Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

NEOLIBERALISM AND BIOPOLITICAL GOVERNMENTALITY
tible in significant ways with the rationality of biopower: the “health” of the
markets implies the health of the population. In the final part I discuss the
particular form of subjectivity—the homo economicus—it produces.
Truth
It might seem less than plausible to assert the significance of Foucault’s
thought in analyzing our contemporary economic reality, given that he is
often read as a thinker who, to his detriment, largely ignored questions of
political economy. Jeffrey Nealon, for example, has argued recently in his
book Foucault Beyond Foucault that he has very little to say to today’s
readers about the economic present, which is not primarily geared towards
a standardized and normalized mass society, but is instead supersaturated
with neoliberal practices of individual self-creation. 4 According to Nealon,
Foucault expanded most of his political and theoretical energy smoking out
the hidden indignities of a form of governmental power that has decisively
lost hegemony in the decades since his death, namely the welfare state.
Making his thought relevant today would therefore require constructing a
productive dialogue with contemporary Marxism. This, in turn, would
mean acknowledging his affinities with certain of its core tenets—such as
the persistence of class struggle—rather than viewing his relationship with
Marxism as a wholesale rejection. 5
It is my contention that while Marxist theory remains a pertinent
analysis of many of the essential mechanisms of capitalism, it fails to identify
what is specifically at stake in the rise of neoliberalism. I claim that Foucault’s
approach to neoliberalism is not only incompatible with Marxist analysis in
crucial ways, moreover Foucault provides an original perspective precisely
because he refuses to theorize it in terms of ideology and class struggle.
A traditional Marxist response would explain the hegemony of neoliberalism
in terms of class antagonism. David Harvey, for example, argues
in his influential analysis that the neoliberal turn was a deliberate and highly
successful attempt to restore the power and the wealth of the upper classes. 6
4 Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensification since 1984
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 11.
5 Ibid, 81-82.
6 Since the global neoliberal turn in the 1970s the income gap between the rich and the
poor, or the ruling class and the working class, has considerably widened. Harvey shows
that, whereas it narrowed considerably in most Western countries after the Second
World War and stayed relatively stable for nearly three decades, since the neoliberal turn
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