Article The gentle way in governing: Foucault and the question of neoliberalism Philosophy and Social Criticism 2023, Vol. 49(3) 257–282 © The Author(s) 2022 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/01914537221079673 journals.sagepub.com/home/psc Joseph Tanke  University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA Abstract This essay challenges some of the recent scholarship which claims that Michel Foucault was more sympathetic to neoliberalism than is typically acknowledged. Accordingly, it considers the possible motivations for Foucault’s 1978-1979 lecture course, The Birth of Biopolitics; the relationship between liberalism and the various forms of power identified by Foucault; and, finally, claims that Foucault’s account of the ‘care of the self’ was itself informed by the neoliberal theory of human capital. It finds that Foucault regarded neoliberalism as coercive social arrangement on par with the other forms of power/ knowledge targeted by his work. And it concludes with some reflections on how Foucault’s account of the ‘aesthetics of existence’ might facilitate resistance to neoliberalism. Keywords neoliberalism, liberalism, governmentality, raison d’État, theory of human capital, aesthetics of existence, care of the self, homo oeconomicus Several commentators argue that Michel Foucault was more sympathetic to neoliberalism than has previously been acknowledged. In the introduction to a collection of essays entitled Foucault and Neoliberalism, Daniel Zamora argues that in the 1978–1979 lecture course, The Birth of Biopolitics, ‘Foucault did not content himself merely with questioning certain aspects of neoliberal thought: he seems, rather to have been seduced by some of its key ideas’.1 Mitchell Dean likewise proffers that neoliberalism allowed Corresponding author: Joseph Tanke, Department of Philosophy, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 2530 Dole Street, Honolulu, HI 96822-2217, USA. Email: tanke@hawaii.edu 258 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(3) Foucault to imagine a ‘kind of regulation outside sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical forms’.2 In a recently published book, Dean and Zamora together contend that Foucault’s lectures were an ‘at times affirmative reading’ of neoliberalism.3 Michael Behrent also argues that Foucault’s readers have failed to appreciate the ‘deep affinity between Foucault’s thought and neoliberalism’, citing issues of anti-communism, anti-statism, and anti-humanism as grounds for a possible convergence.4 Turning to Foucault’s work on ethics, Andrew Dilts claims that Foucault’s account of the subject is indebted to the neoliberal theory of human capital.5 And Tuomo Tiisala charges that Foucault’s insistence upon the politics of the self-formation has proven to be an unwitting ally for the neoliberal discourse which seeks to expunge discussions of economic and social inequality from political discourse.6 In what follows, I consider the most compelling arguments in favor of the idea that Foucault was attracted to certain aspects of the neoliberal program. For reasons of economy, these claims have been grouped into three distinct yet interconnected sets of arguments. Accordingly, we will consider: (1) the question of an autonomous socialist governmentality and the possible motivations for Foucault’s lectures; (2) the relationship between neoliberalism and the other forms of power analyzed in Foucault’s corpus; and (3) claims that the Foucault’s ‘care of the self’ has a neoliberal heritage. My primary goal is to explain why these arguments are dubious; however, I hope also to recover what I regard as the critical force of Foucault’s lectures since in this case distorting Foucault’s teachings deprives us of resources that may prove useful for confronting neoliberalism. I conclude this essay with some reflections on how Foucault’s ‘aesthetics of existence’ might break with the form of self-governance fostered by neoliberal social policies. It is important for reader to bear in mind that despite pointing to a number of salient differences between neoliberalism and the classical liberalism from which it is descended, Foucault does not draw a sharp distinction between these two forms of governance. He regards both liberalism and neoliberalism as issuing from a mid-eighteenth century mutation in the field of governmental practice. Liberalism developed as a strategy for augmenting the forces of individual nation-states within a geopolitical context determined by an intra-European rivalry. In general, liberalism is a governmental regime which uses the idea of the market to base governmental practices upon the individual’s practices of self-governance. Accordingly, liberal societies tend to render normative the assumptions built into the theoretical abstraction known as homo oeconomicus, thereby naturalizing the idea that human nature revolves around the capacity for cost-benefit analysis. For Foucault, neoliberalism is an intensification of classical liberalism, which reverses the traditional relationship between state and economy, making economic growth the source of the state’s legitimacy. In terms of self-governance, neoliberalism is the self-evident rationality which holds that it is necessary to extend these cost–benefit analyses to evermore aspects of one’s life in order to keep pace within a social context defined by economic inequality, diminished public resources and fewer opportunities for stable, wellremunerated work. Tanke 259 Towards a leftist governmentality? Several commentators propose that we should read Foucault’s lectures as motivated by the desire to develop a leftist conception of governmentality. The concept of governmentality defines, for Foucault, a level of analysis concerned with that which is distinctive about a particular governmental regime understood in terms of its exercise of power. In the 1977– 1978 course, Security, Territory, Population, Foucault observes of liberalism that ‘we live in the era of a governmentality discovered in the eighteenth century’.7 Importantly, he suggests that we should think of governmentality as being to the state ‘what techniques of segregation were to psychiatry, what techniques of discipline were to the penal system, and what biopolitics was to medical institutions’.8 We can thus understand governmentality as designating the historically emergent set of discourses and practices by which the state is constituted. For Foucault, the ‘state does not have an essence’ since it is ‘nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities’.9 In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault considers three main forms of governmentality: the German police state (polizeiwissenshaft), where there are no restrictions upon the government’s efforts to manage its subjects10; liberalism, a governmentality that limits governmental intervention by means of a discourse accorded the status of a science, that is, political economy11; and, finally, neoliberalism, an intensification of classical liberalism, which treats economic activity as the guarantee of the state’s legitimacy.12 Each of these governmentalities is informed by raison d’État. Raison d’État is the new form of ‘historical perception’ that emerged in Europe after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648).13 It is concerned with maintaining a balance of power and thus guarding against the return of empire. Raison d’État means that each nation-state must ‘ensure that its forces are such that it will never be in an inferior position with respect to the set of other countries’.14 Foucault insists upon understanding liberalism in terms of this geopolitical context since it was this intra-European rivalry which initially drove both the knowledge and development of the state’s forces. Like the police state, liberal regimes are dedicated to raison d’État; however, unlike the police state, liberalism imposes internal limits upon the scope and intensity of governmental practice. Liberalism can be described as a governmentality which attempts to increase the state’s resources by compelling individuals to govern themselves in ways beneficial to the national interest. For the purposes of this section, however, it is important to understand that, with the concept of governmentality, Foucault is attempting to distinguish between different ways of directing human behavior through the administration of the state. With this analysis in mind, Foucault remarks at the close of his 31 January 1979 lecture, that socialism is hampered by the fact that it lacks an autonomous form of governmentality.15 He explains that socialism developed as an economic and historical rationality, but that its proponents have been unable to conceive of ‘a reasonable and calculable measure of the extent, modes, and objectives of governmental action’.16 This is why, when it comes to governing, socialists find themselves grafting socialism onto liberalism or borrowing techniques from the police state. Foucault: 260 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(3) There is no governmental rationality of socialism….