Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics

Notes: Birth of Biopolitics

Class Notes

• Brief context for the lecture:
• After STP, an Italian newspaper commissions Foucault to write a series of articles. He takes trips to Iran to study the Islamic Revolution. He visits Iran before writing The Birth of Biopolitics.
• His writing on Iran are controversial because he rarely weighed in on contemporary political struggles. People criticized him for valorizing the movement that overthrew the Shah.
• He recognized the entirely different economic moment in the Iranian Revolution. He saw in the local resistance a connection to a larger structure, a larger economic problem. A seemingly smooth continuity should be understood by examining its ruptures.
• He’s struck by neoliberalism.
• He supported not the Islamic state in Iran, but the movement that said no to a certain kind of government/governance.
• Counter-practices over resistance
• He wants after this to find a subjectivity that can discern good from bad governmentality.
• Foucault’s trajectory of neoliberalism. It did not just emerge. It was rather a long crafted intellectual project.
• F.A. Hayek exiled in WWII and goes to England. Trained by Von Mises. He meets a guy from the Chicago School (Aaron Director) and writes The Road to Serfdom.
• He gets a job at University of Chicago and fundamentally shapes the Chicago School of economics.
• At Mont Pelerin Society annual meetings, journalists were brought in to listen and write about the meetings.
• A Regime of Truth is a body of knowledge capable of distinguishing between normal and abnormal. He’s interested in looking at political economy, neoliberalism as a political economic thought that recalibrates the normal and abnormal.
• Governmentality: institutional practice that works on populations; forms of knowledge; apparatuses of security (power).
• Foucaultian methodology: find a concept that emerges and then find where it becomes a problem. Example: how does state capitalism go from productive in 19th century to problematic in 20th century. Why does it need to be reinvented in 20th century.
• Friedman: “What is Neoliberalism”
• Biopolitics and Neoliberalism are synonymous.

Chapter 1

• Foucault diverges from STP on p. 10, noting that he wants to explore the ways limitation were imposed on raison d’Etat were imposed from within rather than externally. In addition, limitations take the form of common sense in a way. Resisting limitations is to resist the most efficient mode of governing and submit to being clumsy. It is a limitation, de facto, that the government imposes on itself, and the problem is defining that limitation. The principle can be found in government objectives. The limitations aren’t imposed on subjects but on practices of the government. The limitations are not decided upon by those who govern, but rather come from transactions, or as Foucault calls them “actions between.” I believe he means that the limitations act from and on forces.
• “The objection is no longer to the abuse of sovereignty but to excessive government” (13).
• The initiation of this kind of limiting governmentality is political economy. It starts with PE. (13).
• Political economy focuses on the circulation and procurement of a nation’s wealth and power. It is not concerned with rights, as such, but rather takes as its focus effects of gov practices (13,15). It doesn’t look for naturalness existing a priori to government, but rather the naturalness of government.
• “The possibility of limitation and the question of truth are both introduced into governmental reason through political economy” (17).
• Regime of Truth: “the articulation of a particular type of discourse and a set of practices, a discourse that, on the one hand, constitutes these practices as a set bound together by an intelligible connection and, on the other hand, legislates and can legislate on these practices in terms of true and false” (18).
• Biopolitics can be formed only within the basis and emergence of population. However, before delving into biopolitics, Foucault makes it clear that one must know what liberalism is and was to understand biopolitics.
• Raison d’Etat is limitless. The police state doesn’t limit itself. So limitation must be imposed from the outside. The market has external limitation that is not juridical.

