Foucault ignored neoliberalism’s material politics and focused on its transformations of the subject

Evidence

Foucault was examining something that fascinated him in the present and whose twentieth-century intellectual origins—distinctive for their antipathy to certain kinds of governmental power—also intrigued him, yet he appeared relatively uninterested in what many would call the “politics” of neoliberalism—its gestation of new inequalities and concentrations of wealth, its deracinations and destitutions of populations, its dismantling of publics and social solidarities. Rather, he was interested in neoliberalism’s transformations of the social, the state, and the subject and also in how neoliberalism brings liberalism more squarely into places, such as France, where liberal principles had heretofore nested somewhat uneasily with other governing rationalities, such as republicanism and socialism. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 94

Categorization

• XREF: This is precisely the gap Brown’s own book fills — the political/power-excessive dimension of neoliberalism that Foucault left unexamined. Directly frames her project. — connects to: Foucault’s biopolitics resembles but misleads analysis of everyday neoliberalism — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 262; Foucault’s account of neoliberalism missed its transnational and postnational dimensions — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 144; Foucault’s political coordinates cannot capture neoliberalism’s effects on democracy — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 146
• SEED: Could seed a piece on the ‘politics Foucault ignored’ — the inequalities and deracinations of neoliberal practice versus his rationalist account.

Broader Connections

• Foucault’s account of neoliberalism missed its transnational and postnational dimensions #expands (0.82) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 144
• Foucault’s political coordinates cannot capture neoliberalism’s effects on democracy #complicates (0.78) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 146