Foucault,Gary Becker and the Critique of Neoliberalism

Economy

After discussing German ordoliberalism and its classical forebears, The Birth of Biopolitics turns to Becker, who Foucault calls ‘the most radical, if you like, of the American neoliberals’ (Foucault, 2004: 273). ³ Foucault observes that, where earlier economists argued that society ought to counteract the market’s negative effects, Becker claims that society itself operates according to market processes (Foucault, 2004: 248). Becker argues that behaviours apparently motivated by love, dependence and aesthetic taste can be explained economically. This allows him to subject an astonishing array of behaviours to economic analysis – including addiction, altruism and fads in the popularity of restaurants (Becker, 1992, 1976a, 1991 respectively). ⁴ In his view, it is possible to economically measure the choice of whether and whom to marry (Becker, 1973) and even the experience of romantic affection itself; as he puts it, ‘Caring can strikingly modify the market allocation between married persons’ (Becker, 1974a: 14). Becker’s economic approach can thus explain phenomena as diverse as the likelihood of divorce, patterns in the incidence of polygyny and the persistence of income inequality across generations (Becker, 1974a: 24). With Becker, the domain of economic analysis expands dramatically.

The benefits of Becker’s approach are evident in his treatment of crime, which Foucault discusses at length. Becker writes: ‘Entry into illegal activities can be explained by the same model of choice that economists use to explain entry into legal activities’ (Becker, 1968: 207). According to Becker, the criminal weighs the benefits of crime against the potential consequences; in more technical terms: ‘A person commits an offense if the expected utility to him exceeds the utility he could get by using his time and other resources at other activities’ (Becker, 1968: 176). But if criminal behaviour responds consistently to environmental factors, it becomes possible to reduce the level of criminality by altering the variables that contribute to the calculations of a potential offender. In order to decrease the incidence of a particular crime, it is enough to increase the penalty or devote further resources to enforcement. As the cost and likelihood of being caught increases, crime will decrease in response – not entirely, but to a tolerable level (Becker, 1968: 176). Because the cost of discovering the crime and punishing the criminal may sometimes outweigh the benefit resulting from deterrence, Becker suggests that there is a point at which offences ought to be tolerated (1968: 170).

In Foucault’s analysis, where 19th-century theorists posited a distinctive criminal identity (homo criminalis), Becker construes the criminal as an ordinary economic actor (homo oeconomicus) (Foucault, 2004: 259). Foucault writes in 1975:

Disciplinary power is individualizing because it fastens the subject-function to the somatic singularity by means of a system of supervision-writing … [which] establishes the norm as the principle of division and normalization, as the universal prescription for all individuals constituted in this way. (Foucault, 2006: 55)

This dense sentence exemplifies the way in which, for Foucault, discipline is concerned neither with the crime in question nor with criminality as such but with the individual criminal, whose identity is defined by delinquency. In contrast, because Becker argues that all human behaviour involves the cool-headed calculation of benefits and costs (Becker, 1976b: 14), there is no need to identify particular individuals as deviant, nor to demand that individual behaviour must conform to a predetermined norm. Where disciplinary regimes attempt to refashion individual subjects, the economic approach intervenes indirectly.

Against this background, Becker’s approach might appear to be an improvement. Becker himself comments, ‘It’s hard for me to see something in [The Birth of Biopolitics] that Foucault doesn’t like in terms of my work’ (Becker, Ewald, and Harcourt, 2013: 7), and it is true that Foucault does not openly condemn neoliberalism. Foucault comments that Becker’s approach entails ‘tolerance towards minority individuals and practices … in which intervention comes not through the internal subjection of individuals but an intervention of the environmental type’ (Foucault, 2004: 265). In light of statements like this, Michael Behrent argues that Foucault considered neoliberal economics to be an appealing alternative to disciplinary power (Behrent, 2009a: 546; see also Behrent, 2013: 90). Behrent claims that, according to Foucault, ‘Neoliberalism of the Chicago variety is [in Foucault’s words] “much less bureaucratic,” and “much less disciplinary” (disciplinariste) – which, coming from Foucault, was no mean compliment’ (Behrent, 2009a: 566). I will return to this argument below, but at this point it is worth noting that, because Foucault’s description of disciplinary regimes is openly negative (see Foucault, 1995: 308), Becker’s shift away from the disciplinary approach to crime could seem consonant with Foucault’s own commitments.