Chapter 2

• Limit of government rationality is intensification of raison d’Etat explored in STP.
• The “site of truth” that becomes the object for a frugal government, one of limitation--the intensification of raison d’Etat--is the market, not what’s in “the head of economists” (30).
• The market moves from a site of jurisdiction (one in which the state actively sought to secure risk by, for example, reducing fraud or ensuring just prices) to one of nature. Prices are derived at by the freedom of the market and they go from being risks to the buyer to just or natural prices from the market. This allows economists to argue for a certain truth value in the market.
• This is the shift from justice to truth. Justice is ensuring the security and fairness of exchange by gov for buyer and seller. Truth is allowing the market to let these things work out a natural truth.
• The market, then, is “a site of veridiction. The market must tell the truth…;it must tell the truth in relation to governmental practice” (32).
• Counter to the rights of man limitations of government (e.g., French Revolution), the limitation of government Foucault wants to explore takes as its place for limitation, not what the gov can’t do based on individual rights, but practices and areas that should be off-limits to the gov. “Government’s limit of competence will be bounded by the utility of governmental intervention: (40). Public Law vs. Radical Utilitarian modes of limitation.
• “Exchange for wealth and utility for the public authorities: this is how governmental reason articulates the fundamental principle of its self-limitation” (44). By exchange he means an economic rationality--price and value in the market that must be determined by natural law. By utility for public authorities he means limiting the ways they can act.
• This rationality makes use in both senses--exchange and utility--of the word interest. However, “interest is now interests, a complex interplay between individual and collective interests, between social utility and economic profit, between the equilibrium of the market and the regime of public authorities, between basic rights and the independence of the governed” (44).
• “The fundamental question of liberalism is: What is the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the true value of things” (46).

Chapter 3

• The new market veridiction switches the old model in mercantilism, one that espouses a zero sum game, states get enriched at the expense of others because there’s a limited number of potential wealth. It switches to a competition model in which the states move away from equilibrium to mutual enrichment. (53-54).
• European states then expand their view of the market into the world. The economic game isn’t one that can be exhausted. This marks a significant shift in global calculation (56).
• The guarantee of perpetual peace via Kant is “commercial globalization” (58).
• Foucault defines liberalism as having three key components: veridiction of the market; governmental utility calculation; unlimited economic development (61).
• Foucault hints at biopolitics and statistics when he notes that states, once they understand the natural mechanisms of an economy, don’t use that knowledge to respect the rights and freedoms of individuals, but rather it limits itself by the evidence of economic analysis which it knows has to be respected. It is limited by evidence, not by the freedom of individuals.” (62). Foucault says he prefers the term naturalism over liberalism, but he continues to use the term liberalism.
• “The new governmental reason needs freedom therefore, the new art of government consumes freedom. It consumes freedom, which means that it must produce it...The new art of government therefore appears as the management of freedom” (63).
• Freedom of commercial exchange must simultaneously be produced and limited by the state. In order to have a market infrastructure, the state has to intervene and limit, and it must also secure and protect the interests of the collective against the individual.

Chapter 4

• In this chapter Foucault begins to trace liberalism’s evolution in the 20th century, but wants to focus first mainly on the Germans. However, he does point out that the German and American neoliberals share three things: a common foe in Keynes, a detestation of planned economies, and a circulation of books and readings between Germany-Austria-US.
• German neoliberalism had to rebuild after the war, and they decided to deregulate and focus on the price mechanism, or a “natural” way of bringing prices back into line with world prices.
• Upon what, however, would a destroyed state base its reconstitution. Foucault point to economic freedom as something that can legitimate the state as the representative of the people.
• Post-1948 Germany gains its legitimacy in the economy. The economy is the genesis from which its juridical structures springs. “Adherence to this liberal system produces permanent consensus as a surplus product, and, symmetrically to the genealogy of the state form the economic institution, the production of well-being by economic growth will produce a circuit going from the economic institution to the population’s overall adherence to its regime and system” (85). “The economy produces political signs that enable the structures, mechanisms, and justifications of power to function” (85).
• The problem of gov limitation in Germany had to do with forming something that would be limited, not limiting something that already exists.
• Foucault spends some time making the claim that socialism lacks a governmentality, that it can fit in different governmentalities and still be called socialism.
• “What is involved in fact is a new programming of liberal governmentality. It is an internal reorganization that, once again, does not ask the state what freedom it will leave to the economy, but asks the economy how its freedom can have a state-creating function and role, in the sense that it will really make possible the foundation of the state’s legitimacy?” (95).

