Michel Foucault

The Birth of Biopolitics

Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978--1979

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Picador is proud to publish the sixth volume in Foucault's prestigious, groundbreaking series of lectures at the Collège de France from 1970 to 1984 The Birth of Biopolitics continues to pursue the themes of Foucault's lectures from Security, Territory, Population. Having shown how eighteenth-century political economy marks the birth of a new governmental rationality--seeking maximum effectiveness by governing less and in accordance with the naturalness of the phenomena to be governed--Michel Foucault undertakes a detailed analysis of the forms of this liberal governmentality. In a direct and conversational tone, this book raises questions of political philosophy and social policy that are at the heart of current debates about the role and status of neo-liberalism in twentieth century politics.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Picador USA
• Seitenzahl: 368
• Erscheinungstermin: 2. März 2010
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 208mm x 140mm x 30mm
• Gewicht: 329g
• ISBN-13: 9780312203412
• ISBN-10: 0312203411
• Artikelnr.: 27352508

Autorenporträt

Michel Foucault

Inhaltsangabe

Foreword: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
One: 10 January 1979
Questions of method. - Suppose universals do not exist. - Summary of the
previous year's lectures: the limited objective of the government raison
d'État (external politics) and unlimited objective of the police state
(internal politics). - Law as principle of the external limitation raison
d'État. - Perspective of this year's lectures: political economy as
principle of the internal limitation of governmental reason. - What is at
stake in this research: the coupling of a set of practices and a regime of
truth and the effects of its inscription in reality. - What is liberalism.
Two: 17 January 1979
Liberalism and the implementation of a new art of government in the
eighteenth century. - Specific features of the liberal art of government (
I ): ( 1 ) The constitution of the market as site of the formation of truth
and not just as domain of jurisdiction. - Questions of method. The stakes
of research undertaken around madness, the penal order, and sexuality:
sketch of a history of "regimes of verdiction." - The nature of a political
critique of knowledge (savoir). - ( 2 ) The problem of limiting the
exercise of power by public authorities. Two types of solution: French
juridical radicalism and English utilitarianism. - The question of
"utility" and limiting the exercise of power by public authorities. -
Comment on the status of heterogeneity in history: strategic against
dialectical logic. - The notion of "interest" as operator (opérateur) of
the new art of government.
Three: 24 January 1979
Specific features of the liberal art of government ( II ): ( 3 ) The
problem of European balance and international relations. - Economic and
political calculation in mercantilism. The principle of freedom of the
market according to the physiocrats and Adam Smith: birth of a new European
model. - Appearance of a governmental rationality extended to a world
scale. Examples: the question of maritime law; the projects of perpetual
peace in the eighteenth century. - Principles of the new liberal art of
government: a "governmental naturalism"; the production of freedom. - The
problem of liberal arbitration. Its instruments: ( 1 ) the management of
dangers and the implementation of mechanisms of security; ( 2 )
disciplinary controls (Bentham's panopticism); ( 3 ) inverventionist
policies. - The management of liberty and its crises.
Four: 31 January 1979
Phobia of the state. - Questions of method: sense and stakes of the
bracketing off of a theory of the state in the analysis of mechanisms of
power. - Neo-liberal governmental practices: German liberalism from 1948 to
1962; American neo-liberalism. - German neo-liberalism ( I ). Its
political-economic context. - The scientific council brought together by
Erhard in 1947. Its program: abolition of price controls and limitation of
governmental interventions. - The middle way defined by Erhard in 1948
between anarchy and the "termite state". - Its double meaning: ( a )
respect for economic freedom as condition of the state's political
representativity; ( b) the institution of economic freedom as basis for the
formation of political sovereignty. - Fundamental characteristic of
contemporary German governmentality: economic freedom, the source of
juridical legitimacy and political consensus. - Economic growth, axis of a
new historical consciousness enabling the break with the past. - Rallying
of Christian Democracy and the SPD to liberal politics. - The principles of
liberal government and the absence of a socialist governmental rationality.
Five: 7 February 1979
German neo-liberalism ( II ). - Its problem: how can economic freedom both
found and limit the state at the same time? - The neo-liberal theorists: W.
Eucken, F. Böhm, A. Müller-Armack, F. von Hayek. - Max Weber and the
problem of the irrational rationality of capitalism. The answers of the
Frankfurt School and the Freiburg School. - Nazism as necessary field of
adversity to the definition of the neo-liberal critique of National
Socialism on the basis of these different elements of German history. -
Theoretical consequences: extension of this critique to the New Deal and to
the Beveridge plans; interventionism and the growth of the power of the
state; massification and uniformization, effects of state control. - The
stake of neo-liberalism: its novelty in comparison with classical
liberalism. The theory of pure competition.
Six: 14 February 1979
German neo-liberalism ( III ). - Usefulness of historical analyses for the
present. - How is neo-liberalism distinguished from classical liberalism? -
Its specific stake: how to model the global exercise of political power on
the principles of a market economy, and the transformations that derive
from this. - The decoupling of the market economy and policies of
laissez-faire. - The Walter Lippmann colloquium ( 26 to 30 August 1938 ). -
The problem of the style of governmental action. Three examples: ( a ) the
question of monopolies; ( b ) the question of "conformable actions (
actions conformes )." The bases of economic policy according to W. Eucken.
Regulatory actions and organizing actions ( actions ordonnatrices ); ( c )
social policy. The ordoliberal critique of the welfare economy. - Society
as the point of application of governmental interventions. The "policy of
society" ( Gesellschaftspolitik ). - First aspect of this policy: the
formalization of society on the model of the enterprise. - Enterprise
society and judicial society; two faces of a single phenomenon.
Seven: 21 February 1979