[S]ocialism can only be implemented connected up to diverse types of governmentality. It has been connected up to liberal governmentality, and then socialism and its forms of rationality function as counterweights….We have seen it function, and still see it function, within governmentalities that would no doubt fall more under what…we called the police state, that is to say, a hyperadministrative state in which there is…a fusion, a continuity, the constitution of a sort of massive bloc between governmentality and administration. At that point, in the governmentality of a police state, socialism functions as the internal logic of an administrative apparatus.17 Foucault’s suggestion appears to be that socialism is not really a radical alternative to existing society, precisely because socialists have neglected the issue of governmentality, and that until socialists define for themselves the limits of governmental power, socialism is fated to reproduce liberalism, or, worse still, the excesses of the police state.18 As important as these reflections may be, they are far from central to Foucault’s analysis of liberalism. Nevertheless, several commentators suggest that we should read Foucault’s lectures as a search for alternatives to the French Socialist Party’s statist conception of politics. Dean and Zamora dedicate an entire chapter to the idea that Foucault was ‘Searching for a Left Governmentality’. They claim that neoliberalism was for him ‘a stimulating kind of governmentality that could offer alternatives to a socialist Left’.19 To substantiate this claim, they cite: Foucault’s dissatisfactions with Marxism and his opposition to authoritarian communism; his distrust of the ‘Union of the Left’, a political coalition that sought to unite the French Left behind a common program; and his interest in the ‘Second Left’, a faction of the Socialist Party led by Michel Rocard.20 Dean and Zamora thus contend that ‘neoliberalism offered [Foucault] a means to rethink resistance, to imagine an intellectual framework that could create a space for minority practices, and [way to] fulfill a key ambition of his last decade: finding a way to be “less governed”.21 While this line of interpretation has yielded an interesting perspective on Foucault’s political activities during the 1970s, there are three primary reasons why it is doubtful that Foucault would have turned to liberalism in search of a leftist governmentality. First, it is unclear that this reading is coherent. As Foucault states, the issue is that socialism lacks an autonomous governmentality. It is thus doubtful that studying liberalism would rectify this problem. By ‘autonomous’ Foucault intends a governmentality unique to socialism, such that when it comes to governing, socialism will develop into an alternative to liberalism. Foucault believes that socialist governments falter when they borrow practices from liberalism and the police state. This is why he asks: ‘what governmentality is possible as a strictly, intrinsically, and autonomously socialist governmentality?’22 And why, after considering the issue, he concludes that this socialist governmentality ‘must be invented’.23 In an interview given shortly after Mitterrand’s election in 1981, Foucault expressed optimism regarding the emergence of a new ‘left-wing logic’ that would distinguish Mitterand’s government from those of his predecessors.24 Foucault seems favorably impressed by Mitterand’s approach to issues like immigration, nuclear weapons, and Tanke 261 prison reform, even though he cautions that ‘we are entering into a government by party, with all the dangers that this involves’.25 While Foucault does not use the word ‘governmentality’ in this context – most likely because this interview was conducted for the newspaper Libération – the concept nevertheless appears to be at play in his analysis. Foucault remarks that ‘today we have the first set of effective measures…which mark the style of government’.26 And, perhaps with the above-mentioned reflections in mind, Foucault suggests that this new style of politics ‘gives the lie to…all that has been said about the non-existence of a left-wing logic in the way a government is run’.27 While it would be too much to conclude on the basis of this interview that Foucault was convinced that the Socialists were inventing a new governmental style capable of supplanting liberalism, these remarks are nevertheless instructive about where one might look for this autonomous socialist governmentality to emerge: not in the work of individual theorists, but in governmental practices themselves. In the second instance, then, it seems doubtful that Foucault would have considered it his task to develop a positive conception of governmentality. Foucault’s scruples regarding the limits of the ‘specific intellectual’ meant that he was reluctant to make pronouncements regarding how thought should develop or political action might unfold.28 Foucault uses history to strip discourses and practices of their self-evidence. As he once explained, ‘the work of the intellect is to show that what is, does not have to be what it is’.29 In various interviews, Foucault sought to distance himself from the ‘prophetic stance’ adopted by many intellectuals. He explains that ‘when I write a book I refuse to take a prophetic stance, that is, the one of saying to people: here is what you must do—and also: this is good and this is not’.30 Foucault’s methods were designed to suggest ‘possible paths of attack’; however, Foucault insists that even still he does ‘not force or compel anyone to attack’ since political action is a ‘personal and physical commitment’.31 One could cite many such passages to this effect, so perhaps it is best to recall that Foucault situated his work within the critical tradition inaugurated by Kant, together with the methodological limitations that this implies. In the self-authored encyclopedia entry from the early 1980s, Foucault describes his project as a ‘critical history of thought’, understood as a historical analysis of the conditions under which the subjects and objects of knowledge take shape.32 These processes of ‘objectivation’ and ‘subjectivation’ (subjectivation) create ‘games of truth’ whereby it becomes possible for certain kinds of subjects to say that specific objects are true or false.33 This critical history of thought can be practiced as a ‘history of veridictions’, where the goal is to understand how the delineation of a group of objects, together with the formation of a subject-position, renders claims of truth and falsity possible.34 Far from any theory-building aspirations, it is this historico-transcendental method that is employed throughout The Birth of Biopolitics. By attending to this methodology, together with the strategic considerations governing its employment, we will be able to identify the critical intent said to be lacking from Foucault’s account of neoliberalism. In the first lecture, Foucault explains that his goal is to understand how, during the course of the eighteenth century, governmental practice was outfitted with a ‘regime of truth’.35 Liberalism is a governmental regime which legislates on the basis of ‘truths’ derived from the ‘science’ of political economy. To critique this regime, Foucault cannot 262 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(3) simply oppose truth to falsity, in the way that the critique of ideology might; this strategy plays into the hands of a governmentality that uses the criticisms it elicits to become more efficient. As Foucault sees it, the problem is not that liberalism and neoliberalism are false and thus susceptible to more truthful accounts of the economy; the problem is that political life has been subsumed within a regime of truth that recognizes only economic reasons. This is also why Foucault does not raise many of the obvious objections regarding neoliberalism, for example, that it exacerbates economic inequality. Criticizing this regime at the level of its effects runs the risk of reproducing the idea that governmental practices can be evaluated solely in terms of truth and falsity. Foucault remarks that recalling all the false things a science has said ‘does us a fat lot of good’, and he contends that it is only when we understand how a particular ‘regime of veridiction’ was established that historical analysis will have ‘political significance’.36 Foucault’s intention is to criticize liberalism – and with it neoliberalism – not as a political economist, but as a genealogist. This entails identifying ‘under what conditions and with what effects a [regime of] veridiction is exercised’.37 Foucault compares his critique of liberalism to the strategies employed in his studies of madness, medicine, delinquency and sex.38 The aim in those cases was to describe the historical events by which a discourse of truth was established around different aspects of human behavior, and, in so doing, to examine the effects which those discourses have had upon the formation of human experience more generally. For some reason, however, the extension of this method to liberalism has given rise to considerable confusion. Some readers have concluded that Foucault was endorsing liberalism’s epistemology of the market, and attempting to use it as a way of curbing the power of government. In an otherwise exceptional study of how neoliberalism maintained its hold over American life after the 2007–2008 financial crisis, Philip Mirowski claims that Foucault regarded the