Chapter 5

• In this chapter Foucault begins to sketch the origins of neoliberalism in German ordoliberalism, providing some bios and origin stories for the school of thought and its main players.
• The Freiburg school and Frankfurt school were contemporaries and took as their origin Max Weber’s work. Both schools took up Weber’s shift from a Marx-like examination of capital and its illogical nature to investigate capitalism and its irrational rationality.
• “So, from before the Nazi seizure of power, we have four elements: a protected economy, state socialism, economic planning, and Keynesian interventionism. These four elements acted as barriers to a liberal policy and from the end of the century they were the object of a series of discussions conducted by the few partisans of liberalism living in Germany” (109).
• The Freiburg school analysis of Nazism’s origins looked at the four components above and said Nazism is the natural inheritance of these kinds of economic interventionist policies. Basically, having an economy like this, according to the Freiburg school, necessitates a large, powerful state to implement and administer it. The Freiburg school thinkers claim the Nazism produces the same kind of mass society that capitalism produces, which Frankfurt school thinkers also critiqued. It created a normalizing system of symbols and subjects under the Nazi party, which they read as anti-liberal, not suitable for a market economy (113-114).
• Since the ordoliberals claim that economies that allow the growth of the state contain defects and outputs like Nazism, the state should no longer be given limitations into where it can and cannot intervene based on an economic rationality. Rather, economic rationality intensifies and becomes the very reason for the state’s existence: “a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state” (116).
• Foucault begins to outline the differences in liberalism and ordoliberalism build on the Nazism analysis.
• 1) Ordoliberalism replaces exchange with competition. That is, exchange in 18th century economic thought allowed the state to secure private property and the equal exchange of equally valued commodities. There’s an equality in exchange. However, the ordoliberals emphasize competition, inequality in exchange. This reduces the state to only preventing monopolies. Competition also shifts them away from laissez faire to an internal logic game of competition, which unlike the 18th century naturalist economic theories doesn’t assert a naturalness to the economic theory. It’s a game whose rules must be obeyed and followed. (120)

Chapter 6

• Foucault begins this chapter making the claim that neoliberalism is not simply liberalism redux, and therefore, any claim that old critiques still explain this moment should be thrown out. It is not Adam Smith, market society, or global capitalist gulags (130-131).
• In ordoliberal reformulations of market rationality they revision three things
• Monopoly: rather than an illogical paradox to avoid, the ordoliberals say that monopoly is the result of improper interventions
• Interventions should intervene on the conditions, not the mechanisms
• EX: control inflation (monetarism) and don’t mess with other things that could upset the regulator of prices (price mechanism). In other words, don’t worry about debt or full employment.
• Using a controlled system of credit allocation as a means to ensure the stability of prices.
• Interventions work on the framework, not the prices. That is, governmental action can work to better turn agriculture into a market friendly production. You can work on soil, education, inheritance, climate, etc., but not put in place price controls or production controls.
• Social policy, that of creating a safety net for people, for the ordoliberals should take on 2 forms:
• Allowing inequality to occur as it is the equal game played by everyone
• Privatizing risk through access to the economy
• Foucault sums this up by saying the only social policy for ordoliberals is economic growth (144). As long as the average of the population is meeting its needs, interventions are unnecessary. Therefore it is the purpose to maintain the average by acting on conditions. Here we see Foucault expanding on biopolitics and the use of statistics to derive norms/averages and act on them.
• Neoliberals intervene on society through the market “so that competitive mechanisms can play a regulatory role at every moment and every point in society and by intervening in this way its objective will become possible...a general regulation of society by the market” (145). Foucault goes on to explain that this is not “an economic government” but rather “ a government of society (146).
• This means that the society envisioned by neoliberals isn’t one of commodities and markets, but one of enterprise, one of turning man into homo economicus “the man of enterprise and production” (147). Again, here is Foucault’s work on biopolitics. He’s shown how the principle is not to intervene on the mechanisms but on the effects. Therefore, intervening in the economy is intervening in society; it is discovering the acceptable average and acting on society to create the conditions for securing that average. Here he turns to the creation of a new kind of subject. Not one of constant consumption, but one of production. “It is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society” (148).
• The objective of neoliberalism is “obtaining a society that is not orientated towards the commodity and the uniformity of the commodity, but towards the multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises” (149).

