Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

NEOLIBERALISM AND BIOPOLITICAL GOVERNMENTALITY
based on economic knowledge and the strict calculation of the necessary
costs and desired benefits. The popularity of self-help guides and selfmanagement
manuals are seen as a symptom of this current, neoliberal
understanding of the subject: individuals are solely responsible for a number
of problems that were previously considered social or political issues. 20
It must be pointed out that this neoliberal production of a new form of
subjectivity is not a direct consequence of implicit or hidden ontological
presuppositions concerning human beings, however. The metaphysical or
anthropological question of whether human beings really are naturally selfinterested
and competitive is ultimately irrelevant. The crucial and fundamental
presupposition is that in order for us to be able to provide a rational
explanation for economic mechanisms we must treat them as if they are
self-interested and competitive. The production of a new economic subject
is a consequence of neoliberalism’s political ontology: economic rationality
must be the rationality of the entire society.
Foucault argues that the Chicago School took this goal to the extreme by
eliminating the difference between the social and the economic. It was
characterized by its use of market economy analyses to decipher relationships
and phenomena that were previously thought to belong not to the
economic but to the social or political realm. Economy was no longer one
domain among others, with its own particular rationality, it was understood
as the rationality of the entirety of human action.
The generalization of the economic form of the market to the whole of
society functioned effectively as a grid of intelligibility and a principle of
decipherment for social relationships and individual behavior. This schema
made it possible to reveal in non-economic processes, relations and
behavior a number of formal and intelligible relations. It became possible to
generalize the economic form of the market throughout the social body,
including relationships that were not conducted, and therefore not usually
analyzed through monetary exchanges. An important example is the
neoliberal analysis of human capital.
The theory of human capital developed by economists of the Chicago
School such as Gary Becker and Theodore Schultz in the 1960s and early
1970s was an attempt to fill a gap in formal economic analysis by offering a
unified explanation of a wide range of empirical phenomena that had either
20 See e.g. Barbara Cruikshank, “Revolutions Within: Self-Government and Self-Esteem,”
in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (eds.), Foucault and Political
Reason: Liberalism, Neoliberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1996).
67