Normalization

Foucault writes that Becker displaces ‘an exhaustively disciplinary society’ in favour of ‘a society in which the mechanism of general normalization and the exclusion of the non-normalizable’ are no longer needed (Foucault, 2004: 265). Read in isolation, this might seem to indicate Foucault’s approval; however, in the context of Foucault's work in this period it is clear that Becker’s approach exemplifies a normalizing power that operates through inclusion. In the lectures that directly precede The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault distinguishes between two kinds of normalization. He writes, ‘Disciplinary normalization consists first of all in positing a model … and the operation of disciplinary normalization consists in trying to get people, movements, and actions to conform to this model’ (Foucault, 2007: 57). This form of normalization distinguishes between what is normal and abnormal by applying a predetermined norm, and it attempts to bring the individuals it targets into line with the norm by applying disciplinary techniques. Foucault immediately adds, ‘Due to the primacy of the norm in relation to the normal … I would rather say that what is involved in disciplinary techniques is a normation rather than normalization’ (Foucault, 2007: 57). As the example of criminality makes clear, Becker has no need to assert a norm of this kind.

Whereas the first form of normalization is associated with medicine (and psychiatry in particular), Foucault describes a second form of normalization that is the special province of economics. In contrast to normation, which judges behaviour to be normal or not according to a predetermined norm, normalization (strictly speaking) ‘starts from the normal and makes use of certain distributions considered to be, if you like, more normal than the others, or at any rate more favorable than the others. These distributions will serve as the norm’ (Foucault, 2007: 63). In place of disciplinary attention to individuals, here the norm is determined through the statistical analysis of a given population, ‘a plotting of the normal and the abnormal, of different curves of normality’ (Foucault, 2007: 63). In normalization proper, the norm emerges from normal patterns through the methods of economics. Becker’s method corresponds to normalization in this sense: although Becker no longer requires ‘the exclusion of the non-normalizable’, as Foucault says (Foucault, 2004: 265), this is simply because the economic approach can absorb deviation.

Becker’s claim that every aspect of human behaviour is rational concerns patterns of behaviour across a population; it is not intended to hold in every individual case. Becker writes: ‘Undue concentration at the individual level can easily lead to an overestimate of the degree of irrationality at the market level’ (Becker, 1962: 13). As everyone knows from experience, individuals are often intemperate, and so particular cases might lead one to believe that people are generally erratic. However, in Becker’s view: ‘Households may be irrational and yet markets quite rational’ (Becker, 1962: 8). Rather than excluding the possibility of the irrational individual, or asserting that such people ought to be different, Becker argues that eccentricity is irrelevant at the level of generality: ‘What is simply more probable for a particular household becomes a certainty for a large number of independent ones’ (Becker, 1962: 6). For this reason, he says: ‘While the economic approach to behavior builds on a theory of individual choice, it is not mainly concerned with individuals’ (Becker, 1993: 402). Which is to say, Becker extrapolates from broader trends and tendencies in order to conclude that human behaviour is (normally) predictable.

Although Becker’s analysis operates at the level of populations, the certainties produced by statistical normalization hold profound implications for individuals. Becker allows for the existence of irrational individuals that lie outside the norm, and yet he argues that changes to the environment would constrain the possibilities for impulsive behaviour to the extent that even the irrational would act as if they were rational. Thus, for example, although some people spend inordinate sums on twee figurines, their habits nevertheless respond rationally to change: if the price of food rises, they will spend less on bric-a-brac because there is simply less left to spend. For this reason, Becker says, ‘Irrational units would often be “forced” by a change in opportunities to respond rationally’ (Becker, 1962: 12). Although there is a sense in which the rules discerned by Becker’s approach are less rigid than their disciplinary analogues, the fact that he extrapolates the norm rather than imposing one simply allows for subtler forms of influence.

Rather than valorizing the tolerance of Becker’s approach, Foucault observes that ‘in Becker’s definition … this homo oeconomicus appears precisely as one who can be manoeuvred, someone who responds systematically to systematic modifications that one introduces artificially in the environment’ (Foucault, 2004: 274). As Foucault recognizes, if Becker is right that all behaviour conforms (in fact) to rationality, then intervention may be tremendously effective even if it does not demand conformity to a given norm (in principle). Becker writes, ‘“Manipulating” the experiences of others to influence their preferences may appear to be inefficient and fraught with uncertainty, but it can be the most effective way available to obtain commitment’ (Becker, 1993: 400). ⁵ Although normalization of this kind need not refashion individuals by force, it nevertheless enables behaviour to be governed indirectly.

