Book Reviewed: The Birth of Biopolitics by Michel Foucault

Commenting on his own manner of expressing thoughts, Michel Foucault likened himself to crayfish. As in, he moved sideways. Actually, he was more like an eel — slippery and elusive. Thus, in The Birth of Biopolitics, a collection of lectures delivered at the Collège de France in 1979, Foucault says absolutely nothing about biopolitics. Readers drawn to this book to contextualize the global response to the recent pandemic will instead find an anfractuous, 300-page-long analysis of (neo)liberalism. They should read this book anyway, and not just because reading Foucault makes for good mental calisthenics and can be an intellectually exhilarating experience. In Foucault’s thought, biopolitics and neoliberalism are two sides of the same coin, and you can’t make sense of the former without understanding the latter. And while I will pull a Foucault on the reader — there will be absolutely nothing about any kind of pendulum in this piece, despite the chosen title — I do promise to talk a little bit about biopolitics.

Foucault’s point of departure is the concept of raison d’État (literally, the reason of the state). This can be defined as the conceptualization of practices that allow the state to reach its objectives — in layman’s terms, what the government must do to make the most of its potential. Raison d’État is situated in the transitional, nebulous zone between the state that exists and the state that the government has set out to construct, meaning it is located between present and future. The concept of raison d’État developed after the Middle Ages, in the 16th and 17th centuries, and created the modern police state with its reliance on the control and surveillance of the population to maintain order. But the need for order was not limited to the domestic realm; it also had to be maintained at the international level. Following the disastrous Thirty Years’ War, the Peace of Westphalia established a balance of power in Europe. Henceforth, to keep the peace, no state could be allowed to become too powerful. This meant that, in its relationship with other states, a European state accepted limitations on its actions. This created an interesting dialectic where European states pursued a policy of unlimited objectives internally and one of limited objectives externally. But in the 18th century, a new transformation came about. Driven not by law but by “political economy,” it consisted of the appearance of a principle of limitation on the art of government that was no longer extrinsic to it but intrinsic. Previously balanced by an external principle, raison d’État was now balanced internally by what Foucault calls “critical governmental reason.” In other words, raison d’État no longer turned on the question of law, the usurpation of the sovereign, or the sovereign’s legitimacy. It turned on the question of how not to govern excessively.

The criteria of government action had ceased to be determined by legitimacy or the absence thereof. The new dichotomy that had replaced it was one of success and failure. It didn’t matter whether, for example, a proposed new tax was legitimate or moral; what mattered was what effect it would have, whether it would be a net positive or a net negative, etc. In this new paradigm, the sovereign had to understand, and reckon with, the natural mechanisms of the system of which he was in charge. A good sovereign recognized the natural mechanisms and governed in accordance with them. That involved finding the right balance, a range of action within which the sovereign did neither too little nor too much. This was a challenge precisely because the government did not sufficiently know it was at risk of governing too much; or, put otherwise, it did not really know how to govern just enough.

Foucault calls the new paradigm a “regime of truth.” By this Foucault does not mean it was a regime of certain philosophical verities, but that it legislated on political practices in terms of true or false. This was a complete break from the earlier methods of governance. In the Middle Ages, when religion played a considerable role in society, the sovereign had to ask himself whether he conformed to the moral, natural, and divine laws of his time. With the emergence of raison d’État in the 16th and 17th centuries, the question was whether the sovereign governed the state sufficiently well to make it reach its maximum strength and bring it to the point where it should be. In the new paradigm — the regime of truth — the sovereign had to determine whether he governed within the maximum and minimum set by the nature of things. The regime of truth consequently became the principle of auto-limitation (self-limitation) of government. That principle is just liberalism by another name.

Foucault forces you to rethink the entire notion of liberalism. Forget the usual cant about liberalism as a freedom-loving ideology that protects society from arbitrary power or the usual accusations that hold liberalism responsible for the dismantlement of essential behavioral norms and for social anomy — Foucault seems to reduce liberalism to the economic domain. His liberalism has three tenets. First, there is the veridiction of the market. The market determines whether a given policy, or a given set of policies, is successful. The market is the arbiter of the regime of truth; it proclaims whether such-and-such thing is true or not. Second, there is the question of utility. In a society where the market determines the true value of things, the value of the utility of the government and of all of its actions must be calculated, and this value must then become the limit on the government’s actions. Finally, liberalism is characterized by the pursuit of unlimited self-enrichment with respect to the global market. Where mercantilism had regarded the economic place as a zero-sum game — for one European state to gain, another had to lose — the new paradigm held that economic growth could be unlimited. It imagined the European states as players at a game of cards. Once the gap between the players became too large, the game could (and ought to) be stopped. That stopping of the game was the European balance of power, the equilibrium that protected the players from the danger of imbalances. But the balance of power meant that a fresh new round could be started, ensuring that the European powers could prosper endlessly. The caveat was that this unlimited prosperity was only limited to Europe — at the card table, the European powers were the players, and the rest of the world was getting played. It is not, Foucault stresses, that colonialism and imperialism were born at that time — both had been long-standing practices — but this was the beginning of a new type of global calculations in the policymaking of European states.

