The Birth of Biopolitics

Produktbeschreibung

Picador is proud to publish the sixth volume in Foucault's prestigious, groundbreaking series of lectures at the Collège de France from 1970 to 1984

The Birth of Biopolitics continues to pursue the themes of Foucault's lectures from Security, Territory, Population. Having shown how eighteenth-century political economy marks the birth of a new governmental rationality--seeking maximum effectiveness by governing less and in accordance with the naturalness of the phenomena to be governed--Michel Foucault undertakes a detailed analysis of the forms of this liberal governmentality. In a direct and conversational tone, this book raises questions of political philosophy and social policy that are at the heart of current debates about the role and status of neo-liberalism in twentieth century politics. 

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Foreword: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana

One: 10 January 1979
Questions of method. - Suppose universals do not exist. - Summary of the
previous year's lectures: the limited objective of the government raison d'État
(external politics) and unlimited objective of the police state (internal
politics). - Law as principle of the external limitation raison d'État. -
Perspective of this year's lectures: political economy as principle of the
internal limitation of governmental reason. - What is at stake in this research:
the coupling of a set of practices and a regime of truth and the effects of its
inscription in reality. - What is liberalism.

Two: 17 January 1979
Liberalism and the implementation of a new art of government in the eighteenth
century. - Specific features of the liberal art of government ( I ): ( 1 ) The
constitution of the market as site of the formation of truth and not just as
domain of jurisdiction. - Questions of method. The stakes of research undertaken
around madness, the penal order, and sexuality: sketch of a history of "regimes
of verdiction." - The nature of a political critique of knowledge (savoir). - (
2 ) The problem of limiting the exercise of power by public authorities. Two
types of solution: French juridical radicalism and English utilitarianism. - The
question of "utility" and limiting the exercise of power by public authorities.
- Comment on the status of heterogeneity in history: strategic against
dialectical logic. - The notion of "interest" as operator (opérateur) of the new
art of government.

Three: 24 January 1979
Specific features of the liberal art of government ( II ): ( 3 ) The problem of
European balance and international relations. - Economic and political
calculation in mercantilism. The principle of freedom of the market according to
the physiocrats and Adam Smith: birth of a new European model. - Appearance of a
governmental rationality extended to a world scale. Examples: the question of
maritime law; the projects of perpetual peace in the eighteenth century. -
Principles of the new liberal art of government: a "governmental naturalism";
the production of freedom. - The problem of liberal arbitration. Its
instruments: ( 1 ) the management of dangers and the implementation of
mechanisms of security; ( 2 ) disciplinary controls (Bentham's panopticism); ( 3
) inverventionist policies. - The management of liberty and its crises.

Four: 31 January 1979
Phobia of the state. - Questions of method: sense and stakes of the bracketing
off of a theory of the state in the analysis of mechanisms of power. -
Neo-liberal governmental practices: German liberalism from 1948 to 1962;
American neo-liberalism. - German neo-liberalism ( I ). Its political-economic
context. - The scientific council brought together by Erhard in 1947. Its
program: abolition of price controls and limitation of governmental
interventions. - The middle way defined by Erhard in 1948 between anarchy and
the "termite state". - Its double meaning: ( a ) respect for economic freedom as
condition of the state's political representativity; ( b) the institution of
economic freedom as basis for the formation of political sovereignty. -
Fundamental characteristic of contemporary German governmentality: economic
freedom, the source of juridical legitimacy and political consensus. - Economic
growth, axis of a new historical consciousness enabling the break with the past.
- Rallying of Christian Democracy and the SPD to liberal politics. - The
principles of liberal government and the absence of a socialist governmental
rationality.

Five: 7 February 1979
German neo-liberalism ( II ). - Its problem: how can economic freedom both found
and limit the state at the same time? - The neo-liberal theorists: W. Eucken, F.
Böhm, A. Müller-Armack, F. von Hayek. - Max Weber and the problem of the
irrational rationality of capitalism. The answers of the Frankfurt School and
the Freiburg School. - Nazism as necessary field of adversity to the definition
of the neo-liberal critique of National Socialism on the basis of these
different elements of German history. - Theoretical consequences: extension of
this critique to the New Deal and to the Beveridge plans; interventionism and
the growth of the power of the state; massification and uniformization, effects
of state control. - The stake of neo-liberalism: its novelty in comparison with
classical liberalism. The theory of pure competition.

Six: 14 February 1979
German neo-liberalism ( III ). - Usefulness of historical analyses for the
present. - How is neo-liberalism distinguished from classical liberalism? - Its
specific stake: how to model the global exercise of political power on the
principles of a market economy, and the transformations that derive from this. -
The decoupling of the market economy and policies of laissez-faire. - The Walter
Lippmann colloquium ( 26 to 30 August 1938 ). - The problem of the style of
governmental action. Three examples: ( a ) the question of monopolies; ( b ) the
question of "conformable actions ( actions conformes )." The bases of economic
policy according to W. Eucken. Regulatory actions and organizing actions (
actions ordonnatrices ); ( c ) social policy. The ordoliberal critique of the
welfare economy. - Society as the point of application of governmental
interventions. The "policy of society" ( Gesellschaftspolitik ). - First aspect
of this policy: the formalization of society on the model of the enterprise. -
Enterprise society and judicial society; two faces of a single phenomenon.

