The Death of Laissez Faire

Thirty years ago this week, Michel Foucault delivered the first of his lectures under the course title The Birth of Biopolitics at the College de France (the eighth of a winter quarter stint of public lectures he had given throughout the '70s and early '80s). The title as it would turn out was a bit misleading... if any thing, "the gestation of biopolitics" might apply. Really these lectures were a continuation of those of the year previous - Security, Territory, Population - which focused upon the development of governmentality and Raison d'Etat (State Reason) in the 17th Century. In picking this up in the '79 lectures, governmentality is found to be relaxed in the 18th Century and homo oeconomicus is permitted and indeed facilitated by governmental action and inaction to drive the modern state. So what we have is a rough history of liberalism (in the economic sense of the term). The first lectures begin with the 18th century adaptation of governmentality to market dynamics. Then we quickly jump to post-WWII Germany and the thriving of "ordoliberalism"; contemporary French economic policy and American neo-liberalism (or the "anarcho-capitalism" of the Chicago school) are examined; and in the last two lectures, we return to the 18th Century, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and the like...

In his course summary (after the fact), Foucault writes, in somewhat of an apologetic tone for the digression:

The theme was to have been "biopolitics," by which I meant the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race ... It seemed to me that these problems were inseparable from the framework of political rationality within which they appeared and took on their intensity.
This means "liberalism"...

We have previously quoted a key passage (see Manufacturing Freedom ), which offers a greater grasp of the situation that Noam Chomsky analyzes (but misses in all of its implications) as "manufacturing consent". Chomsky fails to capture the more comprehensive answer to the question: consent to what? - Presumably, consent is manufactured to facilitate an exploitative foreign policy on behalf of multinational corporations, whose sole interest is to make more money. That is a bit too simplistic.

Those on the Right might reply to Chomsky: 'the way of life you and your fellow whiny liberals enjoy is made possible by the policies you lament'. Economic neo-liberalism (and its accompanying neo-conservative muscle) is the cradle that coddles begrudging social liberalism. Those who do and those who do not consent (provided the former enjoy some semblance of a majority) have had a dominion of freedom carved out for them, whether they find it ethical or not. So, the core question is how this freedom is "manufactured" or made possible. Consent is only ancillary to the question.

Foucault, then, is able to meet the neo-lib (and neo-con) on its own turf. In his characteristic non-committal way, as if approaching a Sphinx, he is not oppositional and lamenting (for the most part), but simply trying to get a grasp of the situation... to capture the riddle.

To get a grasp of things, Foucault introduces two conceptions of freedom: revolutionary (Rousseauian), based on fundamental right, and radical (utilitarian), of "the independence of the governed vis-a-vis governmentality" (pg. 42). These coexist heterogeneously in a "non-dialectical logic." It is the latter freedom, and its place in the liberal tradition, that is Foucault's primary focus. He characterizes liberalism as a naturalism, "inasmuch as the freedom that the physiocrats and Adam Smith talk about is much more the spontaneity, the internal and intrinsic mechanics of economic processes than a juridical freedom of the individual recognized as such" (pg. 61). So the task of government, then, is to comprehend the processes, and to do so it must gather accurate evidence of the economic mechanisms at play. Once it does, governmentality then knows its limits (demarcated not by right, but by utility). Government is hence mainly concerned with making itself useful, without meddling in the natural course of economic processes.

What governmentality can do, as an agent of utility, is to constitute a framework more conducive to the flows of economic relations. There are differing approaches as to how to achieve this contingent on geo-political or even purely geographic circumstances. For instance, in the 19th Century, the liberal economic policy employed as a tactical instrument suitable to a maritime power, namely Britain, would not have been suitable to a continental power like Germany (Pg. 107-108). For its part, Germany adopted in the post-WWII period (which Foucault gives considerable focus) the Ordo-liberal model. Here, the approach is to intervene as little as possible on the market itself, while carefully crafting its framework: "...to the same extent that governmental intervention must be light at the level of economic processes themselves, so must it be heavy when it is a matter of this set of technical, scientific, legal, geographic... broadly social factors which increasingly become the object of governmental intervention" (Pg. 140). Even to the point of altering climate; Foucault cites Walter Eucken's Grundsatze der Wirtschaftspolitik: "Finally, if necessary, we will have to be able to intervene on the climate" (Pg. 141).

The approach to framing market economies which had gained ascendancy from the late 20th century until very recently was the Anarcho-capitalist model of the Chicago school, with which we, having lived in its midst, are overly familiar. The dogma: let us privatize as much as we can get away with, and then just sit back and watch the markets work their magic. In this formulation, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is invoked profusely (though it was used only once in his own Wealth of Nations). Yet, are these "invisible hand" invokations really applicable to neo-liberal models? Foucault: "...for the neo-liberals, the most important thing about the market is not exchange, that kind of original fictional situation imagined by eighteenth century liberal economists. The essential thing of the market is elsewhere; it is competition" (Pg.118).

But, somehow, lately, this model has fallen into disfavor... So much so, that classical Liberalism itself is being declared dead, as we find Nicolas Sarkosy expressing on the occasion of the meltdown of September '08:

Laissez-faire is finished

But to this, "laissez-faire" might say: rumours of my demise are highly exagerated; it is simply a particular approach that is being cast aside.

In its place, we might anticipate a more muscular ordo-liberal model, given to much heavier interventions upon society, upon bodies, upon climate...

Prophet of Depopulation

Quoting some of the central points of J.J.Spengler's review of M.Moheau's Recherches et considérations sur la population de la France (1778):

Moheau looked with favor upon population growth chiefly because, in his opinion, such growth served to augment the political and the fiscal power of the state. Population growth had this effect for two reasons: (a) man constituted the principle, the source, the creator of "wealth"; (b) human efficiency increased and technological culture progressed by virtue of growth in the density of population. -Pg. 651

Moheau qualified his emphasis upon the desirability of population growth... with the proviso that such growth be confined to classes of the population of use to the state. -Pg. 654

Believing that prevailing institutions impeded population growth, that population growth was necessary and desirable, and that factors conditioning population growth - e.g. climate, the desire to marry and procreate, the geographical and occupational composition of the population, etc. - were subject to directed modification, Moheau devoted much attention to means whereby population growth might be stimulated. -Pg. 669

How is it that Moheau is a "Prophet of Depopulation"? Simply by applying the appropriate measures of "directed modification" to the conditions of population (climate, desire, etc.), the opposite of that which Moheau advocated can be acheived. He is contrasted with Malthus & Adam Smith in that as they...

...presented an essentially biological theory of population growth... Moheau... noted that the procreative response of a people to any given actual or potential fund of subsistence was conditioned in a marked degree by the cultural medium within which that people lived. -Pg. 676

So, when Malthusian worries of overpopulation gain the upper hand; when growth generally or growth in certain useless classes no longer "augments the political and fiscal power of the state," modulations of the material and cultural medium of population may be injected to bring about its reduction.

And if that doesn't work: Death Camps!