market as the ‘sole legitimate site for the production of indubitable knowledge of the whole’, remarking that ‘apparently by 1979 Foucault had abstained from casting his characteristic gimlet eye on the historical constructs that give our life meaning, at least when it came to the economy’.39 On the contrary, when we attend to the methodological reflections framing these lectures, it is clear that Foucault was doing just that: analyzing the history of a regime where governmental practices are justified by an economic discourse endowed with the power of truth. Finally, as I have suggested, Foucault’s reflections on the lack of an autonomous socialist governmentality function like one those interesting yet nevertheless tangential asides which punctuate his courses. These comments come at the end of a dense lecture in which Foucault reconstructs the historical process by which the planning measures responsible for rebuilding the West German economy after the Second World War were gradually removed. Notable events include: the Scientific Council’s recommendations for deregulation; Ludwig Erhard’s call for the abolition of price controls; and starting in 1948, the gradual liberalization of the West German economy.40 It seems reasonable to conclude, then, that Foucault’s purpose in this lecture was to explain how neoliberalism took root in West Germany, despite the importance of Keynesianism during the immediate post-War period. And what interests Foucault is the process by which the state’s legitimacy comes to depend upon economic growth.41 His remarks regarding the absence of Tanke 263 a socialist governmentality follow from his discussion of the logic by which the German Social Democrats (SPD) were forced to abandon Marxism.42 Foucault’s goal was not, as Behrent claims, to learn ‘critical lessons’ from the ‘German experience’, so that Mitterrand and the French socialists might fare better at the ballot box43; it was to show that the SPD were compelled to adopt free-market principles precisely because the West German state had been reconstituted in terms of a neoliberal governmentality where the state is thought to be a byproduct of the economy. This reversal of what one thinks of as the traditional relationship between political sovereignty and the economy is, for Foucault, one of the defining features of neoliberalism: while classical liberalism sought to limit political sovereignty by defining a space of economic freedom, neoliberalism is more radical in that it reverses this relationship, making the state’s legitimacy dependent upon economic growth. This is why, when considering the fate of the SPD, Foucault asks, ‘how could a socialist party, whose…longterm objective is a completely different economic regime, be integrated into this political game, since…it was the economic that was radical in relation to the state, and not the state that was primary…?’44 As long as it remained wedded to Marxism, the SPD could not participate in governing, precisely because its policy objectives were foreign to the ‘political game’ constituted in 1948.45 To remain in this game, the SPD will not only renounce Marx, but later sever ties with Keynes as well.46 When we consider Foucault’s remarks regarding the lack of an autonomous socialist governmentality in context, it is clear that his purpose was not to develop a new conception of governmentality, but to illustrate this notion’s significance for the purposes of contemporary political analysis. Neoliberalism as lesser evil? Some readers contend that Foucault was attracted to neoliberalism because it represented an alternative to the forms of power described in works like Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality. Once again, Dean and Zamora argue that ‘Foucault found certain features in the ideal or programmatic form of neoliberalism of the Chicago School attractive’ inasmuch as it ‘envisages a kind of regulation outside sovereign, disciplinary and biopoltical forms’.47 Specifically, they contend that Foucault favored neoliberalism because it ‘regulates without the fabrication of subjectivities’.48 Behrent likewise argues that Foucault’s lectures can be read as a ‘strategic endorsement of economic liberalism’, motivated by economic and political conditions specific to France during the 1970s.49 Behrent suggests that the economic crisis of the late 1970s, together with the resurgence of liberal ideas that it prompted, must have motivated Foucault to consider the ‘affinity between his theoretical objection to state-based conceptions of power and the economic liberalism that was the subject of contemporary debates’.50 Behrent offers that Foucault sought in liberalism a way to rid the French Left of its ‘authoritarian proclivities’,51 and suggests that he grew ‘fascinated’ with economic liberalism because it ‘made far fewer anthropological claims than political liberalism’.52 He concludes that Foucault grew appreciative of neoliberalism because it ‘offers individual freedom greater scope’.53 Even sympathetic interlocutors like Wendy Brown find that Foucault was ‘clearly intrigued by 264 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(3) the “freedom” that liberalism and neoliberalism promise’.54 In a recent article, Tiisala claims that Foucault ‘welcomes’ and ‘endorses’ certain aspects of the work of Chicago School economist Gary Becker.55 According to Tiisala, Becker taught Foucault that it is possible to reframe issues of crime and punishment while keeping the threat of normalization at bay. Tiisala thus claims that Foucault found in Becker ‘an alternative approach that governs people without individualization, namely by using techniques to modify their environment’.56 The goal of this section is to cast doubt upon these interpretations by demonstrating that Foucault regarded neoliberalism as a historical formation of power/knowledge on par with the other forms of power – psychiatric power, disciplinary power, pastoral power and biopower – described in his work. Neoliberalism is a coercive power that renders society increasingly competitive so that individuals will be compelled to govern themselves in terms of a narrow cost–benefit rationality. At key points in his analysis, Foucault presents neoliberalism as the form governmentality ‘which actually involves us’,57 and again, as the ‘governmental style’ in which ‘we are in fact immersed’.58 Neoliberalism is the ‘drastic program of social policy’ that was responsible for dismantling the post-War economic compromise embodied in Keynesianism, the New Deal and the Beveridge plan.59 For neoliberalism, economic inequality is not only tolerable, but designed to operate as the ‘general regulator of society’.60 For this governmentality to function, however, society must be remade. Neoliberal social policies thus endeavor to multiply the ‘enterprise form’, and thereby refigure individual human behavior on the basis of corporate governance.61 Despite what some commentators claim regarding economic liberalism’s modest anthropology, or neoliberalism not issuing in an individualizing power, it is clear that neoliberalism produces a normative understanding of human reason, one which is both the correlate of these social policies and the target for its environmental interventions. For Foucault, this rationality is embodied in the figure of homo oeconomicus. And while it is debatable to what extent homo oeconomicus is a full-fledged subject, it is nevertheless clear that, as neoliberalism takes root, this figure becomes ‘eminently governable’.62 Foucault took up the question of liberalism within a context framed by the History of Sexuality, and with an eye towards the issue of biopower. Although Foucault never specified the precise relationship he envisaged between liberalism and biopower, it is evident that, far from presenting itself as an alternative or more desirable form of power, liberalism was the ‘general regime’ of ‘governmental reason’ within which power gains access to the life of the species.63 Given Foucault’s insistence that the ‘central core of all the problems that I am presently trying to identify is what is called population’, it seems reasonable that one might clarify this relationship by attending to those moments in this course where liberalism and neoliberalism give rise to techniques for regulating the population.64 There are three moments that are particularly noteworthy: the formation of classical liberalism and the discourse of political economy; the social program devised by the economists of the Freiburg school; and, finally, Foucault’s suggestion that the theory of human capital stokes an interest genetic engineering. Earlier we saw that liberalism emerged out of a context defined by raison d’État. Raison d’État is the idea that each country must manage its assets so that it never falls prey Tanke 265 to a nation of superior forces. Since its inception, then, liberalism has been a strategy for maximizing the state’s resources, and this is why it inevitably gives rise to projects for manipulating the state’s population. Political economy prior to Marx is nothing if not an analysis of those aspects of population most conducive to the wealth of nations. As Foucault explains, political economy is primarily concerned with the ‘simultaneous, correlative, and suitably adjusted growth of