Biopolitics

This form of indirect government through satistical normalization corresponds to what Foucault calls ‘biopolitics’. Foucault first mentions biopolitics in October 1974 (Foucault, 1994), but he does not elaborate its significance until 1976. That year, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, ‘biopolitics’ describes the regulation and control of populations. As a complement to disciplines that centre on the individual body – and in contrast to punitive sovereignty – Foucault explains that biopolitics positively fosters and sustains the life of a population through the application of technical expertise. ⁶ He writes, ‘For the first time in history, no doubt, biopolitical existence was reflected in political existence … part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention' (Foucault, 1980: 142). Foucault argues that the emergence of biopolitical power is inseparable from the development of new forms of knowledge. He continues:

Another consequence of this development of bio-power was the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm …. Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor … it effects distributions around the norm. (Foucault, 1980: 144)

In The History of Sexuality the examples of biopolitics that Foucault provides centre on ‘biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity’ (Foucault, 1980: 139). However, in Society Must Be Defended (his Collège de France lectures from the same year), Foucault is clear that biopolitics is only obliquely related to biology. There he explains that, whereas disciplinary power rules by resolving the multitude into individual bodies – each of which can be formed through surveillance, training, and so forth – this new form of power is addressed to the multitude as such (Foucault, 2003: 243). In keeping with his analysis in The History of Sexuality, Foucault writes that ‘the theory of right basically knew only the individual and society … Disciplines, for their part, dealt with individuals and their bodies in practical terms … Biopolitics deals with the population … as a problem that is at once scientific and political’ (Foucault, 2003: 245).

As Foucault goes on to describe, biopolitics works through scientific techniques (‘forecasts, statistical estimates’) in order to affect collective behaviour at the general level (Foucault, 2003: 246; see Hull, 2013: 325). Although biological phenomena constitute one object for power of this kind, in Foucault’s view biopolitics is broader.

In Security, Territory, Population, his lectures two years later, Foucault writes:

This year I would like to begin studying something that I have called, somewhat vaguely, bio-power. By this I mean … the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of … a general strategy of power. (Foucault, 2007: 1)

In contrast to the sovereignty associated with the feudal state and the discipline characteristic of the administrative state, Foucault writes that ‘the state of government, which essentially bears on the population and calls upon and employs economic knowledge as an instrument, would correspond to a society controlled by apparatuses of security’ (Foucault, 2007: 110). In order to clarify the concept of security, Foucault discusses the example of criminality here as well: where sovereignty prescribes the spectacle of punishment for a given offence and discipline adds a system of surveillance and correction, ‘the apparatus of security inserts the phenomenon in question, namely theft, within a series of probable events’ (Foucault, 2007: 6). Security asks, Foucault says:

What is the average rate of criminality? … How much does this criminality cost society? … What, therefore, is the comparative cost of the theft and of its repression, and what is more worthwhile: to tolerate a bit more theft or to tolerate a bit more repression? (Foucault, 2007: 4–5)

Because The Birth of Biopolitics records the transcript of lectures delivered orally, it has the uneven style of extemporaneous speech, with sudden starts and stops left intact. (For better or worse, the English translation polishes the much rougher French text.) For this reason, it would be a mistake to conclude from the relative absence of the word ‘biopolitics’ that the course abandons its theme. ⁷ When read carefully and in context, The Birth of Biopolitics clearly extends Foucault’s evolving analysis of biopolitics. At the outset Foucault explains:

It seems to be that the analysis of biopolitics can only occur when one has understood the general regime of this governmental reason of which I am speaking, this general regime called the question of truth, and above all economic truth, within governmental reason. And consequently, if one understands what is at stake in the regime that is liberalism, which opposes itself to State reason – or rather, which alters it fundamentally without, perhaps, putting its foundations into question – it is once we have understood this governmental regime called liberalism that one can, it seems to me, grasp what biopolitics is. (Foucault, 2004: 24)

Freedom

Foucault’s treatment of biopolitics provides the context required to evaluate the claim that he was drawn to neoliberalism. Becker argues that neoliberalism offers ‘a liberating point of view’ (Becker, Ewald, and Harcourt, 2012: 11, 17, 18), and some suppose that Foucault agrees. Michael Behrent argues that Foucault saw that neoliberal economics promotes freedom by effectively limiting power. According to Behrent, Foucault realized that ‘economic liberalism justifies itself on the basis of its greater efficiency: it is a practice that arises when power realises that it has an interest as power in limiting power’ (Behrent, 2009a: 546). In support of his interpretation, Behrent quotes Foucault:

