Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

INTRODUCTION
The two main cases that he discusses are German ordoliberalism and the
Chicago School. 24 The German tradition derives its name from the journal
Ordo, which began in 1948 as a forum for debate on the postwar reconstruction,
but which actually can be traced back to certain intellectual
movements from the ‘30s, most notably the Freiburg school. The immediate
context for the ordoliberals was the perverse Raison d’État of Nazi
Germany, but they also leveled harsh criticism at the expansive state of the
New Deal and Beveridge Plan in England. After the war, ordoliberalism
would become a fundamental source for the postwar Wirtschaftswunder,
especially in its emphasis on the interplay of market and legal and institutional
structures. On this point it can be contrasted with the later Chicago
school, which would opt for a much more pervasive and radical market
perspective, encompassing (in principle) all strands of life.
Unlike much earlier liberalism, where the state had as its primary role
intervention in order to mitigate the consequences of the market, the ordoliberals
suggested that the role of the state was to ensure the permanence of
competition; economic rationality was said to be the antidote to social
dysfunctions: “One must govern for the market,” Foucault summarizes,
“not because of the market” (BB, 121). The enterprise was the founding
model for society, and competition replaced the traditional social bond in a
“formal game between inequalities” (120) whose only rule was that no
player should be allowed to lose everything and be altogether excluded from
the game, thus the assurance of a certain existential minimum. The market
is however as such a fragile construct, which is why it needs support from
state institutions, above all in settling legal conflicts, but also in many other
ways: in fact, rather than a state reduced to an absolute minimum, the ordo-
seems like a more apt object of study than Anglo-Saxon liberalism, especially in the way
it attempts to balance the need for individual agency and centralized political systems by
a whole gamut of highly technical governmental strategies. For a discussion of the
emergence of the Swedish system in this perspective, see Helena Mattsson and Sven-
Olov Wallenstein (eds.), Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare
State (London: Black Dog, 2010).
24 While these two cases undoubtedly can be taken as two major sources of twentieth
century liberal theory, the motif for choosing the German example, as the editor Michel
Senellart points out in his postface (BB, 328), is also what Foucault perceives as an
“inflationary” critique of the state (187)—which itself was largely inspired by his own
earlier work—that always sees micro-fascisms at work in each of its operations, and was
particularly dominant at the time, as in the debates around German and Italian terrorism,
the German Berufsverbot, and in France surrounding the quarrel over the extradition
of the RAF lawyer Klaus Croissant. “Liberty,” Foucault says in a phrase that must
surely have bewildered many of his listeners, “in the second half of the twentieth century,
well, let’s say more accurately, liberalism, is a word that comes to us from Germany” (22).
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