Laissez-faire is itself a form of state regulation, not an absence of it

Evidence

Thus it is asserted that economic activity belongs to civil society, and that the State must not intervene to regulate it. But since in actual reality civil society and State are one and the same, it must be made clear that laissez-faire too is a form of State “regulation”, introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means. It is a deliberate policy, conscious of its own ends, and not the spontaneous, automatic expression of economic facts. Consequently, laissez-faire liberalism is a political programme, designed to change—in so far as it is victorious—a State’s leading personnel, and to change the economic programme of the State itself-—in other words the distribution of the national income. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 701

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the core Gramscian move: the political/civil society distinction is methodological, not ontological, and laissez-faire is state regulation by other means.
• XREF: Links directly forward into Islamophobia readings about the state’s role in producing ostensibly ‘market’ or ‘private’ religious discrimination, and to Foucault’s governmentality. — connects to: Eighteenth-century liberalism held that laissez-faire enriches the state’s power — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 622
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that non-intervention is itself a deliberate regulatory policy overturns the naturalized economy/state separation that much liberal discourse—and much Islamophobia scholarship’s target—rests on.