Chapter 7

• This lecture focuses on “the redefinition of the juridical institution and of the necessary rules of right in a society regulated on the basis of and in terms of the competitive market economy: the problem then, broadly speaking, of law” (160).
• The ordoliberals believe the man-made legal system gives rise to the economic, not the other way around.
• Foucault spends some time arguing for a different way of studying capitalism, not just as a singularity that is an outgrowth of capital. That is, it isn’t the logic of capital accumulation that creates whatever capitalism is. Rather it is decided/invented within “an economic-institutional ensemble” (167).
• Foucault argues that the German state looked to Rule of Law as a way to reinvent capitalism in a post-Hitler Germany. The Rule of Law meant that interventions couldn’t be made by sovereigns or some administrative bureaucracy (police state) but could only be implemented as far as the law allowed.
• Relying on rule of law means that no one can create a planned economy. A plan must change and rule over the economy, but if laws were in place to secure economic mechanisms, no one could enforce a plan.
• Hayek’s economic rules of law (172-173)
• 1. Never pursue a particular end. The measures are general and should tell people what to and not to do.
• 2. It is conceived of a priori to any particular effect. It’s not reactive.
• 3.  Provides a framework for economic agents to operate within.
• 4. There’s predictable behavior from public authorities
• 5. The state cannot know the totality of the economic process and so must act as if completely blind.
• “In short, both for the state and for individuals, the economy must be a game: a set of regulated activities...but in which the rules are not decisions which someone takes for others: (173). It tells you how to play but not what the outcome will be.
• In this economic order the subject is the enterprise, or as Foucault puts it, “a way of behaving in the economic field” (175)

Chapter 8

• Foucault begins by explaining why he’s spending so much time of neoliberalism and not biopolitics. He then explains his theory of power as a domain of relations. He then transitions into governmentality, which is the conduct of men’s conduct (186).
• Foucault then explains at length why he goes into neoliberalism. He’s concerned generally in this work--at least at the beginning with state phobia, an inclination in ways to limit the state. So, he sees a few commonplaces with critiques of the state. They argue for a cross pollination of kinds of state. They tend to allow a premise of necessary inflationary state power (one that trends toward authoritarianism) to confuse the good and bad (e.g., social security will lead to death camps). This makes people not examine reality or the cause of state phobia itself. Foucault’s exploration of the ordoliberals shows how state paranoia works to create neoliberalism.
• Foucault briefly makes the point that Nazism or fascism isn’t an intensification of the state, but rather springs from “a non-state governmentality, precisely in what could be called a governmentality of the party” (191).
• He then turns to focus on the spread of neoliberalism in France from its German origins.
• The economic game of neoliberalism turns private risk into a public good, which “prevents someone from ever dropping totally and definitively out of the game. It is a sort of inverted social contract. That is to say, in the social contract, all those who will the social contract and virtually or actually subscribe to it form part of society until such a time as they cut themselves off from it...no one originally insisted on being part of the economic game and consequently it is up to society and to the rules of the game imposed by the state to ensure that no one is excluded from this game in which he is caught up without ever having explicitly wished to take part...the only point of contact between the economic and the social is the rule safeguarding players from being excluded from the game” (202).
• We can see the evidence of biopolitics in French neoliberal policy. For example, Foucault explicates the negative tax, which “will guarantee supplementary resources to those, and only those, who either definitely or provisionally fail to reach a sufficient threshold” (203). The purpose of this redistribution is so that “the individual will be guaranteed a given level of consumption, but with enough motivations, or, if you like, enough frustrations, so that he still always wants to work and so that it is always preferable to work rather than receive a benefit” (204). Importantly, however, this neoliberal policy will never work on the causes of poverty, “but simply at the level of its effects” (204).
• There’s a really important passage on 206 about securing the forces of a population based on a moving objective. “it ensures as it were a general security, but at the lowest level...the economic mechanisms of the game, the mechanisms of competition and enterprise, will be allowed to function in the rest of society. Above the threshold everyone will have to be an enterprise for himself or for his family. A society formalized on the model of the enterprise, of the competitive enterprise, will be possible above the threshold, and there will be simply a minimum security...the nullification of certain risks on the basis of a low level threshold. That is to say, there will be a population which, from the point of view of the economic baseline, will be constantly moving between, on the one hand, assistance provided in certain eventualities when it falls below the threshold and, on the other, both its use and its availability for use according to economic needs and possibilities. It will therefore be a kind of infra- and supra-liminal floating population, a liminal population which, for an economy that has abandoned the objective of full employment, will be a constant reserve of manpower which can be drawn on if need be, but which can also be returned to its assisted status if necessary” (206).