population on the one hand, and the means of subsistence on the other’.65 The first volume of the History of Sexuality contains the important reminder that it was this ‘political economy of the population’, which led to the formation of a ‘whole grid of observations regarding sex’.66 For this reason, political economy was said to be responsible for those ‘systematic campaigns’, in which the ‘sexual conduct of couples’ – the famous ‘Malthusian couple’ that was to form the basis of a later volume – was transformed ‘into a concerted economic and political behavior’.67 Later, these same campaigns provided ‘anchorage points’ for the development of racism.68 One should thus always bear in mind that political economy – and by extension, liberalism – was integral to the deployment of sexuality. Liberalism is the overarching governmental regime in which power gains access to life, by way of political economy’s calculations regarding the population. Foucault later suggests that neoliberalism exacerbates this dynamic, and, in so doing, intensifies power’s hold over human life. When discussing Walter Eucken’s distinction between ‘regulatory actions’ and ‘organizing actions’,69 Foucault emphasizes that ‘neoliberal governmental intervention is no less dense, frequent, active, and continuous than in any other system’.70 Its defining characteristic, however, is that instead of correcting for the effects of the market economy, neoliberalism aims to ‘intervene on society as such’.71 Eucken’s goal in adumbrating this distinction is to identify the kinds of interventions which liberals might support. His aim is twofold: first, to convince classical liberals committed to laissez-faire that market economies require continuous management; while, in the second instance, specifying that governments should not intervene directly upon the mechanisms of the market but instead develop social policies that will facilitate its functioning. As is known, neoliberal economists support policies designed to control inflation, even when this goal comes at the expense of full employment.72 However, under the category of regulatory actions, Eucken also sanctions: the use of credit policy, strategies designed to prevent a rise in foreign prices, and moderate shifts in taxation.73 Organizing actions, as Foucault remarks, are ‘more interesting’ since they pertain to conditions for the market’s existence – what ordoliberals termed the market’s ‘framework’.74 Significantly, organizing actions include techniques – transfers and migration – intended to adjust populations to fluctuating economic conditions.75 Considering these measures, Foucault concludes that neoliberalism is ‘light at the level of economic processes’, but ‘heavy when it is a matter of…technical, scientific, legal, geographic,…[and] social factors’, all of which ‘increasingly become the object of governmental intervention’.76 As this discussion indicates, Foucault regarded neoliberalism as a governmentality that shifts governmental intervention away from the economy in order to refocus it upon society. It seems likely, then, that in discussions like this Foucault was concerned with how neoliberal economic ideas spawn social policies for acting upon the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of population. 266 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(3) Eucken’s attempt to define appropriate forms of governmental intervention is also an indication that we have left behind the terrain of classical liberalism and the ‘governmental naturalism’ upon which it was premised.77 Neoliberalism is born with the recognition that ‘government must accompany the market economy from start to finish’.78 If, however, one must continually act on behalf of the market, this is not because market economies are crisis prone but because competition is ‘not a natural given’.79 Central to Foucault’s account of neoliberalism is this idea that competition is a normative end that must be imposed upon society by means an active governmentality.80 This is why Foucault dwells upon the various names that the neoliberals proposed – ‘positive liberalism’, ‘sociological liberalism’, ‘Gesellschaftspolitik’ and ‘Vitalpolitik’ – for distinguishing their project from classical liberalism.81 Foucault contends that it would be misplaced to denounce neoliberalism for giving rise to a ‘mass society’ or a ‘society of the spectacle’ since we have already ‘gone beyond that stage’.82 The governmentality that has ‘become the program of most governments in capitalist countries’ aims instead to disseminate the enterprise form.83 Neoliberalism is thus an expansive social agenda that compels individuals to manage themselves like corporations by first making competition an inescapable fact of social life. Homo oeconomicus Another way in which Foucault marks this transition from liberalism to neoliberalism is through an analysis of homo oeconomicus. Foucault shows how, with the rise of neoliberalism, the classical figure of homo oeconomicus, a ‘partner in exchange’, was transformed into an ‘entrepreneur’, and even, within the context of the theory of human capital, into an ‘entrepreneur of himself’.84 Developed by the Chicago school economists Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker, the theory of human capital holds that each individual can be regarded as a sum total of capital investments, with the wages which that individual receives throughout the course of a lifetime functioning as a return on that capital. This theory makes it possible to construe skills, education, exposure to cultural stimuli and even the affection that parents show their children as investments.85 Foucault’s primary goal in this analysis of homo oeconomicus is to show how, within the context of the enterprise society programed by neoliberalism, a narrow, economic conception of human rationality becomes dominant. This rationality is comprised of cost–benefit analyses, calculations which are continually extended to new aspects of human life. American neoliberalism is particularly instructive in this regard since ‘liberalism in America is a whole way of being and thinking’.86 For our purposes here, it is important to examine those passages in which Foucault suggests that homo oeconomicus facilitates both disciplinary objectives and biopolitical ends by enveloping non-economic behavior within this economic rationality. The concept of homo oeconomicus is thought to have originated in discussions of John Stuart Mill’s work on political economy.87 In ‘On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper to it’, Mill defines political economy as a branch of the science of ‘speculative politics’.88 Speculative politics studies the interaction between social laws and human nature.89 Mill contends that speculative politics is Tanke 267 to the social body what physiology is to the physical body.90 And Mill argues that, inasmuch a speculative politics is a ‘science’, it should be regarded as the ‘foundation’ for the ‘art of governing’.91 Political economy falls under the umbrella of speculative politics since it investigates man’s social behavior; however, political economy is distinguished from this more general field in that it is ‘concerned with him solely as a being who desires to possess wealth’, and inasmuch as he is ‘capable of judging of the comparative efficacy of means for obtaining that end’.92 In this regard, Mill is explicit that political economy is premised upon the ‘abstraction’ by which it disregards all other motives and passions, save for man’s ‘aversion to labor’ and his ‘enjoyment of costly indulgences’.93 Political economy thus assumes: it is human nature ‘to prefer a greater potion of wealth to a smaller in all cases’; and, that ‘there is, perhaps, no actions of a man’s life in which he is neither under the immediate nor under the remote influence of any impulse but the mere desire of wealth’.94 Accordingly, economic man is that ‘being who does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labor and physical self-denial’.95 For this reason, economic man can be said to embody the cost–benefit rationality upon which liberalism depends. Foucault’s lectures on liberalism might be read as a critical history of the process by which Mill’s methodological assumptions were transformed into a normative conception of human reason. A significant portion of the 28 March 1979 lecture shows how homo oeconomicus emerged from the theory of the subject developed by British empiricists like Locke and Hume.96 Foucault describes this anthropological event as ‘one of the most important theoretical transformations in Western thought since the Middle Ages’.97 Unlike earlier accounts of body and soul, the subject of interests is a purely immanent subject defined by its ‘absolutely subjective will’98 and, more importantly, by a penchant for that cost–benefit rationality described by Mill.99 It is therefore doubtful that Foucault could have regarded economic liberalism as an alternative to the methodological humanism targeted by his earlier writings. One should not forget that, since Ricardo, economics has been complicit in the ‘anthropological sleep’ of the modern episteme.100 And that Discipline and Punish, ascribed the emergence of the human sciences, like economics, to a ‘new technology of power and a new political