In his summary of the lectures at the end of the book, Foucault does come back to a more commonly held view of liberalism. But even that view — which conceives of liberalism as, if not an anti-statist ideology, then certainly as of one that aims to tame government — seems to have been abandoned nowadays. Far from taming government, the party that calls itself liberal in my country only represents ever more government. In his roundabout, meandering way, Foucault explains why that is. The governmental practice of liberalism is not about respecting or guaranteeing liberties; it is about consuming them. What Foucault means is that liberalism cannot function without the existence of a number of freedoms — freedom of the market, freedom of exchange, freedom of expression, freedom of discussion, freedom to exercise one’s rights with respect to property, etc. These freedoms are consumed, which is to say that they are produced, since you can’t consume something without producing it first. Liberalism endeavors to produce the things that will make the populace free. It does not accept liberalism; it proposes to generate it at each given moment, on an ongoing basis. This creates a paradox at the heart of liberal thought: an ideology that aims to make society freer and minimize government needs more government to make it freer and minimize government.

The generation of liberty has a cost. The more liberty there is, the more society needs to be protected from individuals, and vice versa. A balancing of interests is required; an equilibrium must be established between collective and individual interests. The basis for calculating the risk involved in the production of liberty is security. In Foucault’s analysis, security is the indispensable condition of liberalism. By managing liberty, a liberal society must also manage security and protect society from danger. This engenders a “political culture of danger”: liberalism conditions society to live with a continuous sense of menace. It is not like the threats that haunted the religiously informed mind of the Middle Ages, with its apocalyptic forebodings and Four Horsemen galloping in the distance. Whether related to crime, health, hygiene, or sex, the dangers of the modern liberal age are quotidian. Says Foucault, “There is no liberalism without a culture of danger.” Another consequence — a gnawing paradox particular to liberal praxis — is the very real possibility of illiberalism. The generation of liberty leads to a multiplicity of interests that result in all kinds of friction. To reduce friction, the government must intervene and sometimes pass legislation that, while ostensibly safeguarding liberty, actually ends up compromising it. Foucault doesn’t offer any examples, but it is easy to think of a simple one. The government of a given country legalizes same-sex unions. A cake business owned by a religious proprietor subsequently refuses to serve a same-sex couple about to take advantage of the new legislation. The couple takes legal action. The government then follows up by legislating that refusal in this instance constitutes discrimination and is therefore illegal. To protect the freedom that it has created for the same-sex couple, it needs to restrict the freedom of the religious person. Perhaps the proprietor is also very vocal about his stance, and the government is moved to expand the scope of what it considers to be hate speech, imposing additional limits on freedom of expression to make religious proprietors less vocal. The generation of new liberties has thus led to additional constraints on liberty. A dramatic example would be the response of most of the developed world to the recent pandemic — in order to protect fundamental liberties, governments had to suspend them indefinitely.

Foucault identifies two major neoliberal strands in the 20th century: German “ordoliberalism” and American neoliberalism. As Foucault occasionally uses the term “neoliberals” to describe the ordoliberals, it is not always easy to determine whom he is referring to. But we can still flesh out the differences between the two camps. The ordoliberals get their name from a 1930s manifesto and an economic review of the same name. They believed in the supremacy of the market, in competition, and in inequality as a normal condition of society. The state ought to be under the surveillance of the market, and not the other way around; the individual ought to function as an enterprise unto himself in his relations with his property, his family, and his environment. Far from foisting homogeneity and a “society of the spectacle” — the traditional concerns of critics of capitalism — the ordoliberals posited that such an economic model would foster a multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises in the economy. But, unlike proponents of laissez-faire economics, they thought that the state had a role to play. The ordoliberals recognized that the competitive mechanisms they championed could lead to atomization, and they thought society had to be protected from the market’s side effects. Capitalism was not an engine that could be counted upon to run on its own. State intervention was therefore necessary and appropriate — as long as it didn’t involve tinkering with the economic processes, with the market itself. Instead, since capitalism needed an environment that would allow it to function properly, the government’s job was to foster the right environment. State intervention had to concern itself with the market conditions that allowed economic processes to operate and the mechanisms of competition to perform their regulatory work. State intervention was also acceptable in regard to those who were unable to provide for themselves and meet their basic needs (the elderly, the sick, the unemployed), though of course the succor had to be sufficiently modest so as not to discourage the “work-shy” from seeking gainful employment.