Chapter 9

• The targets or adversaries for American neoliberalism were Keynesian policies, Beveridge Plan social compacts--war service for secured lifetime labor, and social programs.
• American neoliberalism exists on both left and right. In the right it is the threat of socialism, and on the left it is the threatening expansion of a military state that gives it rise.
• Foucault emphasizes the historical roots of America in liberalism, such that it isn’t a political choice but an affective way of being in the world. It is baked into the American worldview and is something Americans are socialized into.
• Foucault focuses his analysis of American neoliberalism on human capital and criminality.
• The neoliberals take issue with an abstract, logic-of-capital driven abstract theory about labor. They would argue, according to Foucault, that selling labor power and the alienation of the worker from his work, is the result of a theory of capitalism. Essentially, the problem with labor is a problem with “the general field of reference of economic analysis” (222).
• Neoliberals take as their starting point for economic analysis the following definition: “Economics is the science of human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have mutually exclusive uses” (222). Foucault explicates by saying that this definition reinserts labor into economic analysis adopting “the task of analyzing a form of human behavior and the internal rationality of this human behavior” (223). It takes on then rationality and “the strategic programming of individuals’ activity” (223).
• This analysis of economics that includes labor positions itself from the point of view of the worker. They reason that people work for a wage, which they take to be an income, not a price at which they sell their labor. Rather, they see income as selling one’s human capital. He adds: “labor is not a commodity reduced by abstraction to labor power and the time [during] which it is used...from the worker’s point of view labor comprises capital, that is to say, it as an ability, a skill; as they say; it is a ‘machine.’ And on the other side it is an income, a wage, or rather, a set of wages; as they say; an earnings stream” (224).
• In this way, the worker is both a worker and a machine. He is an enterprise whose human capital makes his life an enterprise. This represents a retooling of classical homo economicus, one that is not a man of exchange, but rather “an entrepreneur...of himself” (226).
• Foucault divides human capital, or acquiring human capital, to two elements: inherited and acquired. He spends some time going over what was then a burgeoning field in genetics to posit a few dystopian hypotheses, but he soon turns to investments in human capital, or as he starts calling them: abilities machines. One prominent form of investment is education, both schooling and the statistical calculations that are now prominent that correlate the number of hours spent doing X with a child and its potential for Y. (228-230).
• Improving economic conditions means investing in human capital, the wellspring of innovation, which ultimately promotes cultural and educational policies for the neoliberal machine.

Chapter 10

• This chapter explores the ways American neoliberalism uses “the market economy and the typical analyses of the market economy to decipher non-market relationships and phenomena which are not strictly and specifically economic but what we call social phenomena” (240).
• American neoliberalism is more exhaustive in its turning the social into the economic than ordoliberalism. As such, it extends market analyses to the social to “reveal” behaviors as intelligible where they once weren’t (243).
• Neoliberalism, in addition to equating social relationships to transaction costs, also allows a governmental analysis to emerge that gives rise to groups like the American Enterprise Institute, “whose essential function...is to measure all public activities in cost-benefit terms” (247).
• The economic, then, is not a mantra of hands-off the market, but rather is turned around and becomes the means by which to measure the government. (247).
• “Economic behavior is the grid of intelligibility one will adopt on the behavior of a new individual. It also means that the individual becomes governmentalizable, that power gets a hold on him to the extend, and only to the extent, that he is homo economicus...the surface of contact between the individual and the power exercised on him...will be only this kind of grid of homo economicus” (252-53).
• Foucault extends neoliberal rationality to criminality. Governments no longer have to worry about criminals or criminality, but rather only conduct. In addition, since it is a behavior, a grid of intelligibility within an economic rationality, there’s not an individual criminal that needs to be understood, but rather a “supply of crime” (253).
• Foucault employs a neoliberal analysis of crime, showing that we’ve moved away form Foucault’s panopticon, which seeks to zero out crom. In the neoliberal rationality, however, crime is a supply whose demand must be reduced. So, it is not the absolute elimination of crime but an acceptable reduction. Societies, then, produce and consume certain kinds of conforming behavior. Therefore, “good penal policy does not aim at the extinction of crim, but a balance between the curves of the supply of crime and negative demand” (256). This is a biopolitical analysis of criminality.
• Neoliberal policies, then, act on the market milieu not on the individual himself. “On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-paradigm of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals” (260). Here we see biopolitics on display. Whereas disciplinary power asks individuals to conform to preestablished norms, biopower/biopolitics allows for acceptable difference and acts on the game rather than the players.
• A good analogy might be football here. If you want to make the game more exciting, you don’t put weight on the good players’ feet. You take some part of the game that is unexciting (the extra point) and make it more competitive. Open up room for error. Move the ball back and it’s no longer a gimmee.