anatomy of the body’ that not only objectifies human behavior but works to render man more ‘calculable’.101 It is not surprising, then, that in this lecture, Foucault’s aim was to distinguish the subject of interests from the subject of right, and then, on this basis, to analyze how the ‘economic subject and the subject of right have an essentially different relationship with political power’.102 In classical liberalism, homo oeconomicus functions as a limit to governmental power inasmuch as it is financially imprudent for the state to interfere with the individual’s interests. In this way, homo oeconomicus allows for the formation of a governmentality founded upon the rationality of the individual subject.103 Liberalism is at bottom the belief that the state best achieves its interests by having individuals manage their own. This account of homo oeconomicus and his relationship with power provides a point of comparison for this figure’s subsequent development under neoliberalism. In classical liberalism, homo oeconomicus is free to pursue his own interests; however, with the development of neoliberalism, he becomes increasingly susceptible to manipulation. Foucault explains that after ‘being the intangible partner of laissez-faire, homo 268 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(3) oeconomicus now becomes the correlate of a governmentality which will act on the environment and systematically modify its variables’.104 Under neoliberalism, homo oeconomicus is no longer an internal limit to state power; he is the point of application for a managerial power that controls environmental variables in order to bring about a desired conduct.105 This is why ‘homo oeconomicus is someone who is eminently governable’.106 And why neoliberalism does not require the ‘internal subjugation of individuals’.107 As a historically constituted rationality, neoliberalism limits the individual’s choices, together with the kinds of values that can be applied to them, thereby ensuring that the subject manages itself in an economically useful fashion. Foucault’s lectures detail the history by which this means-ends rationality crowds out other ways of thinking, becoming synonymous with reason itself.108 They describe the transformation of society into an economic game where it is necessary for individuals to continually make cost–benefit analyses in order to keep pace with competition. For Foucault, neoliberalism means that these calculations are not restricted to the domain of sales and purchases, but generalized so as to include any ‘purposeful conduct which involves…a strategic choice of means, ways, and instruments’.109 The extension of this economic rationality to domains of life previously accorded a fair amount of autonomy is what cultural theorists describe as ‘economization’.110 Economization allows economists to reframe issues like getting married, having a child, or committing a crime in economic terms.111 More importantly, however, economization exposes non-economic behavior to the coercive power of the market. It is to illustrate how this power functions, and not, as Tiisala has claimed, to outline a new theory of punishment, that Foucault turns to Becker’s article, ‘Crime and Punishment’.112 Foucault’s discussion of this essay is found at the close of his 21 March 1979 lecture. This context is significant since Foucault is here considering how American economists have managed to extend a grid of economic intelligibility to non-economic behaviors. Through his discussion of the penal system, Foucault demonstrates that homo oeconomicus is not just an economic lens brought to bear on human behavior, but a tactical deployment that produces all the effects of power. With the advent of neoliberalism, homo oeconomicus is no longer just a stand-in for economic efficiency, but becomes the ‘surface of contact between the individual and the power exercised on him’.113 Foucault begins this analysis by noting that, like Beccaria and Bentham before him, Becker’s reforms are designed to render the justice system more economical, that is, both more cost effective and efficient.114 The problem that Beccaria and Bentham faced was that in the eighteenth century justice was irregular and inconsistent. They proposed a ‘legalistic solution’ comprised of clearly defined laws and punishments.115 Discipline and Punish explains that by ‘regularizing, refining, [and] universalizing the art of punishment’, these reformers hoped to reduce the ‘economic and political cost’ of punishing.116 In this sense, homo penalis was also a homo oeconomicus, in that homo oeconomicus represents the ideal of economic efficiency.117 Becker’s economic solution, on the other hand, is a response to an entirely different problem, namely the fact that since the 19th century there has been an anthropological inflation of crime, thus resulting in the displacement of homo penalis by homo criminalis.118 Homo criminalis is the idea that one is no longer dealing with a simple legal transgression, but punishing a distinctive nature who Tanke 269 must be understood so that the appropriate rehabilitation strategy can be designed. This anthropological inflation of the criminal disrupts the smooth functioning of the law by saddling its application with multiple discourses and competing authorities.119 The problem, in short, is that the once-efficient legal mechanism has spawned a costly system of experts concerned with the psychological, sociological, and anthropological dimensions of criminality.120 Becker, on the other hand, heads off the ‘slippages which took us from homo oeconomicus to…homo criminalis’ by implementing a strict economic approach to crime and punishment.121 Becker defines crime as anything which exposes the individual to the risk of a lawful penalty.122 This definition allows Becker to sidestep the discourses in which homo criminalis takes root. The criminal is no longer a psychological or sociological type; he is anyone who hazards the risks associated with actions proscribed by law.123 Together, these postulates give rise to a unique strategy for reshaping the phenomenon of crime. They allow Becker to articulate crime as an issue of supply and demand, and to reframe punishment in terms of the market. Accordingly, law enforcement will act upon the ‘market for crime’ by creating a negative demand, while punishment should influence the would-be criminal’s sense of ‘gains and losses’.124 For Foucault, it is significant that the criminal is no longer invested by discourses of truth, but instead treated as an economic subject who can be taught to make better uses of his capital. Homo oeconomicus is essential to Becker’s strategy since when this figure is imposed ‘the individual becomes governmentalizable’.125 Foucault underscores this point: ‘power gets a hold on him [the individual] to the extent, and only to the extent, that he is homo oeconomicus’.126 And, at the close of this lecture, Foucault explains that homo oeconomicus allows one to define a level of behavior that can be ‘interpreted as economic behavior and controlled as such’.127 It would be a mistake to conclude that homo oeconomicus is yet another face of the disciplinary society. Foucault cautions that ‘what appears on the horizon of this kind of analysis is not at all the…project of an exhaustively disciplinary society’.128 However, it would also be a mistake to conclude that Foucault favored this system of power relations just because it appears more lenient in some respects. As Foucault’s analysis makes plain, one cannot judge liberalism on the basis of its ideological content alone. Liberalism is a governmental technology that produces and consumes freedom.129 This freedom is a ‘regulator’ of human conduct inasmuch as this freedom is ‘produced and organized’.130 ‘Liberalism must produce freedom’, Foucault explains, ‘but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats, etcetera’.131 In this analysis of homo oeconomicus, it appears that Foucault’s purpose was to indicate how neoliberal governmentality surpasses the disciplinary society, in that it controls behavior with ‘new techniques of environmental technology or environmental psychology’.132 The very next lecture confirms that Foucault understood this coercive power as a combination of behaviorist psychology, economics and social policy.133 Although Foucault fails to deliver on his promise to explain how with the birth of neoliberalism homo oeconoumicus was transformed into ‘someone manageable’,134 it is nevertheless clear that Foucault viewed this figure as the conduit for a coercive power ‘in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game, rather than on the players’.135 270 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(3) When reading this lecture course, one should remember that Foucault’s overall goal was to understand how liberalism gave rise to new biopolitical imperatives.136 Importantly, there are several indications that Foucault was suspicious of how this revamped model of homo oeconoumicus facilitates power’s hold over the population. After elaborating the theory of human capital, and in particular its distinction between ‘innate’ and ‘acquired’ forms, Foucault observes that this rationality encourages individuals to evaluate their couplings in terms of calculations regarding their