Second aspect of the "policy of society" according to the neo-liberals: the
problem of law in a society regulated according to the model of the
competitive market economy. - Return of Walter Lippmann colloquium. -
Reflections based on a text by Louis Rougier. - ( 1 ) The idea of a
juridical-economic order. Reciprocity of relations between economic
processes and institutional framework. - Political stake: the problem of
the survival of capitalism. - ( 2 ) The question of legal interventionism.
- Historical reminder: the Rule of law ( l'État de droit ) in the
eighteenth century, in opposition to despotism and the police state.
Re-elaboration of the notion in the nineteenth century: the question of
arbitration between citizens and public authorities. The problem of
administrative courts. - The neo-liberal project: to introduce the
principles of the Rule of law into the economic order. - Rule of law and
planning according to Hayek. - ( 3 ) Growth of judicial demand. - General
conclusion: the specificity of the neo-liberal art of government in
Germany. Ordoliberalism faced with the pessimism of Schumpeter.
Eight: 7 March 1979
General remarks: ( 1 ) The methodological scope of the analysis of
micro-powers. ( 2 ) The inflationism of state phobia. Its links with
ordoliberalism. - Two theses on the totalitarian state and the decline of
state governmentality in the twentieth century. - Remarks on the spread of
the German model, in France and in the United States. - The German
neo-liberal model and the French project of a "social market economy." -
The French context of the transition to a neo-liberal economics. - French
social policy: the example of social security. - The separation of the
economic and the social according to Giscard d'Estaing. - The project of a
"negative tax" and its social and political stakes. "Relative" and
"absolute" poverty. Abandonment of the policy of full employment.
Nine: 14 March 1979
American neo-liberalism ( I ). Its context. - The difference between
American and European neo-liberalism. - American neo-liberalism as a global
claim, utopian focus, and method of thought. - Aspects of this
neo-liberalism: ( 1 ) The theory of human capital. The two processes that
it represents: ( a ) an extension of economic analysis within its own
domain: criticism of the classical analysis of labor in terms of the time
factor; ( b ) an extension of economic analysis to domains previously
considered to be non-economic. - The epistemological transformation
produced by neo-liberal analysis: from the analysis of economic processes
to the analysis of the internal rationality of human behavior. - Work as
economic conduct. - Its division into capital, abilities, and income. - The
redefinition of homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself. - The notion
of "human capital." Its constitutive elements: ( a ) innate elements and
the question of the improvement of genetic human capital; ( b ) acquired
elements and the problem of the formation of human capital (education,
health, etcetera). - The interest of these analyses: resumption of the
problem of social and economic innovation ( Schumpeter ). A new conception
of the policy of growth.
Ten: 21 March 1979
American neo-liberalism ( II ). - The application of the economic grid to
social phenomena. - Return to the ordoliberal problematic: the ambiguities
of the Gesellschaftspolitik. The generalization of the "enterprise" form in
the social field. Economic policy and Vitalpolitik: a society for the
market and against the market. - The unlimited generalization of the
economic form of the market in American neo-liberalism: principle of the
intelligibility of individual behavior and critical principle of
governmental interventions. - Aspects of American neo-liberalism: ( 2 )
Delinquency and penal policy. - Historical reminder: the problem of the
reform of penal law at the end of the eighteenth century. Economic
calculation and principle of legality. The parasitic invasion of the law by
the norm in the nineteenth century and the birth of criminal anthropology.
- The neo-liberal analysis: ( 1 ) the definition of crime; ( 2 ) the
description of the criminal subject as homo oeconomicus; ( 3 ) the status
of the penalty as instrument of law "enforcement." The example of the drugs
market. - Consequences of this analysis: ( a ) anthropological erasure of
the criminal; ( b ) putting the disciplinary model out of play.
Eleven: 28 March 1979
The model of homo oeconomicus. - Its generalization to every form of
behavior in American neo-liberalism. - Economic analysis and behavioral
techniques. - Homo oeconomicus as the basic element of the new governmental
reason appeared in the eighteenth century. - Elements for a history of the
notion of homo oeconomicus before Walras and Pareto. - The subject of
interest in English empiricist philosophy ( Hume ). - The heterogeneity of
the subject of interest and the legal subject: ( 1 ) The irreducible nature
of interest in comparison with juridical will. ( 2 ) The contrasting logics
of the market and the contract. - Second innovation with regard to the
juridical model: the economic subject's relationship with political power.
Condorcet. Adam Smith's "invisible hand": invisibility of the link between
the individual's pursuit of profit and the growth of collective wealth. The
non-totalizable nature of the economic world. The sovereign's necessary
ignorance. - Political economy as critique of governmental reason:
rejection of the possibility of an economic sovereign in its two,
mercantilist and physiocratic, forms. - Political economy as a science
lateral to the art of government.
Twelve: 4 April 1979
Elements for a history of the notion of homo oeconomicus ( II ). -Return to
the problem of the limitation of sovereign power by economic activity. -
The emergence of a new field, the correlate of the liberal art of
government: civil society. - Homo oeconomicus and civil society:
inseparable elements of liberal governmental technology. - Analysis of the
notion of "civil society": its evolution from Locke to Ferguson. Ferguson's
An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1787). The four essential
characteristics of civil society according to Ferguson: ( 1 ) it is an
historical-natural constant; ( 2 ) it assures the spontaneous synthesis of
individuals. Paradox of the economic bond; ( 3 ) it is a permanent matrix
of political power; ( 4 ) it is the motor of history. - Appearance of a new
system of political thought. - Theoretical consequences: ( a ) the question
of the relations between state and society. The German, English, and French
problematics; ( b ) the regulation of political power: from the wisdom of
the prince to the rational calculations of the governed. - General
conclusion.
Course Summary
Course Context
Index of Names
Index of Concepts and Notions