Chapter 11

• This chapter focuses on the problems created when equating all actors, whether economic or social, to economic man. Rather than the object of economic analysis being a rational choice to conduct oneself according to scarce resources with multiple ends--basically, making a rational choice based on scarcity and desired results--neoliberal economists extend economic analysis to the irrational. They open it up to “any conduct which responds systematically to modifications in the variables in the environment” (268-269). Here there is no preconceived rationality or best choice, but rather a systematic, non-random way of responding to environmental stimuli.
• Whereas the classical homo economicus was someone who acted out of self-interest, and whose self-interest was beneficial for others, and as such should be left alone, neoliberal homo economicus is someone whose behaviors are systematic and is therefore governable (270).
• Foucault turns to providing an historical basis for homo economicus, which reaches back into English empiricist philosophy. There we see the emergence of the individual of interest. Foucault defines interest as something that is irreducible and cannot be transferred to another person. That is, it is at its most elemental and is completely subjective. This interests Foucault because it marks the emergence of “subjective will” (273).
• In empirical philosophy, the subject of interest will necessarily invoke the subject of right. For example, entering into a contract is within the interest of someone, but it can cease being in the interest of someone. However, contracts are upheld in law, and as such the law limits the means by which self-interest can escape its commitments. Therefore, self-interest “overflows him, surrounds him, and is the permanent condition of him functioning” (274). In short, the subject of right and the subject of interest (homo economicus) are at loggerheads.
• Homo economicus in the classical sense is in a paradoxical situation. Everything he needs to know to make the right calculation eludes him, but he acts in self-interest anyway, as do all others, and as a result, benefit. As Foucault puts it: “we are at the heart of the problematic of the invisible hand, which is the correlate of homo economicus if you like, or rather is that kind of bizarre mechanism which makes homo economicus function as an individual subject of interest within a totality which eludes him and which nevertheless founds the rationality of his egoistic choices” (278).
• The famous invisible hand means that there’s no way, because it is invisible, for someone to pursue the collective good. They can only know their own self-interest, and this is how they should behave. Therefore, sovereigns should not try to govern the economy because it is doomed to fail. “Economics is a discipline that begins to demonstrate not only the pointlessness, but also the impossibility of a sovereign point of view over the totality of the state that he has to govern” (282). We can see here the demise of sovereign power. In addition, men are disciplined to be self-interested?

Chapter 12

• To bridge the paradox between governing a man of right and an economic man, neoliberalism avoids a split in governing in two different ways by interfacing with a new phenomenon “civil society” (295).
• “Civil society is...a concept of governmental technology, or rather, it is the correlate of a technology of government the rational measure of which must be juridically pegged to an economy understood as process of production and exchange. The problem of civil society is the juridical structure...of a governmentality pegged to the economic structure...And I think that civil society--which is very quickly called society, and which at the end of the eighteenth century is called the nation--makes a self-limitation possible for governmental practice and an art of government...it makes possible a self-limitation which infringes neither economic laws nor the principles of right” (296).
• This new governmentality which must be governed itself by the economic and administer the juridical “will be a government that manages civil society, the nation, society, the social (296). Here we see clearly biopolitics. It is not the management of individuals, but of populations, of society.
• Foucault makes the point that we shouldn’t view civil society as something natural, but rather as something “born precisely from the interplay of relations of power and everything which constantly eludes them, at the interface, so to speak, of governors and governed” (297).
• Civil society allows economic man to exist. That is, civil society contains disinterested interests, people who act for one another because they are interested but have no stake in the outcome (e.g., compassion, love for neighbor, etc.). It is this existence that allows economic man to come to the fore. However, economic man is certainly interested in the outcome, and as a result civil society begins to erode. “Consequently, the more we move towards an economic state, the more, paradoxically, the constitutive bond of civil society is weakened and the more the individual is isolated by the economic bond he has with everyone and anyone” (303).
• There is something that eludes power mechanisms that happens in civil society (everyday behavior). Where is the space that we can elude governmentality with certain practices? How can we develop critical subjectivity?