CHAPTER 2 METHODOLOGY
2.3 MODERN GOVERNMENTALITY
2.3.1 Liberal Reasoning
Liberalism, the “modern form of political intervention” (Dean 1997, p. 189), is framed by Foucault more as a practice of government than a philosophical view of the world.36 As practice liberalism asks “where exactly is the principle of the limitation of government to be found; and how are the effects of this limitation to be calculated?” (Foucault 1979, p. 20).37 Within the answer, liberal partitions of rule came to distinguish the public from the private, or the governed from the government, within civil society (Olssen et al. 2006, p. 29). In addition, the convergence of certain practices of government and liberalism’s regime of “truth” promoted the market’s own self-regulation or self-function. This was to produce the “truth” that ought to guide governing. The result, Foucault claims, was the development of the market as site of
‘veridiction’, or “truth” telling (1979, p. 36).38 During its development in Europe and, later, in the US, liberalism found anchorage in the market and in the notion of utility which became
36 Also see Christie & Sidhu (2006, p. 451).
37 Quote taken from footnote.
38 Other ‘sites of veridiction’ developed during the 18th and 19th Centuries within the rationality of liberalism such as penal and psychiatric institutions, so it was not only the market that functioned as a site of “truth”
(Foucault 1979, p. 35).
53 important in the calculation of the limitation of intervention by administrative or public authorities. Limiting governmental intervention was then navigated and informed by the interaction of the “[e]xchange of wealth and utility of the public authorities” (ibid, p. 43) which meant that its functioning was based on the notion of interest. It was not the interest of the state per se (raison d’ État) that this rationality was concerned with, rather it was focused on a variety of complex interests that consisted out of individuals, the population, the government, the law, human rights, and state equilibrium in Europe. Similarly, governmental authority was not exercised on those elements which constituted the state, as was the case with raison d’ État.
It was only exercised and considered legitimate if it was ‘rational’ and justifiable through law, and was interventionist only if it was in the interest of an individual or individuals (ibid, p. 45).
The principal object of liberal reason became the “man [sic] of interest” (Gordon 1991, p. 24), which was termed homo œconomicus by Foucault. It also witnessed a transformation of the law “in that its function as an instrument of the exercise of sovereignty [became] linked to a complex set of disciplinary and governmental apparatuses” (Dean 2009, p. 118). Law thus became an instrument for the normalisation of power and it resembled and functioned more like a series of norms than laws proper as it sought to establish a balance between too much and too little government and sought to create the conditions in which ‘free’ citizens acted in a responsible and disciplined manner (ibid, pp. 121-122). This led Foucault to claim that modern governmentality, in its broadest sense, was constituted by interplay between sovereignty, discipline and government (1978b, pp. 107-108). Foucault cautions that the rise of liberal governmentality did not signify a quantitative increase in freedom within European societies following the breakdown of the authoritarian police state. Instead, liberalism was a ‘consumer of freedom’ in as much as it needed freedom to both function and govern – the freedom of the market, freedom of expression, the freedom to sell and buy. Hence liberalism sought to
54 constitute the conditions necessary for freedom and the exercise of power and, thereby, embodied its management rather than its imperative (Foucault 1979, p. 63). For Foucault,
“[l]iberalism [was] not acceptance of freedom; it propose[d] to manufacture it constantly, to arouse it and produce it, with, of course, [the system] of constraints and the problems of cost raised by this production” (ibid, p. 65). Because liberalism was concerned with producing and protecting freedom, it became paradoxically concerned with setting up certain limitations to prevent the restriction of freedom (ibid, p. 64). For example, for free trade between states to occur, agreements and measures were needed to prevent domination of some states by others.39 Similarly, to ensure internal market (intra-state) competitiveness, anti-monopolistic measures had to be devised.
However, to address the cost, or the possible threats, to the interests of the population by the interest of individuals through the calculation and production of freedom, security became the principle of regulation of the cost of freedom (Foucault 1979, p. 65). Although security remained concerned with physical ‘threats’ from the outside, its reconceptualisation came to involve the ‘management’ of the population to secure the internal stability of the state.40 Liberalism then sought to address what became one of the resulting consequences: the interests of the population came to face a constant ‘danger’ or ‘risk’. This led to another important side effect of liberalism – the “considerable extension of processes of control, constraint and coercion which [were] something like the counterpart and counterweight of different freedoms” (ibid, p. 67). As Tikly points out
39 An example is America’s protectionist policies against the perceived economic hegemony of England at the start of the 19th Century.
40 For example, the freedom of workers was not supposed to threaten the interests of enterprise and of production and, similarly, individual accidents (inevitable old age or possible illness) were not supposed to threaten the interests of society and, therefore, required regulation and management (Foucault 1979, pp. 66-67;
Olssen et al. 2006, p. 26).
55 [l]iberal governmentality retain[ed] and utilize[d] the techniques, rationalities and
institutions characteristic of sovereignty and discipline but reposition[ed] them in accordance with the new object of liberal government. This object, which [took] the forms of an administrative imperative to optimise the health, life and productivity of populations are referred to by Foucault as bio-power (2003, p. 163).
This calculation of ‘risk’ to the welfare and prosperity of citizens witnessed the division of the population into sub-groups as certain individuals were classified and named, for example, as ‘criminal’, ‘abnormal’ or ‘feeble-minded’. Such classifications, as well as the means to “prevent, contain or eliminate” (Dean 2009, p. 100) those who were classified, were aided by the increase in ‘scientific “knowledge”’ production about humans. This process also saw race – a bio-political imperative – being included in the calculation of possible ‘enemies’
to the wellbeing of the state (ibid; Olssen et al. 2006, p. 29). By the 20th Century, however, the initial supervision of bio-political practices led to even further mechanisms of control and, indeed, increased intervention as liberalism sought to ‘breathe more life’ into and, so, increase freedom. This took place in the context of the early 20th Century economic crisis that was perceived as a ‘risk’ to certain basic freedoms and which led to measures intended to lessen the
‘dangers’ of unemployment and the subsequent ‘dangers’ to consumption and political freedoms (Foucault 1979, p. 68). So, liberalism became a “product and critique of bio-politics”
(Dean 2009, p. 118). As example, the American President Franklin Roosevelt’s welfare policies were intended to address the social and economic insecurities during the 1930s. They ushered in a “series of artificial, voluntarist interventions, of direct economic interventions in the market represented by the basic [w]elfare measures, and which from 1946…were described as being in themselves [another form] of…despotism” (Foucault 1979, p. 68).
56 The Keynesian interventions that gave rise to the welfare state came, in turn, therefore, to be perceived as posing a threat to forms of ‘democratic freedom’ – so, it was that liberalism induced the ‘crisis’ of governmentality that developed during the first quarter of the 20th Century. This resulted in the cost of political freedom being evaluated against the ‘threat’ it posed to economic gains. In this, the idea of the market was used to oppose certain legislative measures that sought to address anti-monopolistic practices and promoted free trade. It did so by claiming that the latter amounted to excessive intervention that curtailed the freedom that the market needed to function effectively (Foucault 1979, pp. 68-69). It was thus the evaluation of the perils of liberal governmentality during the so-called ‘crisis of capitalism’ that gave the rise to what is today understood as neo-liberalism.