Foucault 1979 CdF, Chapter 4, 31 January 1979

Theory of the State:

pg. 77 Theorizing the state is, according to Foucault, “an indigestible meal.” Rather there are processes of “statification” that bring together multiple practices under a certain kind of governmental rationality. The State has no essence. It has not autonomous source of power. It harnesses or brings into resonance (as Deleuze and Guattari say) multiple practices as a “perpetual process.” “The state is nothing else but the multiple effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities.”

The problem of Nazism (representation vs. Sovereignty):

pg. 80-90. Foucault then skips ahead in the theory of the liberal state to address the origins of the neoliberal turn in Germany in 1948. After world war two the German state had been destroyed. The Germans had to disavow the guarantee that States necessarily represent their people, and in fact this is what happened in Nazisim: the state had abused its powers of economic and social intervention and violated the freedoms of its citizens. It had to “forfeit its right to representativity.” But then under what conditions could the German’s rebuild the State with no clear representativity to reestablish collective consensus toward a new sovereignty? The German’s invented a new “framework” or formal rules that could apply to everyone to insure their maximum freedom. This framework could only claim to represent insofar as it guaranteed the liberty of its population. Economic rules, and frameworks both secure individual liberty and economic growth without deferring to political sovereignty. The economic framework then becomes primary to the state. The state is thus based on economic competition and sovereignty.

On Marxism:

pg. 91 “It is often said, well, at least by those who know his work, that there is no theory of power in Marx, that the theory of the state is inadequate, and that it really is time to produce it.” Foucault oddly claims that Hobbes was the last theorist of the state (as someone who was a supporter of monarchy). “Locke does not produce a theory of the state.” Rather he produces, “principles of government.” (The state is limited by natural right by civil society who have the right to rebel) = rationality of governing ourselves: externally limits the state. Hobbes (The state has no responsibility to civil society. )= “Not an autonomous source of power. An effect, or mobile shape of a perpetual statification (étatisation).”

According to Foucault “there is no governmental rationality of socialism.” It has been always relied on liberal notions of governmentally. Marxism and Liberalism are thus not opposed. We cannot find in the “text” of socialism a true governmentally, it still needs to be invented.