Liberalism played a more formative role in American history than it did in the history of Europe, and American neoliberals, paragons of the other major strand of 20th-century liberalism, were a very different beast. Seeing society entirely as a function of investment and returns, the Americans militated for the application of the economic domain — the market — to non-economic domains. According to Foucault, it is with American neoliberalism that the idea of “human capital” began to take hold. For example (Foucault’s example), to grow into a productive adult, a child needs a certain level of nurturing and attention — not because it is good in itself, but because it is the thing to do if the child is to grow into solid human capital. Creating the right kind of environment for the child and the child’s development is the way to boost human capital, the best way to maximize the return on that capital. The mother whose responsibility it is to take care of the infant and create the best possible environment will also be getting a return of capital — in the form of satisfaction that she will feel when the child grows up to be a successful adult. Or take the penal system, a topic close to Foucault’s heart. A society run by American neoliberals will not seek a complete eradication of all crime. Enforcement is costly, and attempts to reduce crime to zero are too onerous. At the same time, society does not require absolute compliance. A certain amount of crime can therefore be tolerated. A good penal system is one that seeks to find an equilibrium between supply (the need of individuals to commit crimes) and negative demand (the need of society to punish said crimes). A threshold must be determined and maintained; criminal activity above that threshold should be penalized, but anything below it must be tolerated. Concepts such as morality and spirituality never seem to enter the equation; it’s all about economics. For American neoliberals, the market was the ultimate benchmark to evaluate the government, a permanent economic tribunal that adjudicated on its actions. The market gauged the government’s performance, censored it, and criticized its costs and abuses. Foucault says, tongue-in-cheek, that where classical liberalism promoted the idea of laissez-faire (i.e., let the market be), the slogan of American neoliberalism was more like “do-not-laissez-faire,” only it was the government and not the market its ideologues were talking about.

The last lectures are rather abstruse discussions of homo economicus and civil society. Homo economicus is the consummate market man. He accepts reality and responds to external economic stimuli and any modifications in the external environment. He accepts reality as it is and should be left alone to engage in laissez-faire, pursue his self-interest, and maximize his profit. Homo economicus is an entrepreneur unto himself, his own capital, his own producer, the source of his own revenue. He is a very rational man, a beacon of rationality in an opaque, irrational economic system that Adam Smith called the “invisible hand.” Foucault does not believe that Adam Smith meant by that concept what is commonly thought he meant. Foucault sees the invisible hand not as some hidden force that administers the economic system, but as the symbol of its invisibility. The economy can never be seen in its totality, by anyone. The sovereign can’t see it too, no matter how high he is perched, and so homo economicus strips the sovereign of his power. But it would be wrong to view homo economicus as a free man. Foucault notes that if homo economicus responds to modifications in the variables of his environment, he is in fact eminently governable. Unfortunately, Foucault does not elaborate on this, but it seems safe to say that homo economicus can consequently be manipulated and shaped to conform to the needs of a neoliberal society. He is part of civil society, which, in simple terms — though nothing is ever simple with Foucault — is that vast part of society that contests the government’s powers even as it needs the government to make it ever more free. And with that, Foucault ends his lectures.

