Michel Foucault — The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79

96 published claims from this book.

• A long-sighted sovereign would see only chimeras in the economy
• A society’s economic base determines its political and juridical superstructure.
• Abandoning full employment creates an assisted liminal population as manpower reserve.
• Agent blindness to the collective good is necessary for Smithian economic benefit
• Anti-Keynesianism and Austrian marginalism unite the two neo-liberalisms
• Anti-monopoly law in ordoliberalism blocks external distortions rather than intervening in the market itself.
• Becker defines economics as the science of systematic environmental responses
• Both Schumpeter and ordoliberals rejected Marx’s internal-contradiction thesis of capitalism
• Capitalism is a singular economic-institutional ensemble that can be reinvented
• Collective utility has prevailed over sovereign rights as the axis of modern government
• College de France lectures served as open research fields distinct from Foucault’s books
• Competition is a governmental objective requiring an indefinitely active policy, never naturally given
• Drug enforcement can be engineered through price rather than prohibition
• Drug policy targets elastic versus inelastic demand rather than drug types
• Early economists were simultaneously jurists and public-law theorists
• Early modern Western takeoff is credited to human not physical capital
• Economic and juridical-political thought are heterogeneous and incompatible worlds
• Economic experts replace prudent counselors as the prince’s advisors
• Economic growth replaced history as Germany’s organizing axis of time after 1945.
• Economic man’s rationality is founded precisely on everything that eludes his calculation
• Economic rationality is founded on the unknowability of the whole economic process
• Economics is lateral to governing, not its internal rationality
• Eighteenth-century liberalism held that laissez-faire enriches the state’s power
• English empiricism’s theory of the subject is a pivotal Western mutation
• Formalizing law expands the judiciary into an omnipresent public service
• Foucault rejects critiques that denounce reason’s oppression as equally oppressive
• Foucault used historical scholarship to illuminate the present diagonally.
• Foucault’s method traces genealogy of truth coupled with law
• Foucault’s public lectures reached huge audiences but frustrated genuine exchange.
• Free economic participation generates a permanent political consensus among its agents.
• Genealogy refuses to take sovereignty, the state, and civil society as givens
• German economic theory and Weberian sociology posed one question of capitalist survival
• German ordoliberalism and American anarcho-liberalism are distinct critiques of excessive government.
• German ordoliberalism inverted the classical liberal problem of limiting the state
• German social democracy abandoned Marxism more slowly than its rivals
• Government-framed rights discourse derives rights from what must be left to freedom
• Homo economicus is a grid of intelligibility, not a full anthropology, enabling governability
• Homo economicus was always the basis of a new governmental reason
• Innovation is redefined as the income of invested human capital
• Interstate competition justifies unlimited domestic regulation of subjects’ lives.
• Juridical limitations on the police state were external, not internal, to it
• Law and order originally meant state rule limited to law itself
• Law turned from a multiplier of royal power into its subtractor.
• Legal form became liberalism’s regulatory instrument for its generality, not for jurisprudential reasons.
• Liberal critique questions the necessity and legitimacy, not just cost, of governing.
• Liberal governance is a highway code, neither laissez-faire nor planning
• Liberalism means the deliberate self-limitation of governmental reason
• Modern penal practice replaced the act-question with the identity-question
• Modern public law shifted from founding sovereignty to limiting governmental power.
• Neo-liberal homo economicus differs wholly from the classical version
• Neo-liberal society above the threshold makes every individual an enterprise for himself.
• Neo-liberalism collapses labor into capital and frames the individual as an enterprise
• Neo-liberalism replaces the peasant manpower reserve with an assisted liminal population.
• Neo-liberalism’s real objective is the market’s formalization of the state and society
• Neoliberalism generalizes the enterprise form across the entire social body
• Neoliberalism reduces social policy to a non-exclusion rule protecting the market game.
• Ordoliberal enterprise society is simultaneously for and against the market
• Ordoliberalism denied an essential capitalist logic and made rival capitalisms inventable
• Ordoliberalism makes state policy the guardian of fragile market mechanisms
• Ordoliberalism seeks maximum legal interventionism and minimal economic interventionism
• Ordoliberals traced Nazism to technocratic state management, not capitalism
• Penal policy ignores the criminal psyche and acts on market incentives
• Penal power shifted from judging acts to interrogating the criminal’s identity.
• Phenomenology shaped the Freiburg jurists’ theory of law
• Physiocrats justified taxation by making the sovereign co-owner of the land
• Political economy founded itself on the impossibility of an economic sovereign
• Political economy made ignorance, not wickedness, the prince’s cardinal vice
• Political economy reframes subjects of right as a population to be governed
• Political economy replaced equitable justice with maximum-minimum self-limitation in government
• Raison d’Etat abandoned imperial ambition for permanent competitive equilibrium among states.
• Rights-based sovereignty and utility calculus both converge on limiting the individual
• Rule of law in economics restricts the state to purely formal legislation
• Schumpeter predicted socialism via competition’s centralizing effects, not capital’s contradictions
• Seventeenth-century opposition politics made public law into a weapon against the police state
• Sexuality as an object emerged from the crossover of jurisdiction and veridiction
• Smith’s invisible hand denies that economic evidence can exist
• Socialism lacks an intrinsic art of government and must invent one
• State-phobia today parallels the eighteenth-century phobia about despotism.
• The 1948 German state was legitimated via the free market mechanism
• The economic world must remain opaque even to the sovereign
• The economy is a game whose outcome no one knows
• The frugality-of-government question displaced the constitutional question
• The invisible hand doctrine functions to disqualify the political sovereign
• The modern state has been effectively shrinking for years, not growing
• The negative tax treats poverty’s symptoms while abandoning inquiry into its causes.
• The palace and the cottage are equally social, not closer to nature.
• The physiocratic Economic Table gave the sovereign total transparency over the economy
• The police state merges government entirely with administration, making governmentality unlimited
• The pre-eighteenth-century market functioned as a site of justice, not truth
• The Rule of law opposes both sovereign despotism and the police state
• The Rule of law separates universal laws from particular administrative measures
• The same mechanism that unites society also drives its historical change
• The state has no essence, only the mobile effect of ongoing statification.
• The state-phobia of the postwar period shaped neo-liberal governmental practices in Germany and America
• Twentieth-century states have been reduced via party or liberal governmentality
• World War II nations secured sacrificial war service through promises of lifetime social security