On the horizon of this [neoliberal analysis] we find instead the image or the idea or the theme-program of a society in which there would be optimization of systems of difference, in which the field would be left free to oscillating processes … and finally in which there would be an intervention that would not be of the type of the internal subjection [assujettissement] of individuals, but an intervention of the environmental type. (2004: 265)

Because the statistical methods of biopolitics allow for the efficient management of a population, Foucault claims that the liberty allowed by neoliberalism should be taken neither as a stable quantity nor as unambiguously good. He writes: ‘Liberty in the regime of liberalism is not a given, liberty is not a set region that one would have to respect …. Liberalism is not that which accepts liberty. Liberalism is that which proposes to fabricate it at each instant’ (Foucault, 2004: 66). Although liberal theorists (including Becker) claim to respect the pre-existing freedom of individuals, Foucault suggests that this liberty is itself formed by liberalism. He writes ‘this governmental practice which is installing itself is not content to respect such-and-such liberty, to guarantee such-and-such liberty. More profoundly, it is a consumer of liberty … It must produce it, it must organize it’ (Foucault, 2004: 65).

Because individual and collective interests can potentially threaten each other, liberalism cannot simply let freedom roll along unimpeded – in Foucault’s view, it must actively manage the subjectivity of its subjects. Where Behrent claims that ‘modern forms of power must give ample room to freedom’ (2009a: 558), Foucault writes that ‘at its heart, liberalism … involves a relation of production/destruction [with] liberty’ (Foucault, 2004: 65). Insofar as individual freedom is itself shaped by this new regime of power, Foucault undercuts the neoliberal claim to protect individual freedom from the state’s encroachment.

At a symposium in 2012, François Ewald addressed Becker directly: ‘[Foucault] sees your work, your kind of analyses as creating the possibility to promote, to envision new kinds of liberty’ (Becker, Ewald, and Harcourt, 2012: 6; see Ewald, 1999). Given Ewald’s stature as Foucault’s editor and close associate, this claim carries some weight. Ewald explains ‘the challenge is to be free from morality and from the law. And he finds, I think, the solution in the writings of the economists … You propose a theory of man, a vision of man, that is non-moral and non-juridical’ (Becker, Ewald, and Harcourt, 2012: 5).

In Ewald’s view, Becker provided Foucault with an alternative to the moralism and legalism of sovereignty and discipline. The next year Ewald addressed Becker again: ‘You were a liberator for Foucault, a liberator from past models’ (Becker, Ewald, and Harcourt, 2013: 3). If Foucault was only concerned about sovereign and disciplinary power, Ewald might be right. However, it is not only the ‘past models’ Ewald mentions that Foucault found problematic – Foucault also aimed to critique the form of power he saw as current. As Foucault’s account of biopolitics makes clear, freedom from morality and the law does not entail freedom as such, for biopolitical power works within subjectivity itself.

Foucault considers the possibility that Becker’s approach favours freedom, and he responds: ‘Was not homo oeconomicus already a certain type of subject who precisely entitled an art of governing modelled upon the principle of economy?’ (Foucault, 2004: 275). Where Behrent and Ewald present neoliberalism as the friend of freedom, Foucault suggests that Becker’s conception of the subject is the correlate of governmental power. This does not invalidate it, of course; in Foucault’s view, freedom never exists undetermined, independent of any influence. However, Foucault's analysis does undermine the neoliberal claim to preserve freedom by limiting government. Where Ewald claims that Foucault saw Becker’s approach as liberating, Foucault is more ambivalent. He writes:

If one speaks of liberalism … this does not mean that one is passing from a government which was authoritarian … to a government which becomes more tolerant, more lax, and more supple. I did not want to say that the quantity of liberty had increased. (Foucault, 2004: 63–4) ⁸

Critique

Although Foucault’s comments on neoliberalism can seem sympathetic when read in isolation, the link between neoliberalism and biopolitics indicates that The Birth of Biopolitics constitutes a sustained critique. Philip Mirowski praises Foucault for acknowledging the interventionist character of neoliberal government, but he claims that ‘Foucault managed to be so very prescient with regard to everyday neoliberalism precisely because he took on board such a large amount of the neoliberal doctrine as a font of deep insight into the nature of governmentality’ (Mirowski, 2013: 97). Following Behrent, Mirowski claims that Foucault came to realize how much he had in common with neoliberal doctrine, but Mirowski goes even further. In his view:

The market as portrayed by Foucault in his late lectures on neoliberalism is the sole legitimate site for the production of indubitable knowledge of the whole; in other words, an absent deity rendered in a manner no different from Hayek or Stigler or Friedman. (Mirowski, 2013: 98)

