Behrent Michael C. - Foucault and Neoliberalism

In recent years, Michel Foucault has garnered a reputation as a fierce critic of the neoliberal order, especially through his analyses of micro-politics and governmentality. But the essays in this terrific collection raise important questions about Foucault's relation to neoliberalism. They show that Foucault himself was quite sympathetic to some of its core elements, and, more importantly, that his theory has in many ways diluted the intellectual resources that might enable more successful resistance to it. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in critical social theory and in contemporary political culture.

Vivek Chibber, New York University

Michel Foucault was a far-sighted theorist, but also a creature of his time. This superlative collection moves beyond early polemics in order to force reflection on the uses and limits of the great philosopher's now celebrated investigation of neoliberalism in part by providing a reminder of how it fit in the various contexts of French intellectual life in the 1970s that informed it. Michael Behrent and Daniel Zamora deserve credit for offering precautions, rather than burning Foucault, as the next stage of his reception unfolds.

Samuel Moyn, Harvard University

The antistatist turn of much of the global left has disturbing but largely unexamined affinities with neoliberalism. Michel Foucault, for all his greatness, is a key figure in this turn. This collection is a stimulating exploration of those affinities, and, to put it provocatively, but not inaccurately, Foucault's commonalities with the likes of Gary Becker and Friedrich Hayek. This excellent book will annoy many, but it has the potential, for those with sufficiently open minds, of being a productive annoyance.

Doug Henwood, The Nation

Foucault and Neoliberalism has already begun to launch a crucial historical and political debate. Its critique and historical contextualization of Foucault's late work open up new perspectives on the rise of neoliberalism in France and the general evolution of the intellectual left since the 1980s. From the retreat of class analysis to the triumph both of identity politics and of a conception of social justice limited to equality of opportunity, Foucault and Neoliberalism helps us first to understand and then to imagine an alternative to the political dead end of the contemporary left.

Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago

First published in French as Critiquer Foucault: Les annes 1980 et la tentation nolibrale Les ditions Aden, 2014

This collection Polity Press 2016

Introduction & Chapter 3 copyright Daniel Zamora

Chapters 1 & 8 copyright Michael Scott Christofferson

Chapter 2 copyright Cambridge University Press

Chapter 4 copyright Mitchell Dean

Chapter 5 copyright Loc Wacquant

Chapter 6 copyright Koninklijk Brill NV

Chapter 7 copyright Jean-Loup Amselle

Conclusion copyright Michael C. Behrent

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0176-2

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0177-9 (pb)

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zamora, Daniel (Doctoral Candidate)

Foucault and neoliberalism / Daniel Zamora, Michael C. Behrent.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-5095-0176-2 (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5095-0177-9 (paperback : alk. paper) 1. Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984. 2. Neoliberalism. I. Title.

B2430.F724Z36 2015

194dc23

2015013023

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

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Jean-Loup Amselle is Professor of Anthropology at l'cole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He is the Director of the Cahiers d'tudes Africaines and is the author of Affirmative Exclusion: Cultural Pluralism and the Rule of Custom in France (Cornell, 2003).

Michael C. Behrent is an American historian who teaches modern French history and European intellectual history at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. He is currently preparing a book on the work of Michel Foucault during the 1970s and the neoliberal turn in French thought.

Michael Scott Christofferson is Associate Professor of History at Adelphi University, New York. Since completing a Ph.D. supervised by Robert Paxton, he has published French Intellectuals against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (2004), and he is currently finishing a critical biography of Franois Furet.

Mitchell Dean is Professor of Public Governance at the Copenhagen Business School. While a dedicated Foucauldian for many years, he has come to question whether a Foucauldian problematic of power and politics is sufficient for present issues. This concern is reflected in his recent book The Signature of Power: Sovereignty, Governmentality and Biopolitics (2013).

Jan Rehmann is Visiting Professor of Critical Theory and Social Analysis at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. He also teaches philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. He is co-editor of the journal Das Argument and of the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (HKWM). He has published (among other titles) Max Weber: Modernization as Passive Revolution. A Gramscian Analysis (2015), Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection (2014), Pedagogy of the Poor (2011, with Willie Baptist), and Postmodernist Neo-Nietzscheanism (2004).

Loc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a researcher at the Centre de sociologie europenne, Paris. His work spans urban relegation, ethnoracial domination, the penal state, incarnation, and social theory and the politics of reason. His books have been translated into 20 languages and include Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2004; new expanded edition, 2015), The Two Faces of the Poor (2015), and Tracking the Penal State (2016). For more information, see loicwacquant.net

Daniel Zamora is a sociologist at the Universit Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) specializing in welfare policies under neoliberalism. His current work concerns the history of unemployment and poverty in Europe since the 1970s.