If we accept Foucault’s definition of liberalism (and I am not entirely convinced that we should — Foucault’s view of society seems to be as reductive as that of neoliberals), then modern political discourse in the West and beyond has not really been about divisions between right and left, or about any of the “isms,” but about the amount of government that is acceptable from the standpoint of the market. Attempts in the 20th century to come up with alternatives to neoliberalism did not invalidate the market; they only sought to domesticate it and put it under the control of a central planning system. Political disagreements in the West have only been so many manifestations of the tug-of-war between the ordoliberals and American neoliberals. Looking around, it looks like both camps have prevailed. The ordoliberals have succeeded in the sense that most Western states tend to operate on ordoliberal principles: the market functions as the supreme arbiter of things, while the government tries to create the right environment for the market and assist those who are unable to meet their basic needs. Every individual has indeed become an enterprise unto himself, or at least he is supposed to be entrepreneurial if he wants to get ahead. We are truly living in the Era of Mercury, to use the Russian title of a book by the American professor Yuri Slezkine, he of The House of Government fame. The main idea, or one of the main ideas, of this book, infelicitously named The Jewish Century, is not that the 20th century belonged to the Jews, but that the historical condition of the Jews has become the condition of modern man. The anomalous history of the Jews forced them to excel at trade, commerce, and entrepreneurship, to become adroit middlemen and intermediaries. By the 20th century, the modern socioeconomic landscape of an increasingly globalized world — with its migratory flux, rootlessness, and perpetual displacement — forced everyone else into the traditional position of the Jews. Slezkine playfully names the modern age the Era of Mercury, after the Roman god of commerce, the patron of “rule breakers, border crossers, and go-betweens; the protector of people who lived by their wit, craft, and art”. The modern age is defined by impermanence, a cardinal feature of a market economy. The guiding slogan is “embrace change”; companies boast of being “disruptors”; workers are told to expect to change not only their jobs but entire careers; adaptability is the greatest virtue. To cope with permanent change, individuals have to live by their wit, craft, or art. Mercury worship is essentially hustle culture. Nowhere is this more evident than on social media, where legions hope to exploit whatever competencies they possess to find a niche, build an audience, and then monetize the living daylights out of it. Everyone is now an enterprise unto themselves.

But American neoliberals have also got what they wanted. The logic of the economy — of the market — has spread to non-economic domains. This includes human relationships, how we think about them, and how we conceive of them. Consider the language we use. People refer to their significant others as “partners” and talk about being “invested” (or not) in relationships. Enter the term “high value” in the Youtube search field, and you will find a plethora of videos about “high-value” men and women, and how to snag them.

“Value” is a word appropriate for a commodity or a product, not a human being, but in a framework where every individual represents human capital, it shouldn’t be surprising that the individual is transformed into just another commodity. Saul Bellow once said in an interview that the replaceability of one’s mate, a very modern concept, meant that love as such was doomed —why commit to one person if you can always trade up? Replaceability, the constant possibility of getting a better deal, is of course a market concept. I am not suggesting that the past was somehow inspired by a purer, more idealistic ethos. The practice of dowry suggests financial considerations were no less pertinent in the past than they are today, if not more so. But financial considerations were buttressed by religious ones; the transactionality of marriage, to stick to our example, was negated by the impossibility — or, at the minimum, considerable difficulty — of getting a divorce. In a fiercely secular world, there is nothing to offset financial considerations. Perhaps it is no coincidence that an ever freer market, of both commodities and capital, has been accompanied by the elimination of various social taboos — the removal of economic constraints has simply been applied to non-economic domains.

What does biopolitics have to do with all of this? Biopolitics is political control of the biological life of the citizenry; it relies on the use of mechanisms and policies that administer the physical life of the population. China’s one-child policy, vaccination campaigns, mask mandates, tobacco legislation, the Prohibition in the US, concentration camps — all can be considered examples of biopolitical praxes. As Foucault explains in the first volume of The History of Sexuality — the text where he does discuss biopolitics — this kind of politics emerged sometime in the middle of the 18th century, just in time for the Industrial Revolution. Biopolitics is “an indispensable element in the development of capitalism” (Foucault uses the term “biopouvoir” in that text, but while there is a difference between “biopolitics” and “biopower,” it is not substantial enough to split hairs). As the West underwent industrialization, a need arose for a new type of governance. An economy that was mostly concerned with harvests and sufficient food supplies shifted to one of production and capital accumulation. People poured into the cities, where they lived in close proximity to one another in ever greater numbers, necessitating a different approach to questions of health, hygiene, crime, sanitary standards, and so on. No doubt elements of biopolitics have always existed. Epidemics and pandemics have stalked humanity since the dawn of mankind and always required measures to be taken, however rudimentary and primitive. I am convinced that David’s decision to take a census was an early attempt at biopolitics (incidentally, this incurred the wrath of God; see 2 Samuel 24) — figuring out how many, and what kind of, people live in your society is a step towards greater control and optimization of the population. But biopolitics as a principle of government emerged along with the Industrial Revolution. It was a response to the transformation from agrarian society to an industrialized one — essentially, a shift from a society that looked at the position of the sun to tell the time to a society that lived by the clock. In Foucault’s analysis, this transformation went hand-in-hand with capitalism and liberalism. Biopolitics, it follows, is an epiphenomenon of capitalism.