offspring’s genetics.137 For those committed to the theory of human capital, the goal of human reproduction should be to engineer a child gifted at birth with a relatively large share of human capital. One must thus look for a mate with a healthy genetic makeup, high income, and significant social status. Here, Foucault’s analysis not only anticipates the dynamics afflicting today’s dating and marriage ‘markets’ but also sounds the alarm against a soft eugenics. Foucault: as soon as a society poses itself the problem of the improvement of its human capital in general, it is inevitable that the problem of the control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction, will become actual, or at any rate called for.138 Foucault later returns to this line of argumentation to explain how neoliberal economists account for the fact that wealthy families tend to have fewer children than lowerincome families, when classical economics predicts that they ought to have more.139 The neoliberals dispel this paradox by contending that the birthrate is affected by the transmission of human capital. Their argument holds that inasmuch as wealthy parents have more human capital to transmit, and because this transmission requires parents to attend to their progeny’s development, ‘higher quality’ children are more expensive than children from poor families.140 In a related discussion, Foucault suggests that the theory of human capital provides governments and neocolonial powers with a way of anchoring social policies concerned with economic growth.141 Once again, the relationship between power and the population is at issue. Foucault notes how the theory of human capital provides economists with solutions to classical economic problems like the falling rate of profit and the question innovation. Neoliberals no longer attribute innovation to the inherent ‘boldness of capitalism’, nor even to the ‘permanent stimulation of competition’; instead, innovation is said to result from targeted investments in human capital.142 One consequence of this approach is that strategies for economic growth can no longer be indexed solely to the relationship between capital and workers, but must also consider ‘one of the things that the West can modify most easily’, namely investments in human capital.143 Similar to the way in which homo oeconomicus allowed power to take hold of the individual, the theory of human capital grants power access to the population. It defines a point of application for those governmental policies which aim to incentivize members of a population into developing marketable skills. One way that neoliberal economies avoid stagnation, then, is by creating social policies that coerce human capitals into self-investing, augmenting, and thereby producing economic growth. Tanke 271 While Foucault mentions these issues in passing, it nevertheless appears like he was preoccupied with the question of how liberalism foments strategies for managing populations. Foucault’s account of homo oeconomicus demonstrates how cost-benefit analyses have been extended to bio-phenomenon like human reproduction, while the theory of human capital has been shown to create a mode of ingress that allows states, colonial and corporate powers to act upon the qualitative dimensions of population. It is difficult to know how, if at all, these ideas would have figured into Foucault’s larger History of Sexuality, especially after that project was refocused around the figure of ‘desiring man’.144 But it is not difficult to see these analyses functioning as elements within a genealogy of biopower. One of the tragedies of this pseudo-debate regarding Foucault’s supposed affinity for neoliberalism, is that it has largely forestalled inquiry into these issues. Is homo aestheticus indebted to homo oeconomicus? In this section, I examine the criticisms that have been raised regarding Foucault’s turn to ethics, and his idea that the practice of human life might take inspiration from artistic creation. I am concerned to address two interrelated arguments regarding the ‘final Foucault’: first, the idea that it was the study of neoliberalism which inspired Foucault’s conceptualization of the self in terms of practices and, second, that, because of this heritage, Foucault’s ethics has a more conservative flavor than is typically acknowledged. The first argument is spelled out by Andrew Dilts. Dilts contends that Foucault’s account of ethical subjectivity is ‘indebted to the radical form of neoliberal subjectivity expressed in the theory of human capital developed…by Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker’.145 In particular, Dilts claims that it was through the analysis of homo oeconomicus that Foucault came to consider the different techniques by which human beings constitute themselves as subjects.146 Dilts explains that the theory of human capital allowed Foucault to shift attention away from the ‘ways in which we are made [into] subjects’, and refocus it on the ‘role that subjects play in their own formation’.147 On this reading, the theory of human capital is supposed to have afforded Foucault the possibility of imagining a non-sovereign ‘subject of practices’.148 Although Dilts ultimately distinguishes Foucault’s conception of subjectivity from the model proposed by the neoliberals, he nevertheless holds that Foucault’s care of the self closely resembles the entrepreneurial subjectivity devised by Schultz and Becker.149 Dean and Zamora likewise claim that ‘Foucault’s intellectual evolution during his last decade…has a stronger relation to the rise of neoliberalism than is generally acknowledged’.150 Building upon Dilts’ arguments, they purport to identify resemblances between homo oeconomicus and Foucaultian subject. They sum up Foucault’s contribution to ethics as the reminder ‘don’t forget to invent your life’, asking rhetorically whether this doesn’t recall ‘Gary Becker’s injunction that we should not forget to be entrepreneurs of ourselves’.151 Instead of further distinguishing Foucault from the neoliberals as Dilts had done, Dean and Zamora use this supposed affinity to argue that Foucault’s work has had ‘ambivalent political outcomes’, inasmuch as it has ‘somehow paradoxically reduced the scope of critical theory’.152 By training attention on the self, they argue, Foucault 272 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(3) inaugurated a ‘retreat from collective action’ that prevents theorists from challenging the economic institutions that shape daily life.153 Emphasizing what they regard as the quietistic implications of the turn to ethics, Dean and Zamora conclude that, in the end, Foucault offers a ‘lifestyle’, but not a ‘political strategy’.154 With respect to first issue, it seems unlikely that Foucault would have turned to Gary Becker to re-conceptualize the subject when there were already resources for doing so closer to home, namely in the writings of Althusser, Bourdieu, Hadot and the collaborative works of Deleuze and Guattari. It seems more plausible that it was by studying the Christian pastorate and the practice of confession that Foucault came to regard the self as a constellation of practices defined by the relationship one takes up with one’s self. In the second instance, it seems strange to attribute current political problems to a thinker who has been dead for nearly 40 years, particularly when that thinker was one of the first to sound the alarm against neoliberalism. This indictment not only systematically misreads Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism, but runs roughshod over his distinction between ethics and politics. Like the Ancient Greeks, Foucault understood that there are important connections between ethics and politics. But if he does not offer an explicitly political strategy, it is because his goal was to develop an ethics – a style of engagement that was never intended to be a substitute for politics, even if it might provide it with a new impetus. In general, it is problematic to read Foucault as though he were developing these ethical notions independently of the problems uncovered by the History of Sexuality project. However, rather than engaging in a point-by-point refutation of these arguments, I want to shift gears and instead provide readers with a sense for how Foucault’s ethics can function as a form of resistance to the neoliberal rationality he identified. In a well-known interview, Foucault defines the ‘aesthetics of existence’ as the idea that one’s bios can be treated as ‘material for an aesthetic piece of art’.155 This approach to ethics, he suggests, avoids the problem of normalization precisely because its aim is aesthetic.156 This idea is so appealing that Foucault momentarily drops his genealogical frame and admits that he is fascinated by the idea that ethics might become a ‘very strong structure of existence’, one that could be developed in opposition to disciplinary structures and authoritarian systems.157 Foucault’s aesthetic re-conceptualiztion of ethics is typically understood as a first step in resistance to disciplinary and biopolitical power. These powers find their highest manifestation in the production of manageable human subjects. One might resist – so the thinking goes – this process of subjectivation by relating to one’s self as a work