Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

JOHANNA OKSALA
not merely as an economic doctrine, but also as a comprehensive framework
for understanding ourselves and the political reality we live in today.
My aim in this paper is to argue that a Foucauldian ontology of the
present provides a valuable and original set of tools for such a philosophical
critique of neoliberalism. I will show that the political ontology of neoliberalism
can be effectively explicated along the three axes of power, knowledge
and subjectivity, which Foucault considered central to any critical
inquiry into our present. Specifically, I will focus on his lectures on neoliberalism,
The Birth of Biopolitics, delivered at the College de France in
1978–79. 2 These lectures analyze the neoliberal program in its two principal
forms: the initial German form was represented by the proponents of the
Freiburg School of economics such as Walter Eucken and Wilhelm Röpke,
also called “Ordoliberals,” coined from the journal Ordo. It was strongly
linked to the critique of Nazism and, after the War, to post-war
reconstruction. The other, American form, was the neoliberalism of the
Chicago School, which, while deriving from the former, was in some
respects more radical. 3
Diverging from interpretations that treat these lectures as economic or
social history, I want to emphasize their philosophical character. As
Foucault describes his objective in the first lecture, his interest is in the
construction of reality: the focus in his research is to understand the
coupling of a set of practices with a regime of truth in order to follow the
effects of its inscription on reality (BB, 19). His philosophical claim, in
essence, is that neoliberalism functions as an apparatus of knowledge and
power: it constructs a particular kind of social and political reality. We have
come to understand the world around us in a distinctive way through the
matrix of neoliberalism, and this framework delimits our political rationality
as well as our implicit self-understanding.
My argument proceeds in three stages, following the three axes of
knowledge, power and subjectivity. In the first part I claim that neoliberalism
can be viewed as an extreme form of the liberal regime of truth regulating
our current governmentality. Secondly, I show how neoliberalism is compa-
2 The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart,
trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). All references to these
lectures are designated in the text as BB.
3 There are a number of connections between the two: they share the same enemy—a
state-controlled economy—and a series of persons, theories and books passed between
them. Yet, they also have their own distinctive features. Foucault argued that the
Chicago School was more radical in its expansion of the economic to the social,
ultimately eliding the difference between them. See e.g. BB, 323.
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