Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

NEOLIBERALISM AND BIOPOLITICAL GOVERNMENTALITY
mentality “since it establishes, in its most important features… a particular
regime of truth which…is in fact still the same today” (BB, 18). Foucault’s
claim is not that at that moment in history politics and the art of
government finally became rational, nor that an epistemological threshold
had been reached on the basis of which the art of government could become
scientific. He is rather arguing that governmental activity entered into a
new regime of truth that conditioned what kind of claims could be
reasonably made about it. This transformation was decisive for our current
understanding of politics. It meant that all the questions formerly posed by
the art of governing had to be reconfigured in order for us to be able to
answer them in terms of truth or falsehood.
At one time these amounted to the question: Am I governing in proper
conformity to moral, natural, or divine laws? Then, in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, with raison d’Etat, it was: Am I governing with
sufficient intensity, depth, and attention to detail so as to bring the
state… to its maximum strength? And now the question will be: Am I
governing at the border between…the maximum and minimum fixed
for me by the nature of things...? (BB, 18-19)
Foucault’s key claim is thus that our modern understanding of politics was
constituted and limited by a particular liberal regime of truth, which
established a new relationship between political power and economic knowledge.
To sum up its essential features, it became possible, for the first time
in history, to make scientific truth claims about economics and good
governance. One of the most important ontological tenets of economic liberalism
and neoliberalism is the doctrine of economic neutrality: economic
facts are objective, universal and politically neutral. Political decisions have
to be based on economic truths, which in themselves are understood to be
politically neutral. 12
12 Teivo Teivainen (2002) calls “economism” the attempt to carry out state policies
exclusively on the basis of economic analyses, which are understood to be neutral
politically; see Teivo Teivainen, Enter Economism, Exit Politics: Experts, Economic Policy
and the Damage to Democracy (London: Zed Books, 2002). He argues (17) that
politically relevant decisions are increasingly made in institutions and contexts that are
defined as economic and that are therefore outside of democratic decision-making.
Democracy is restricted through the defining of various governance institutions and the
issues they deal with as economic and using the doctrine of economic neutrality to
produce a dichotomy between the economic and the political spheres. Examples include
Central Bank independence, balanced budget amendments, exchange-rate rules as well
as commitments to specific policy rules associated with trade and investment through
international or regional institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
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