The survival of neoliberal forms of governance after their apparent repudiation during the Global Financial Crisis is a problem that continues to generate significant scholarly controversy. One of the most influential accounts of the survival of neoliberalism in the crisis draws on Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics to claim that states intervening to support financial markets during the crisis was simply the neoliberal system working as expected. Returning to Foucault’s original text, I argue this account constitutes a systematic misreading (...) because it treats Foucault as having developed an instrumentalist theory of the neoliberal state, a possibility Foucault explicitly rejected. I suggest that the reasons that led Foucault to reject an instrumentalist theory of the state remain just as relevant today, and accordingly argue for a return to Foucault’s methodological decision to treat neoliberalism not as a theory of state but as a discourse which constructs a novel bio-political governmentality. (shrink)

The general claim advanced in this article is that Foucault’s genealogy of the modern state traces two ideal-typically different power arrangements at the origin of the modern state, roughly referred to as ‘sovereign power’ and ‘governmentality’. They are ideal-typically different in that they operate according to a different logic, including different ends, means and modi operandi. The more specific claim, then, is that due to this different logic, their ever changing interpenetration on the level of the state is imbalanced. In (...) order for ‘governmentality’ to operate according to the law, it must be backed by the juridical frameworks provided by sovereign power, but then again these juridical frameworks prove inadequate and insufficient to curb ‘governmentality’s’ operational procedures as well as the modalities and intensities of its implementation. In other words, in his genealogy of the modern state, Foucault tracks down ‘governmentality’ as a distinctive form of power which, although intertwined with the state, cannot juridically be contained by the state. It cannot be appropriately restrained by its legal regulations and, as such, constitutes an excess vis-à-vis those regulations. (shrink)