance objectives, individual performance evaluations; permanent evaluation; individual increase or granting of bonuses as a function of competence and individual merit; individualized career paths; strategies of "daringing absponsibility" to ensure the self-exploitation of staff who, simply, wage laborers in relations of strong hierarchical dependence, are at the same time held responsible for their sales, their branch, their store, etc. as though they were in-dependent contractors. This pressure toward "self-control" extends workers' involvement beyond management level. All of these are techniques of rational domination that impose over-involvement in work (and not only among management) and work under emergency or high-stress conditions. And they converge to weaken or abolish collective standards or solidarities.

Within the apparatus (dispositivity)11 of neoliberalism every individual is considered to be "equally unequal", as Foucault put it. Exploitation, domination, and every other form of social inequality is rendered invisible as social phenomena to the extent that each individual's social condition is indicted as nothing other than the effect of his or her own choices and investments. As Wendy Brown has pointed out, Homo economicus is constructed, not as a citizen who obeys rules, prisons common goods, and ad-dresses problems it shares with others, but as a rational and calculating entrepreneur who is not only capable of, but also responsible points out that this has the effect of "depolitization well as compulsory" in political citizenship to an unpolitical complacency." She writes:

The model neoliberal citizen is one who stands responsible for their presumably rational self-investment decisions. Foucault notes that this definition of economics gives itself the task of analyzing a form of human behavior in terms of its internal rationality. Economics is no longer viewed as the analysis of processes but rather, as the analysis of "the strategic programming of individuals" activity" (83, 223). For Pierre Bourdieu, the institution of these new forms of entrepreneurial activity has meant that levels of competition traditionally characteristic of relations between businesses and corporations are now deeply entrenched at the level of the workforce itself.

Within this practically Hobbesian (anti-journal) individuals constitutes a form of market morality economy through the autonomous rational deformed by freely chosen practices. Neoliberal responsibility for themselves and themselves, although autonomous and free. An individual processes of subjectivation, or what nobiherality (E, 42), is consequently due to the moral failure nulty allows for the avoidance of any kind of responsibility for such a life even as examples of ber of decades. Instead, impoverished population treated as "opportunities" for investment.

On June 15, 2006 the UN released a report2006/7" On the alarming worldwide growth of work under emergency or high-stress conditions. And they converge to weaken or abolish collective standards or solidarities.

The model neoliberal citizen is one who stands responsible for their presumably rational self-investment decisions. Foucault notes that this definition of economics gives itself the task of analyzing a form of human behavior in terms of its internal rationality. Economics is no longer viewed as the analysis of "the strategic programming of individuals" activity" (83, 223). For Pierre Bourdieu, the institution of these new forms of entrepreneurial activity has meant that levels of competition traditionally characteristic of relations between businesses and corporations are now deeply entrenched at the level of the workforce itself.

Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.

estimated that by the year 2017 the majority of human beings would for the first time ever, be living in cities. One third of those city dwellers, that is one billion of them, will live in slums. The report also projected that the growth in slum populations will amount to twenty-seven million people per year—an increase that will continue at least the next two decades. In 1996 one hundred and seventy-six leaders from around the world met at the World Food Summit and pledged to cut the number of undernourished and starving people in half within twenty years.

Over a decade later, the number of people going hungry around the world has increased by eighteen million, bringing the worldwide total to eight hundred and fifty-two million, with an average of six million children dying of hunger each year. In the United States, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of homeless individuals in the last twenty-five years, attributable mainly to an increase in poverty and a growing shortage of affordable rental housing. Although the nature of homelessness makes it difficult to obtain accurate and timely statistics, it is estimated that an average 3.5 million people experience homelessness annually with the fastest growing segment of this population being families with children. As of 2003 the number of homeless who are children under the age of 18 is nearly 40%, in New York City, children constitute nearly half of the homeless population while children and their families make up 7% of the total. And although sometimes heir to employment figures going up across the United States, so too has the number of working poor and those forced to work multiple jobs without adequate healthcare and other benefits.

The noiliberal approach to dealing with growing poverty, unemployment, and homelessness is not simply to ignore it, but to impose punitive judgments through the moralizing effects of its political rationality. For example, the former Commissioner of the NNC Department of Homeless Services, Linda Cibos famously vowed to "change the meaning of homelessness" by emphasizing "better management" and "client responsibility." "My expectation," she stated, "is that you can actually manage this in a way that people change their behavior." Or course, what never factors into this construction of "client responsibility" are any of the structural constraints imposed by the city's endemic social problems, such as unfair housing practices and the lack of adequate education and employment opportunities. Instead,

ments can be accessed in PDF format at the UN-HABIT webpage: http://qa. unbi-tating/content.asp?id=359&ekaid=%20eped-idekah Menelaid (accessed April 30, 2008). I have not found an updated version of this article at the time of publication.