Fair enough. I note, though, that Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Mao’s China were not what you’d call liberal states, and the last two especially did not operate on a capitalist model, having created economic systems that acted as foils to capitalism. Yet their application of biopolitics — in scope, invasiveness, and violence — far exceeded anything in the capitalistic societies of the West. Power aside, one of Stalin’s main objectives was the industrialization of the Soviet Union, an objective that was achieved, albeit at an appalling cost to the Soviet people. The cult of the worker, the adoration of the Stakhanovite, constant economic leaps — this was the reality of the non-capitalist Soviet Union. The most industrious workers were awarded such honorific titles as “Hero of Labor” and “Hero of Socialist Labor.” To be virtuous was to be productive. The term “engineers of human souls,” supposedly coined and certainly used by Stalin, is a very biopolitical term. The difference between a society in which the Son of God merely wanted the Apostles to be fishermen of souls and one in which the son of a poor Georgian cobbler proposed that his apostles manufacture them — that is the difference between a non-biopolitical society and a biopolitical one. The dispute between capitalism and socialism is about control of the means of production and not the means themselves. It makes little difference for a factory worker whether his factory is owned by an industrialist or a Politburo that claims to represent his proletarian interests; what matters is who pays him more and what he can do with his earnings once he clocks out. Socialism is not so much the opposite of capitalism as its subset. This is lost on those who still cling to the belief that socialism is somehow the antidote to the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism and will deliver salvation from its evils. The opposite of socialism is not capitalism but individualism. It is individualism that begets freedom. But what makes man free?

Carl Schmitt wrote that all significant concepts of the state are secularized theological concepts. Religious belief can be suppressed, but it can never be truly banished; man’s need to believe will simply bubble up elsewhere. We saw this during the recent pandemic, when science — “the science” — was elevated to a system of belief with its own attributes of faith, its own gods, and its own heretics. This writer was amused to hear the governor of New York ask her (fully vaccinated) audience to be her “apostles” in the government’s vaccination campaign — a revealing choice of words (and also a poor one, given that historically the ultimate tendency of apostles tended to be martyrdom). In his last lecture, Foucault mentions that in the modern age the “economic field” replaced God as the one and only thing above the sovereign. The market, then, has simply become a secularized concept of God; neoliberalism, the system of worship. Liberalism, Foucault writes, seeks to generate itself constantly, at every given moment. So does faith, if it is to remain alive. This is why religious philosophers like Nikolai Berdyaev have considered Christian belief to be a creative process — as man needs God, God also needs man. If man does not nourish and sustain his faith at every waking moment, there is no faith and, therefore, no God. The choice to believe, to strive towards God, is the ultimate act of individualism, and that is what makes man truly free. By debasing Himself and becoming human through Christ, God bestowed godliness upon man and emancipated him from the forces of nature. It is this liberation that allowed man to dominate nature and Western civilization to attain its greatness. But modern man has only yoked himself once again, though this time not to nature but to the “economic field” and technology. Biopolitics, with its hard focus on the biological aspect of the population, to the complete exclusion of any concern for the individual soul, is a thoroughly secular style of government, one that could have only come about in a society lacking in metaphysics.

To be clear, I am not making a case for theocracy here. Religious belief is and should be innate; it cannot be imposed from without. The great Russian scholar Sergei Averintsev wrote that the biggest faultline in the Abrahamic religions lies between those who believe in the supremacy of their faith and live by it, and those who want to deploy their religion as a political or social instrument. The former (and I say this without claiming to be one of them) represent true faith; the latter, however successful their instrumentalisation of religion might be, only travesty it. A society might call itself religious, but only the individual can truly be so. This is something that those looking towards theocracy as a solution to modernity’s ills either fail or refuse to understand. Criticism of modernity that is little more than a rejection of its massive achievements is not much of a criticism. The Era of Mercury has improved the lives and the lot of untold millions, and has, on balance, been very good to us. But a society that is so shorn of spirituality or metaphysics it can no longer tell between God and Caesar — that society, whatever its level of affluence, is in a certain important sense quite impoverished.