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Reviewed by:
  • Foucault, Neoliberalism, and Beyond ed. by Stephen W. Sawyer and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
  • Oliver Davis
Foucault, Neoliberalism, and Beyond. Edited by Stephen W. Sawyer and Daniel Steinmetz Jenkins. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 226 pp.

This is the third edited volume addressing the relationship between Michel Foucault's work and neoliberalism. Its editors seek to elevate their volume above the fray of a decade-long heated argument over alleged affinities, which they characterize as part of a 'growing cottage industry' of 'histories of a perceived present crisis' (p. ix), while also including essays by protagonists in that debate. The essays which contextualize Foucault's 1979 Collège de France lectures on neoliberalism within the wider arc of his philosophico-historical project (Aner Barzilay, Dotan Leshem, Duncan Kelly, Luca Paltrinieri, Judith Revel) are the most insightful. Others are too quick to reduce his complex problematization to its immediate contexts in scattergun over-contextualization not devoid of errors of fact and understanding: Daniel Zamora describes Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's modernizing presidency (1974–81) as 'neoliberal' (p. 63) because it pursued socially liberal policies favouring 'individual freedoms' (p. 62) and applied 'neoliberal economic doctrines' (p. 59), but none of Giscard's domestic policy can meaningfully be described as neoliberal (or ordoliberal) and large-scale neoliberalization did not begin in France until much later. Even in the US, neoliberal economic policy did not begin to take effect until the late 1970s (see David M. Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 46). Leshem is therefore right to remind readers of the astonishing richness of Foucault's analysis for its time (p. 104). In a brilliant essay, Paltrinieri illuminates Foucault's characterization of neoliberalism in terms of an obligatory entrepreneurship of the self by way of a contrast between his and Bourdieu's critiques of the notion of human capital. While Paltrinieri argues that Foucault was the more cautious critic of neoliberalism, he also acknowledges that Foucault's untimely death meant that Bourdieu got to witness and analyse some of the later transformation of the entrepreneurship of the self from the 'semiutopian economic hypothesis' which Foucault encountered into 'a reality experienced by every worker' (p. 174). Revel argues that Europe's response to the migrant crisis—by blocking migrants as opposed to managing migration flows in order to resolve domestic economic issues—is not intelligible within the logic of neoliberalism. Revel's contribution to this volume is one of few accurately to reflect the title's aspiration to move the discussion 'beyond' Foucault's account of neoliberalism in its immediate context. Given the emphasis placed by many contributors on Foucault's attempt to discredit Marxism's obsession with the state, it was surprising not to see more concerted discussion of the resurgence of the security state under neoliberalism as one very striking exception to, or contradiction of, its commitment to a non-interventionist state. Closer attention to this paradox, which Revel pinpoints in the case of the migrant detention centre but which runs considerably wider (as Michelle Alexander, Loïc Wacquant, and Didier Fassin show), would have nuanced some of the more historiographically naive readings. These make out that Foucault thought in terms of simple periodizations and turning points, for example with disciplinary society yielding to the softer-touch governmentality of neoliberalism. [End Page 504]

Oliver Davis
Warwick University
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