Seven: 21 February 1979
Second aspect of the "policy of society" according to the neo-liberals: the
problem of law in a society regulated according to the model of the competitive
market economy. - Return of Walter Lippmann colloquium. - Reflections based on a
text by Louis Rougier. - ( 1 ) The idea of a juridical-economic order.
Reciprocity of relations between economic processes and institutional framework.
- Political stake: the problem of the survival of capitalism. - ( 2 ) The
question of legal interventionism. - Historical reminder: the Rule of law (
l'État de droit ) in the eighteenth century, in opposition to despotism and the
police state. Re-elaboration of the notion in the nineteenth century: the
question of arbitration between citizens and public authorities. The problem of
administrative courts. - The neo-liberal project: to introduce the principles of
the Rule of law into the economic order. - Rule of law and planning according to
Hayek. - ( 3 ) Growth of judicial demand. - General conclusion: the specificity
of the neo-liberal art of government in Germany. Ordoliberalism faced with the
pessimism of Schumpeter.

Eight: 7 March 1979
General remarks: ( 1 ) The methodological scope of the analysis of micro-powers.
( 2 ) The inflationism of state phobia. Its links with ordoliberalism. - Two
theses on the totalitarian state and the decline of state governmentality in the
twentieth century. - Remarks on the spread of the German model, in France and in
the United States. - The German neo-liberal model and the French project of a
"social market economy." - The French context of the transition to a neo-liberal
economics. - French social policy: the example of social security. - The
separation of the economic and the social according to Giscard d'Estaing. - The
project of a "negative tax" and its social and political stakes. "Relative" and
"absolute" poverty. Abandonment of the policy of full employment.

Nine: 14 March 1979
American neo-liberalism ( I ). Its context. - The difference between American
and European neo-liberalism. - American neo-liberalism as a global claim,
utopian focus, and method of thought. - Aspects of this neo-liberalism: ( 1 )
The theory of human capital. The two processes that it represents: ( a ) an
extension of economic analysis within its own domain: criticism of the classical
analysis of labor in terms of the time factor; ( b ) an extension of economic
analysis to domains previously considered to be non-economic. - The
epistemological transformation produced by neo-liberal analysis: from the
analysis of economic processes to the analysis of the internal rationality of
human behavior. - Work as economic conduct. - Its division into capital,
abilities, and income. - The redefinition of homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of
himself. - The notion of "human capital." Its constitutive elements: ( a )
innate elements and the question of the improvement of genetic human capital; (
b ) acquired elements and the problem of the formation of human capital
(education, health, etcetera). - The interest of these analyses: resumption of
the problem of social and economic innovation ( Schumpeter ). A new conception
of the policy of growth.

Ten: 21 March 1979
American neo-liberalism ( II ). - The application of the economic grid to social
phenomena. - Return to the ordoliberal problematic: the ambiguities of the
Gesellschaftspolitik. The generalization of the "enterprise" form in the social
field. Economic policy and Vitalpolitik: a society for the market and against
the market. - The unlimited generalization of the economic form of the market in
American neo-liberalism: principle of the intelligibility of individual behavior
and critical principle of governmental interventions. - Aspects of American
neo-liberalism: ( 2 ) Delinquency and penal policy. - Historical reminder: the
problem of the reform of penal law at the end of the eighteenth century.
Economic calculation and principle of legality. The parasitic invasion of the
law by the norm in the nineteenth century and the birth of criminal
anthropology. - The neo-liberal analysis: ( 1 ) the definition of crime; ( 2 )
the description of the criminal subject as homo oeconomicus; ( 3 ) the status of
the penalty as instrument of law "enforcement." The example of the drugs market.
- Consequences of this analysis: ( a ) anthropological erasure of the criminal;
( b ) putting the disciplinary model out of play.

Eleven: 28 March 1979
The model of homo oeconomicus. - Its generalization to every form of behavior in
American neo-liberalism. - Economic analysis and behavioral techniques. - Homo
oeconomicus as the basic element of the new governmental reason appeared in the
eighteenth century. - Elements for a history of the notion of homo oeconomicus
before Walras and Pareto. - The subject of interest in English empiricist
philosophy ( Hume ). - The heterogeneity of the subject of interest and the
legal subject: ( 1 ) The irreducible nature of interest in comparison with
juridical will. ( 2 ) The contrasting logics of the market and the contract. -
Second innovation with regard to the juridical model: the economic subject's
relationship with political power. Condorcet. Adam Smith's "invisible hand":
invisibility of the link between the individual's pursuit of profit and the
growth of collective wealth. The non-totalizable nature of the economic world.
The sovereign's necessary ignorance. - Political economy as critique of
governmental reason: rejection of the possibility of an economic sovereign in
its two, mercantilist and physiocratic, forms. - Political economy as a science
lateral to the art of government.

Twelve: 4 April 1979
Elements for a history of the notion of homo oeconomicus ( II ). -Return to the
problem of the limitation of sovereign power by economic activity. - The
emergence of a new field, the correlate of the liberal art of government: civil
society. - Homo oeconomicus and civil society: inseparable elements of liberal
governmental technology. - Analysis of the notion of "civil society": its
evolution from Locke to Ferguson. Ferguson's An Essay on the History of Civil
Society (1787). The four essential characteristics of civil society according to
Ferguson: ( 1 ) it is an historical-natural constant; ( 2 ) it assures the
spontaneous synthesis of individuals. Paradox of the economic bond; ( 3 ) it is
a permanent matrix of political power; ( 4 ) it is the motor of history. -
Appearance of a new system of political thought. - Theoretical consequences: ( a
) the question of the relations between state and society. The German, English,
and French problematics; ( b ) the regulation of political power: from the
wisdom of the prince to the rational calculations of the governed. - General
conclusion.

Course Summary

Course Context

Index of Names

Index of Concepts and Notions 

Autoreninfo

Michel Foucault