Foucault on Liberalism

It is known that liberalism in Foucault serves to present the «framework of political rationality» to the state mechanisms based on discipline —right and biopolitics— understanding biopolitics as a technology of populations. That function is very complex because it determines the final challenges to the system, it defies the aforementioned mechanisms and indicates their own limits. The question, carried to an adequate level of theoretical radicality, identifies the mediation between the bearer of liberty and the mechanisms of government. Between «a system worried about the respect of the subjects of right and of the liberty of initiative of individuals», on the one hand, and the disciplinary and biopolitical mechanisms that keep in mind population as a mass, on the other, adequate mediations should be established. We can see that Foucault undertakes the classical problem of the tensions between the mass and individual dimensions of democratic society. In liberalism, the former constitutes the framework of political rationality and the latter concentrates on the action of government as biopower.

In Foucault’s analysis, as in the rest of conventional analysis, such tensions cannot be completely resolved. For that reason, critique appears as the only appropriate practice for liberalism, that is to say, the continuous reflection, the aspiration to rationalize the government. Liberalism requires the government —with all its mechanisms— to be not an end in and of itself. Government cannot become absolute. This rationalization humiliates the old reason of State and reduces the central role of policy. For liberalism, Foucault recalls, governments always govern too much. The liberal attitude imposes even the need to legitimize anything that could be an aim of the government. For liberalism, it will no longer have its own aims because it is not considered a natural institution anymore. Now we are legitimated even in asking why it would be necessary to govern.

In the summary of his 1978/9 seminar, Foucault spoke about a «liberal technology of government», and he quoted a sentence by Franklin, «a technology of thrifty government» as a general expedient to establish the mediation we are talking about. In his opinion — forged in the perception of the differences between the physiocrats and the liberals—, the mentioned technology required social regulation. He described it in a classicist fashion as «participation of the governed in the making of the law, by means of a parliamentary system».

This technique seemed more rational and compatible with the governmental economy,or with a rationalization of the government. Here, a historical synthesis neither necessary nor typical took place. Liberalism has not always been linked to democratic parliamentarianism, just as democracy, always endowed with technical and disciplinary biopolitics, has not always been linked to liberalism. In fact, liberalism can drastically constrain its criticism and focus it on economical aspects, and the State can even eliminate it, as happens in authoritarian States.

The most interesting part of Foucault’s description —he is not offering a theory— rests in identifying natural structures as the basis for the development of liberalism. Naturally, he identified those structures as the surroundings of the idea of civil society. Even without referring to Adam Smith’s canonical analyses -as he will in The Birth of Biopolitics—, it was also clear that for Foucault the points of departure for liberalism are those of a natural freedom scenario. These marked moments are unconnected with the State, but it is precisely the State which should accredit its rationality as based on them. Thus, Foucault considers the market a test to measure the excesses of government, because its analysis shows that an optimal development in economy is incompatible with the maximization of the government. In some way, natural freedom found one of its expressions in the market, but was not exhausted in it. It can be said that a completely liberal civil society is a place of natural freedom. civil society maintains a complex relation with the State: it is outside and inside at the same time, and it is the basis for mediation itself. It embodies liberty, but it has need for rational government.

Foucault specified the decisive and paradoxical argument for this question. Since it seems clear that natural freedom should be taken as such by its capacity to govern by itself; Foucault cleverly observed that this order does not arise from a political society based on a contractual relation. on the contrary, there was already a need of government in the natural order. Adam Smith would have centered his argument saying that the results of natural freedom have to be regular to guarantee their own maintenance. Long before Marx, the Scottish philosopher found a contradiction in the economic system. So, the need of the government had to do with the same regulation of natural liberty and aspired to maintain it in that naturalness. For instance, this was the meaning for anti-monopoly laws, one of the inevitable and unacceptable results of liberty. Thus, government guarantees natural liberty: its ethical-legal regulation of the market tries to guarantee the equality of opportunities, the free competition, the liberty of prices; namely: the natural free market. only by the ethical- legal regulation of the government, then, natural freedom regulates itself. The adequate relation between State and civil society is configured inside and outside through synthesis of natural and political regulation, of positive and natural law. Foucault knows this result and he describes it properly, although without quoting Smith’s category of natural freedom.

The notion of regulation is here the decisive one. It reproduces the paradox of an intervention that opens the possibility for everything to run under the guidance of the nature of things. There will be regulation for that which can only keep its natural attributes by regulation. That is the reason why liberal government is neither to discipline —its aims are not to forbid or to order—, nor to imagine the negative. It is rather linked to security mechanisms, although Foucault didn’t clarify this point. He defended these positions in his previous seminar —Security, territory, population— where we find this powerful passage: «Liberalism, the game, to let people do what they want and things to happen spontaneously, that things go by, laissez-faire, passer, happen, essentially and fundamentally signifies to act in such a way that reality develops and goes by, that reality happens in accordance with laws, principles and mechanisms that reality itself already possesses». There are some ethical- political laws that are proper and adequate to natural reality. Here is the paradox, that can only be reduced because in both society and government we speak about laws of freedom. Regulation is justified only if it offers securities to naturally keep liberty it as it is. The security mechanisms only make sense through the link they establish with liberty: as its framework and playground.

From all this we can draw a conclusion: liberty is introduced in the core of the technologies of power. Liberal government is the aftermath of this mutation. In this new technique, government should think about the nature of things, and the nature of things in this context is nothing but the liberty of human beings. Liberal government technique takes into account: «what human beings want to do, what are they interested in doing, what they think they will do». The being-together of human beings has a «specific naturalness of the relations of the men among themselves», that has to do with living together, working together and producing together. Only at the end of Security, territory, population does Foucault find the nature of society and tackle the notion of regulation. Finally, in The Birth of Biopolitics, liberalism discovers its basis in a naturalism, and it is only now that we are talking about human nature. These natural relations, if they are going to respect the government, must be translated in scientific knowledge. Liberal government and the knowledge of the nature of things connected to the coexistence of human beings are thus indissoluble partners. «We have then an essential scientific knowledge for government», concludes Foucault, that also characterizes liberal government as a specific correlation between power and knowledge, now identified with government and science. Government must mold its decisions from the latter. This would be its procedure of rationalization.

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