According to Mirowski, Foucault considered the market to be ‘the Archimedean point that allows a critique of autocratic state power’ (Mirowski, 2013: 97). ⁹ However, Foucault expresses the opposite view. He writes, ‘The market … constitutes a place of veridiction’ (Foucault, 2004: 33) – which is to say, ‘not a law of truth but the set of rules that, with respect to a given discourse, permit one to determine which statements can be characterized as true or false’ (Foucault, 2004: 37). In these lectures, as elsewhere, Foucault’s concern is not to discern whether a given discourse is true or false but rather to analyse the rules that determine what counts as truth and falsehood in particular times and places. With respect to the market, Foucault is clear:

Politics and economics are neither things that exist, nor errors, nor illusions, nor ideologies. They are something that does not exist and which can inscribe itself in the real within a regime of truth that divides the true and the false. (Foucault, 2004: 22)

Like Mirowski, Ewald claims that Foucault identifies neoliberalism with critique; he claims that ‘[Becker] gave him the idea that it may be possible to make a critique of governmentality that is internal to a system’ (Becker, Ewald, and Harcourt, 2013: 21). Ewald is right that neoliberalism is critical in one sense of the term: Becker articulates a form of analysis on the basis of which it is possible to criticize a particular response to a problem such as criminality. However, this is not critique as Foucault understands it. In The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault writes, ‘The critique that I propose consists in determining under what conditions and with what effects veridiction is exercised’ (Foucault, 2004: 37). As he goes on to explain, this is rather different from arguing that a given state of affairs – for instance, the management of madness by psychiatric power – is grounded in views that are false and therefore oppressive. Instead, Foucault continues:

[Critique] would consist in saying that the problem is to make apparent the conditions that had to be met so that one could hold … views concerning madness that could be true or false according to the rules of medicine or confession or psychology. (Foucault, 2004: 37–8)

Although critique of this kind does not intervene directly in politics, Foucault argues that it is politically indispensable. He writes:

In order for analysis to have a political impact, it is necessary that it does not focus on the genesis of truths or the memory of errors …. Recalling all the errors that doctors have been able to say about sex or madness, that does us a fat lot of good. (Foucault, 2004: 38)

Conclusion

When read in isolation, some passages in The Birth of Biopolitics could seem to suggest that Foucault was drawn to neoliberalism, but I have argued that Becker’s approach is paradigmatically biopolitical. Becker demonstrates that the state need not enforce conformity on the individual level in order to manage a problem such as criminality; through his approach, populations may be governed indirectly by statistical methods. Because neoliberal biopolitics forms the very freedom it claims to protect, it allows for the extension of power in the name of liberty. In itself, this does not entail that biopolitics is better or worse than sovereignty and discipline, but it does disrupt the placid inevitability that strengthens biopolitical power in its contemporary, neoliberal form. In this way, rather than endorsing neoliberalism, Foucault subjects it to critique.

In contrast to his earlier treatment of biopolitics, Foucault’s tone in The Birth of Biopolitics is muted. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality he associates biopolitics and genocide (Foucault, 1980: 137); in Society Must Be Defended, he repeats the link with genocide (Foucault, 2003: 261) and adds that ‘it is at this moment that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States’ (Foucault, 2003: 256). It is therefore striking that The Birth of Biopolitics explicitly disavows the accusation that neoliberalism is effectively racist (Foucault, 2004: 235). Foucault’s circumspection allows some to claim that he was sympathetic to neoliberalism, but Foucault’s account of critique indicates that it would be misguided to expect Foucault to issue a judgement for or against it. As Foucault understands it, critique does not consist in condemnation, nor does its power derive from hyperbole. Instead, it aims to uncover the contingency of systems of power that we are tempted to take for granted.

In Foucault’s account, biopolitics works from the inside: we may feel ourselves to be free, but that freedom is already formed by the order we might wish to resist. This suggests that denouncing neoliberalism would underestimate its subtlety. Because neoliberalism is adept at incorporating deviation from the norm, there is a danger that what seems like revolution may simply reinforce the prevailing order. Instead, Foucault aims to open a space for strategic interventions that constitute resistance on the local (if not the global) level. Foucault’s critique of neoliberal biopolitics shows that it is both more dangerous and more susceptible to change than it might seem. Because the neoliberal regime of economic truth emerged under particular conditions, neoliberal systems of government are likewise transient. Although critique of this kind does not tell individuals what they ought to do, it provides resources that are vital for those struggling to discern what might be done. ¹¹