of art, and transforming oneself by means of a rigorous askesis. While Foucault tended to elaborate these ideas in interviews, his 1982 lecture course, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, contains an important aside in which he suggests that it is an ‘urgent, fundamental, and politically indispensable task’ to ‘constitute an ethic of the self’.158 In this same aside, Foucault situates this ethics within the field of power relations opened up by the concept of governmentality. He explains that if we understand by governmentality a strategic field of power relations in their mobility, transformability, and reversibility, then I do not think that reflection on this notion of Tanke 273 governmentality can avoid passing through, theoretically and practically, the element of a subject defined by the relationship of self to self.159 Foucault’s point is that if we consider power relations in terms of their reversibility, then it makes sense for us to attend to the self’s relationship with itself as the place where resistance breaks out and these relations might be reversed. This is what Foucault means when he claims that ‘there is no first and final point of resistance to political power [other] than in the relationship one has to oneself’.160 Power is the general name for a strategic situation in which one attempts to control the behavior of others; ethics is the work that one does on oneself in order to produce one’s freedom within a world defined by power relations. For Foucault, the goal of ethics is to create a human life that is not only beautiful but also, in the strict sense of the term, autonomous. The question of autonomy is posed in terms of ethics since that is where individual freedom is either won or lost. Foucault’s purpose was not to restrict the political imaginary to the self, nor to claim that politics can take only one form; it was to study, both theoretically and practically, the different arts by which one transforms oneself into the kind of person who cannot be ruled so easily. If Foucault does not provide posterity with a political strategy, that is because it is both difficult to predict where resistance will breakout and immodest to prescribe the form it should take. However, this theoretical humility should not be confused with a tacit acceptance of the world as it is. Under the guise of ethics, Foucault was continually calling for an insurrection against the forms of power which limit the scope of our autonomy. But what about neoliberalism? As we saw, there is some indication that Foucault distinguished neoliberalism from disciplinary and biopolitical power on the grounds that neoliberalism does not require the ‘internal subjugation of individuals’ since it acts upon the ‘rules of the game’.161 If it is indeed correct that liberalism does not transform individuals into subjects – this, as I indicated, is very much an open question – does Foucault’s conception of resistance as ethics still have critical purchase? Conclusion To conclude, I want to explain why Foucault’s account of the aesthetics of existence provides for a viable model of resistance to the coercive logic of neoliberal society. In doing so, I will call attention to certain aspects of this ethics that, to my knowledge, have seldom been remarked upon. I argue that we can regard homo aestheticus – the nonnormative horizon of Foucault’s ethics – as a reversal of homo oeconomicus and thus as a form of subjectivity which opposes the rationality that is imposed upon us by neoliberal economic and social policies. To be clear, it is not my view that Foucault’s approach to ethics is alone sufficient for countering and correcting these policies; that requires a fullfledged political process. True to Foucault, I want to explain how the aesthetics of existence undermines the neoliberal rationality described throughout this essay and thereby demonstrate that Foucault’s ethics is much more than a mere lifestyle. It is significant that Foucault qualifies his ethics as ‘aesthetic’ – as opposed to simply ‘artistic’ or ‘creative’ – thereby implying a relationship with the philosophical discourse of aesthetics and the specific mode of judgment that it made possible. While it is true that 274 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(3) Foucault sought to challenge the standard modernist narrative which excludes the practice of human life from the concept of ‘art’, it would be wrong to conclude that Foucault was ‘hostile’ to the Kantian view of aesthetics.162 Despite what is frequently claimed, Kant is not the source of the idea that art is or ought to be autonomous; he demonstrated that if the concept of the aesthetic is to be coherent, then the form of judgment which is specific to it must be free from moral and cognitive considerations. Aesthetic autonomy, then, is the idea that the subject is free to develop a relationship with objects, events, and perhaps even ways of life independently of concerns regarding truth and morality. By conceptualizing ethics in terms of aesthetics, Foucault was attempting to instill our practices of the self with the kind of freedom enjoyed by the subject of aesthetic judgment. For this reason, homo aestheticus represents the ideal of separating our practices of self-formation from the forms of rationality that define life within the neoliberal world. It is important to observe that much of Foucault’s work is grounded in the intuition that modern Western societies tend to subject more and more aspects of human life to discourses claiming to be scientific. As we saw, the genealogy of liberalism endeavored to criticize the formation of a regime of truth within the field of governmental practice. Foucault’s ethical considerations can be regarded as the natural counterpart to these inquiries inasmuch they attempt to preserve the spaces cleared by genealogy by occupying them with new practices. By describing ethics in terms borrowed from aesthetics, Foucault was not only sidestepping the forces of normalization; he was attempting to show how human experience might be regulated by an art, rather than controlled by a discourse of truth. It is significant that when outlining his view of ethics, Foucault underscored the idea that the aesthetics of existence means that ‘it’s not at all necessary to relate ethical problems to scientific knowledge’.163 Here, we should observe that Foucault’s ethics is powerful not just because it marks the point at which one begins to govern oneself but because it creates the possibility of governing oneself according to a wholly different logic and in terms of an entirely different system of values. From the vantage point of Foucault’s later work, homo oeconomicus can be described as the form of self-government that is imposed upon us by liberal and neoliberal regimes. Homo oeconomicus makes it possible to found the rationality of government upon the rationality of those who are governed.164 Within the context of classical liberalism, homo oeconomicus allowed political economists to conceive of the individual subject as the place where complex economic processes achieve clarity as individual interests; since it was assumed that in managing his own interests the individual necessarily promotes the state’s as well, this figure formed the basis of a laissez-faire governmentality.165 Neoliberalism has many dimensions to it, but it is first and foremost a repudiation of laissezfaire.166 Neoliberal policymakers agree that, instead of taking a hands-off approach to governance, it is necessary for government to actively reshape society, so that it will be responsive to market mechanisms. As we saw, these figures dream of a competitive society where individuals manage themselves like corporations in order to develop subjectivities capable of receiving market valorization. Homo oeconomicus is no longer just a subject with interests; he is a figure governed through the manipulation of his environment, a social world increasingly defined by the laws of competition.167 However, Tanke 275 if homo oeconomicus is so easily governed, this is owing to how he governs (or fails to govern) himself. It is one of the ironies of history that, not long after sober-minded Englishmen and thrifty Scotts began exhorting us to calculate our interests, German philosophers like Kant and Schiller taught us how to think without them. It is almost as though the same historical mutation which spawned liberalism also gave birth to a discourse that would prove to be its antidote. Aesthetics teaches us not just that it is possible to set aside our interests, but that sometimes it is necessary to do so if we want to live fully human lives. By applying aesthetics to life, Foucault was attempting to revive qualitative thinking within a world ruled by a restrictive cost–benefit rationality. This is the first step in breaking the hold of a system that equates human worth with market value. If homo oeconomicus is governed by the idea that one must work on oneself in order to maintain access to a wage, homo aestheticus represents the possibility of detaching those practices from the market and undertaking the ‘work’ of self-formation on its own terms and for its own sake. Perhaps the reason why Foucault’s ethics elicits such hostility, even after so many years, is because it announces so frankly what many of us already know but are reluctant to admit, namely that we really can change the world by first changing ourselves – if only we are willing to pay the price. Declaration of conflicting interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article. Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. ORCID iD Joseph Tanke  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7001-318X Notes 1. Daniel Zamora, ‘Introduction: Foucault, the Left, and the 1980s’, Foucault and Neoliberalism, eds. Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 2–3. 2. Mitchell Dean, ‘Foucault Must Not Be Defended’, History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015): 398. 3. Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora, The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution (London: Verso, 2021), 30. 4. Michael Behrent, ‘Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976–1979’, Foucault and Neoliberalism, eds. Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 29. 5. Andrew Dilts, ‘From ‘Entrepreneur of the Self’ to ‘Care of the Self’: Neoliberal Governmentality and Foucault’s Ethics’, Foucault Studies, no. 12 (2011): 132. 6. Tuomo Tiisala, ‘Foucault, Neoliberalism, and Equality’, Critical Inquiry 48, no.1 (2021): 39. 276 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(3) 7. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 19771978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 109. 8. Ibid., 120. 9. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 77. 10. Ibid., 7. 11. Ibid., 15–19. 12. Ibid., 84–85. 13. Foucault, Security, 365. 14. Foucault, Biopolitics, 6. 15. Ibid., 92. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 92–93. 18. Ibid., 94. 19. Dean and Zamora, Last Man, 40. 20. Ibid., 41–45. 21. Ibid., 40. 22. Foucault, Biopolitics, 94. 23. Ibid. 24. Michel Foucault, ‘Practicing Criticism’, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1990a), 153. 25. Ibid., 153–154. 26. Ibid., 153. Italics added. 27. Ibid. 28. Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 3, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 126–133. The concept of the specific intellectual was defined in opposition to universal intellectuals. Specific intellectuals investigate questions arising from their own lives, and avoid speaking in the universal modality, for example, on behalf of the proletariat. 29. Michel Foucault, ‘How Much Does it Cost for Reason to Tell the Truth?’, Foucault Live, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996b), 359. 30. Michel Foucault, ‘Clarifications on the Question of Power’, Foucault Live, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996a), 262. 31. Ibid. 32. Michel Foucault, ‘Foucault’, Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 2, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 459. 33. Ibid., 460. 34. Ibid. 35. Foucault, Biopolitics, 19. For more on Foucault’s methodology, see also, 33–39. 36. Ibid., 36. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Philip Mirowski, Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2014), 98. Tanke 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 277 Foucault, Biopolitics, 87. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 88–91. Behrent, ‘Liberalism without Humanism’, 50. Although his main concern lies elsewhere, Behrent also advances a version of the ‘socialist governmentality argument’. Accordingly, he characterizes Foucault’s position as: ‘those on the Left who believe that power matters would thus be wise…to learn more about liberalism’. Foucault, Biopolitics, 90. Ibid. Ibid., 91. Dean and Zamora, Last Man, 189. Ibid., 189–190. Behrent, ‘Liberalism without Humanism’, 53. Ibid., 30. Ibid. Ibid, 44. Ibid., 43. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 76. Tiisala, ‘Foucault’, 24. Ibid, 37. Foucault, Biopolitics, 101. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 148. Ibid., 270. Foucault’s account of homo oeconimucus as the correlate of neoliberal governmentality appears to be in tension with his remark that ‘what appears on the horizon’ is different from an ‘exhaustively disciplinary society’ in that ‘there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals’ (259–260). This passage is important for those who claim that Foucault was attracted to neoliberalism for the reason that it might provide for a less normative system of governance; however, it seems mistaken to conclude, as Dean and Zamora have, that Foucault regarded neoliberalism as a ‘way out of subjectification’ (Last Man, 160). In the very next lecture, Foucault describes homo oeconomicus as already ‘a certain type of subject’ and ‘the partner, the vis-à-vis, and the basic element of the new governmental reason formulated in the eighteenth century’ (271). A full consideration of this issue is beyond the purview of the present essay, but it seems to me that one might alleviate this confusion by restricting the reference of Foucault’s statement about ‘what appears on the horizon’ to Becker’s penal reforms, instead of applying it to liberalism tout court. For a Foucaultian account of the neoliberal subject, see Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2017), 255–299. Foucault, Biopolitics, 22. Ibid., 21. 278 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(3) 65. Ibid., 14. 66. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 26. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Foucault, ‘Biopolitics’, 137–142. 70. Ibid., 145. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 138–139. 73. Ibid., 139. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 140. 76. Ibid., 141. 77. Ibid., 61. 78. Ibid., 121. 79. Ibid., 120. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., 133–148. 82. Ibid., 149. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 225–226. 85. Ibid., 229. 86. Ibid., 218. 87. Joseph Persky, ‘The Ethology of Homo Economicus’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 9, no. 2 (1995): 221–231. Mill himself never uses the term ‘homo oeconomicus’. Persky traces it to John Kells Ingram’s critique of Mill’s political economy. 88. John Stuart Mill, ‘On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It’, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 321. 89. Ibid., 320. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid., 320–321. 92. Ibid., 321. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., 322. 95. Ibid., 326. 96. Foucault, Biopolitics, 271–274. 97. Ibid., 271. 98. Ibid., 273. 99. Ibid., 282. 100. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 257. 101. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 193. Discussions of the human sciences are also found on 191 and 304–306. Tanke 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 279 Foucault, Biopolitics, 276. Ibid., 282–283. Ibid., 270–271. Ibid., 270. Ibid. Ibid., 260. Ibid, 269. Ibid., 268–269. Brown, Demos, 30–33. Foucault, Biopolitics, 268. Ibid., 247–260. Ibid., 252–253. Ibid., 248. Ibid., 248–249. Foucault, Discipline, 89. See also 94–99. Foucault, Biopolitics, 249. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault tends to use the concept of homo oeconomicus in a way that accords with his later account of this figure’s neoliberal incarnation. For example, he describes the maison de force at Ghent as a ‘coercive society’ organized around ‘economic imperatives’ and dedicated to the ‘reconstruction of homo oeconomicus’ (121–122). This discussion predates Foucault’s in-depth study of liberalism, and the distinction he appears to draw in the above-cited passage between homo oeconomicus as ideal of economic efficiency (liberalism) and homo oeconomicus as interface between the individual and government (neoliberalism). Ibid., 250. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 259. Ibid., 252. Ibid. Ibid., 259. Ibid. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 259. Ibid., 270. Ibid. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 323. Ibid., 227–228. Ibid., 228. 280 Philosophy and Social Criticism 49(3) 139. Ibid., 244. 140. Ibid., 244–245. This identification of ‘more expensive’ children with ‘higher quality’ is Becker’s: ‘I will call more expense children “higher quality” children, just as Cadillacs are called higher quality cars than Chevrolets’. Gary S. Becker, ‘An Economic Analysis of Fertility’, Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries, ed. National Bureau of Economic Research (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 211. For an illuminating discussion of Becker’s theory of fertility, and an account of how homo oeconomicus facilitates biopolitical control, see Jemima Repo, ‘Gary Becker’s Economics of Population: Reproduction and Neoliberal Biopolitics’, Economy and Society 47, no. 2 (2018): 234–256. 141. Ibid., 230–233. 142. Ibid., 231. 143. Ibid., 232. 144. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990b), 5. 145. Dilts, ‘Entrepreneur’, 132. 146. Ibid., 141. 147. Ibid., 145. 148. Ibid., 142. 149. Ibid., 143. 150. Dean and Zamora, Last Man, 143. 151. Ibid., 170. 152. Ibid. 153. Ibid. 154. Ibid., 169. 155. Michel Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’, Essential Works of Foucault, Volume 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 260. 156. Ibid., 254. 157. 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