Foucault’s prescience about everyday neoliberalism came from adopting neoliberal doctrine

Evidence

I am not the first to demur that Foucault’s treatment of neoliberalism leaves something to be desired. It seems that a few scholars are coming around to the position that Foucault managed to be so very prescient with regard to everyday neoliberalism precisely because he took on board such a large amount of the neoliberal doctrine as a font of deep insight into the nature of governmentality. … Again, to be clear, I am not accusing Foucault of being a member of the Neoliberal Thought Collective—an absurd counterfactual—but rather, suggesting that he shared quite a bit of common ground with their doctrines, and was coming to appreciate that incongruous fact toward the end of his life. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 278

Categorization

• XREF: Central to the book’s core thesis: even Foucault, the great critic of power, absorbed the thought collective’s framework; dovetails with Mirowski’s argument that neoliberalism colonizes even its critics’ analysis. — connects to: Foucault’s governmentality concept may itself be a cog in the neoliberal regime of truth — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1951; Foucault’s biopolitics resembles but misleads analysis of everyday neoliberalism — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 262; The neoliberal regime reappropriated Foucault’s ethics of the self into a self-exploitation device — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 68
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely destabilizing claim for the reader’s whole frame: the sharpest critic of power saw the world through his adversary’s lens and was right to do so. Resists easy summary.